The Donated House

Thank God for New Year’s weekend, which was luxuriously relaxing, with good company and excellent food, and kept my mind from running in maddening circles over this land. And then thank God for Tuesday morning and everyone who went back to work! Six emails have already come and go on the subject this morning, and I’ve got an appointment with Barbara to talk about my drawings and get some sort of cost estimates done, which should help reassure the lender, which should help move things along. She mentioned that there was a sold sign on the land when she walked past it this morning. A cold hand gripped my heart as I wondered for a paranoid moment whether they’d sold it out from under me due to all this faffing, but then I realised that, as far as I know, the vendor doesn’t actually know anything about all this faffing yet. I told it all to my solicitor in an email between Christmas and New Year, but I haven’t heard back from her, so am assuming she’s been away from her desk like the rest of everyone until today. So I am still hoping that I will be able to tell the vendor, in the same breath with which I tell him I lost the initial offer of a mortgage, that I’ve sorted it all out and here’s your cheque, sir, pleasure doing business with you.

Oh! A seventh email, from the mortgage arranger, saying that if Barbara says it’ll work there should be no further issues.

It is a full time battle not letting my hopes soar so high they’ll crush me completely if they once more fall.

There’s nothing like a very stressful land purchase to make Christmas… practically disappear from my radar, actaully. I hardly noticed it, what with the frantic negotiations with Buildstore and discussions with our accountant about just how much of our company’s money we can get our hands on.

The latest is that Buildstore have approached Ecology Building Society and we have an “agreement in principle”, which (when pooled with the remortgage or the current house, plus the money we turn out to be able to lend ourselves from our company, plus some change we found down the back of the sofa) will buy the main plot and allow about a modest amount for build costs. Which I’m slightly afraid will build a small shed, rather than what you might call a house, but I remain optimistic, because I am willing and able to do a very great deal of the work myself (assuming I can get some training and advice) and I’m quite happy for it to take a few years.

We’d been assuming all along that it would take years to build the whole house, and had planned it in two stages anyway; a main dwelling of 2 or 3 bedrooms and an open plan ground floor, quite modest in footprint, to be followed, when funding allowed, by the construction of a sort of workshop/great hall/guest accomodation/social space/multi-purpose wing, with a connecting hallway between. The whole thing would be maybe 250 sqare metres of interior space, so reasonably generous, but we would build the dwelling bit first to save money, and then save up to begin the second stage.

It now looks as if we will have to build the workshop/great hall first, which will be entirely open plan with a sort of railed loft area above, and a shower room and small kitchen at one end. It remains to be seen where on the continuum between frontier cabin and great hall this building will fall; I am not in a position to accurately estimate build cost, being posessed of a great deal of enthusiasm and generalised engineering and practical skill, but not of any specific idea how to apply these to building a straw bale house, so I can’t say how much of the work I will have to pay someone else to do. I will make an appointment with Barbara at Amazonails the very moment I am confident this land purchase will go through.

Meanwhile, while it’s still the bank holiday and nobody’s available to discuss progress with me, I shall sit here with my mince pie and mulled wine and try a bit harder to feel festive.

(drums fingers)

You know that thing they say about how you shouldn’t announce something until it’s a done deal? Pregnant women do it, there’s a certain number of weeks you’re supposed to wait because you don’t want to have to explain to people if it all goes wrong. Well, I’m not a superstitious person, but I did have a little voice in my head asking whether it was a good idea to tell all my friends at a christmas party on Monday.

Now it’s Friday and the latest news is that the lender will not only not give us the amount they originally offered, the won’t give us anything now, because we’d only be able to buy the land, not build anything on it. I am struggling not to give up all hope. We can still remortgage our existing house, which luckily has doubled in value since we bought it 10 years ago (with the help of the extension we have yet to complete). Between that and the possibility that our company (which has more money than we do) could buy the land and then let us build our house on it, we think we can scrape together *most* of the money and I just need to cram in a few hours of invoicing to see whether we can make up the shortfall.

This assumes our company can buy land which we are then going to build a house on… not sure of the legality issues.

And it would leave us penniless (though keeping more of what we then proceeded to earn each month, there being less pesky mortgage to pay.)

I’m holding off on slamming the brakes on the contracts until I know for sure we can’t do this. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m happy to buy the land if we can manage it, even if it leaves us with nothing, because

1. As long as we’ve got broadband, Elmo and I can work from a caravan and we’re happy to live that way for a few years.
2. Elmo’s income will (touch wood) continue to be high and we can save up and build as we can.
3. My income is negligible lately, so I am free to quit my job and work on the property full time.
4. When we sell this house, we’ll have a little more than it was mortgaged for to show for it (hopefully).
5. I have pretty much decided to deal with Amazonails about building the house, and Barbara was really optimistic about being able to build something reasonably cheaply with my friends’ slave labour, careful planning and a long timescale.
6. Having a smaller mortgage would mean we actually had some money each month to put aside to save up for materials.
7. I clearly have an overdeveloped sense of adventure. You only live once.

