Act I - Finding a Plot
Entry posted by AliMcLeod
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Prior to purchasing the plot we’re planning to build on, we lived in a 120 year-old single-storey Farmhouse sitting in 1/3 acre plot with lovely views looking down onto a loch a few hundred meters down the valley. We loved living there, but with our daughter heading off to university in Autumn 2014, we realised that we did not need a 5 bedroom house, and the annual maintenance was expensive both in terms of time (tending to the gardens) and money (regular replacement of the slate tiles due to the high winds we often encountered).
In addition to this, my wife’s mother, who lived in Dublin at the time, was suffering from bad health, and we moved her over to Scotland in December 2014 so my wife could take care of her. We didn’t have long to find her somewhere to live and she moved into a house not too far away (roughly 7 miles). Except, not too far away turned out to be a 30 minute journey each way, due to traffic, so decided that moving closer to her would be beneficial to them both.
At this point, self-building had not even cross my mind and we did what most people do when they want to move – we scoured the estate agent websites for a suitable new home for us in that area. This was early January 2015.
Whilst I was confident our current house would sell – it was a unique property, and there was, and still is a, trend for Edinburgh folks to sell their properties and move over the Forth Road Bridge to Fife where you could still easily commute to the central belt of Scotland but get at least double the house-space your money – I knew that it might take some time, since the house was at the upper end of the local market, price-wise.
But, I was learning something about myself during our house search. We viewed a number of great houses, but none of them really jumped out at me as somewhere I’d prefer to live rather than where we were living at the time. I wondered whether I was just being overly-fussy, but I’ve since realised that I wanted a house that was a bit different.
For that reason, we didn’t put our house on the market immediately as we wanted to find something else first, and, in retrospect, I wasn't sure I really wanted to move.
We first came across the plot towards the end of January 2015 when out walking. It is literally (and by literally, I mean literally, and not the vernacular used by teenagers today) a 5 minute walk from where my mother-in-law lives.
The plot had a big “PLOTS FOR SALE” sign stuck in the ground, and another sign by a local builder who was advertising a Planning Approved house design that could be built on the house. We later contacted that builder, and I will explain how that tale ended in a future post, but there is a reason that the board is blurred in the picture below.
The plot is the middle one of 3, around 760 m2 and is south facing over the River Forth to the Lothians. Between the plot and the river is B-road and a shingle beach. It grabbed our interested pretty much immediately. The plot to the west had a self-build in progress, and the plot to the east was purchased back in 2012, but no build had yet started.
I’ve been told that pictures are always good for a blog, so here they are (these were taken later in the year, after we’d purchased the plot).
View from the Plot, looking over the River Forth. It looks a lot nicer when the tide is in.
View of the Plot from the roadside. The boundary on the east is roughly where the two markers are at the bottom right, with the plot running parallel to the house to the west. Those markers are important and will likely have a future post dedicated to them…
The plot from a little further back, standing on the other side of the road:
The above doesn’t really show the scale of the plot, so here’s the layout:
In the next post, I’ll share why we initially decided not to buy the plot, but then changed our mind, and hopefully get to showing some house plans.
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