SimonL

Great blog! Good to see you've incorporated a green oak porch and garage. We're building a 'green oak' garage and workshop with a 1 bed 'flat' above it using green oak construction methods but we will be using local larch and Douglas fir instead of oak. We're also incorporating some stone cladding on the house, using stone from the demolished Minto House, which is available in abundance from a local landowner. Rest of the house will be render on block and Scots larch cladding.

Not far from us at all then. Thanks for the link to your blog. We built our last place in 2003 so were shocked by some of the prices we've seen/ been quoted. Ah well we'll just have to do as much as possible ourselves

Hi Redoctober our plot overlooks Yetholm Loch near Kelso. Glad to hear you had a good experience with Flemings. Whereabouts are you?

We built our first house in Brimpton, nr Reading, sold it and are now working with Fleming on our project in the Scottish Borders. We're at building warrant stage (Building regs in England and Wales). I can honestly say that Flemings' service, advise and communication to date has been excellent. Working with them we got planning approval in 11 weeks from submission and all it cost us was our application fee to the Council. We looked at MBC but unfortunately they did not have an inhouse design team, and as we knew exactly what we wanted it made sense to engage with a company that had an inhouse design team. We also spoke to a number of other TS and SIP providers but unfortunately got the impression that they were only interested in selling their portfolio of designs and not in anything of a bespoke nature. Fleming have also proactively offered to amend their quotation downwards to us on the basis that some building material costs have come down in price! You don't hear of that happening often!