Well, this is a bit of a roller coaster ride. Yesterday I went up to see Barbara Jones of Amazonails to talk about straw bale building and look at the plot. I felt great about the whole thing; liked Barbara, loved her ideas and attitude, everything just felt positive.

This morning, however, our mortgage guy came back to us saying that although the lender had offered us one amount, on reflection and after careful consideration, they had felt it would be prudent to halve that. Meaning we can still buy the land, but we can’t afford to build anything on it.

Great.

Awesome.

Thanks, guys.

All the freecycled materials and volunteer labour in the world won’t build this house without at least *some* money.

So, commences a flurry of phone calls, internet searches, etc, and we are in discussion with several other lenders about what they could offer. It’s nightmarish for me, because I know big, fat nothing about money, so talking to these people is like an anxiety dream full of questions I didn’t know the answers to and phrases I knew had very specific meanings but I didn’t know what those meanings were. In the end, I seem to have left it for now with our mortgage broker, who at least speaks the language. But it’s illustrative of a concept I’ve been thinking about lately in terms of this house: When faced with a problem you don’t know how to solve, giving up or passively hoping for a solution to magically arrive is *such* an alluring prospect. It’s terrifying, the thought of getting stuck in, learning on the trot, tracking down the people you need to ask, trying to understand their answers, and, most difficult of all, experiencing the anxiety of trying to talk intelligently to people who know 10 times what you know about a subject.

I know I can’t allow myself the comfort of hiding under the duvet and letting/expecting someone to rescue me by handling everything that crops up that’s outside my comfort zone. This whole project is outside my comfort zone, but there’s only one way to make your comfort zone bigger and that’s to take the bull by the horns and try doing stuff you don’t feel all that confident about.

So I guess I’d better get back on that phone.

Here we go! A blog to chart the progress of our new house (assuming it gets underway; still far from a done deal.)

Elmo and I have just had an offer accepted on our dream plot, a south-facing acre of land looking out over Todmorden, West Yorkshire (I am assured it is not in Lancashire, despite the post code.) We’re waiting for our solicitor and the vendor’s solicitor to get things going, as it’s all just verbal and via the estate agent so far. I’m trying not to fall in love until contracts have at least been exchanged, but I fear it’s a losing battle.

The plot is broken up into two pieces, one of which is £250k and the other (which has no planning permission) is £55k. The main plot is a tree-lined approach to a beautifully level (well, terraced) ex-kitchen garden to a sort of neo-gothic mansion (now 5 apartments) down the hill a bit. It’s the ultimate blank canvas, lined on the north by a 3 metre whitewashed brick wall, which then slopes down the west side, between the plot and the trees of the access drive. On the east side is what looks like a similar sloping wall, but turns out to be a row of old potting sheds which separate the building plot from the old raised beds and glasshouse foundations beyond. The main plot ends a metre before the potting sheds begin, which is a shame, since that’s the bit we can’t really afford (yet.) But the vendor is willing to give us a two-year option to buy that bit, and hopefully we can negotiate the use of it in the meantime, since its tumbling mess of victorian potting sheds, though in a very rough state, would provide very useful storage space if shovelled out and re-roofed.

We found the plot a month or so ago, but didn’t chase it too hard, since it looked nice but not necessarily *incredible* on (e)paper. However, when we were up that way and did a drive-by, which turned into a walk-around, we were suddenly very interested indeed. The deal was sealed for us when David Snell (Plot Finder Challenge, Homebuilding and Renovating Magazine) came to see it and kept saying things like “incredible” and “I can’t believe it”.

Financially, we could be said to out on a limb. We will have used about 2/3 to 3/4 of our total budget on the land alone. Not, I believe, the recommended cost ratio. However, I am not one of those people who needs the latest expensive integrated music system and a trendy fitted kitchen and all new furniture. I heard a radio piece about a woman, recently, who couldn’t afford her dream wedding, so she appealed to Freecycle groups for “wedding stuff”. She ended up doing the entire wedding for free on the goodwill of Freecyclers.  “Hmmm…” I said to myself. “I wonder if I could build a house on the goodwill of freecyclers?” I’m frequently appalled at the sort of thing people throw away when “improving” their homes, and besides, re-use is the very purest form of recycling. Loads of people have bits and pieces of building materials lying around, stuff that they maybe intended to use. Eventually. The greenest of the green ways to acquire materials, it strikes me, is also to help out our new neighbours (immediate and more distant) when it suddenly occurs to them that they are not, despite their fondest hopes, ever going to build that sauna in the garden. Skip-diving for the twenty-first century, minus the potentially smelly skip.

Now, first off, lets see if I can get a trailer…