Its nearing the end of May 2016, and we’d owned our plot for 10 months. In that time we had:

• Pretty much decided on a builder, although we’d not signed anything contractually
• Cleared around 1000 tonnes of soil off the site
• Found out that the approved plans that came with the house were unworkable for anyone whose ancestors originated  from somewhere other than The Shire, Middle Earth
• Come to the conclusion that while architectural technicians are great at CAD, but they are not necessarily thinking of your project as a place where someone has to live
• Even ignoring the usability issues with the house design, we realised that us not having an opportunity to present a brief  in the process meant that the house did not really work for us
• Self-building (or not, as is our case) is stressful

We were sat at a talk the Homebuilding and Renovating show in Glasgow and has just decided that we needed to find a new architect.

And, what better time was there to do that was there than at that show?

So, we spent the next few hours speaking to some of the architects that were there, with differing impressions.

The one major constraint we were imposing was that, because of the existence of the pipeline along the edge of our plot, and the assurance from our builder that the foundation plan was close to being approved by the pipeline owner, we were very reluctant to change the footprint of the house. Doing so would have meant coming up with a new foundation design which would have meant significant rework for the structural engineer, and extra cost for us - it wasn’t just  redoing the drawings, but pages and pages of retaining wall calculations. I’ve always been pretty good at maths, but this stuff is gobbledygook to me!

We didn’t limit ourselves to architects at the show though – for the following few weeks after the show we also researched architects in the local area, looked at websites and asked people we knew for recommendations (although we didn’t know any self-builders so accepted this would not necessarily provide a rich vein of options). We spoke to quite a few architects during that time – some were put off by the constraint to use the existing footprint, some by the complexity of the site. Some didn't even bother to respond, which in my mind was Darwin's natural selection at play. We eventually had a short-list of three architects, all of whom we met on site.

We had put together a high level brief detailing what we liked about the current house plans, what we didn’t like so much, and also what other requirements we had, and shared that with the architects. In reality, we would have been happy with either one of the short-listed architects – all had good ideas about how the house and the plot -  but in the end we chose based on a mix of cost, flexibility and relationship

• One of the architects wanted to charge based on 6% of the build cost and would not shift from that. I am strongly against such a charging structure and it effectively ruled him out.
• Whilst our brief was to use the existing footprint, one of the other architects spent a lot of time suggesting alternative layouts for the site – he had some were great ideas, and I wish we could have had the flexibility to do so, but it put a concern in my mind about his ability to follow the brief. He worked on a fixed fee per stage, but his costs were also a fair bit more than the architect we finally chose.
• We got on really well with the architect we finally chose. After meeting on site, we sat for a coffee and he actually spent some time sketching alternate designs on some napkins (I wish I’d kept those) and he also fully bought into our need to keep the same house footprint. A week or so later, we got his fee proposal through and confirmed that we’d be going ahead.

The whole process from first contacting various architects and instructing our selected one took around 6 weeks and after a period of feeling low about the whole process, we were re-invigorated and looking forward to things finally starting to move forward.

Next up: The first designs from the new architect