Hi and welcome to 'The Real Self Build Blog' which is the story of how my wife and I built our own house. We have called  it 'Real'  because we really did build  95% of the house ourselves and in this blog I hope to show you in words and pictures how we did it.

 

 

This is a picture of our house and as you can see it is now complete.  It is of conventional brick construction with Sandtoft Clay Pantile roof, upvc Sash Windows by GlynGary, Brett Martin Cast Iron effect rainwater system and Hormann Cedar Wood doors. The materials and design were chosen to compliment the village and its surroundings. Anyway we didn't start here so let me show you where we did.

Behind the hedge is our plot, it used to be the garden of the house adjacent. Plots are very difficult to find but the use of magazines like 'Build It' or 'Homebuilding and Renovating' are very helpful. We also visited the planning office of our chosen area authority where they keep the 'planning register' another source of  leads for new plots. However we eventually found ours in 'Plotfinder' classifieds. Here are one or two more pictures of our plot taken whilst we were planning the build.

 

A picture with my wife duly taking notes. Access to the site was a crawl through the Holly Hedge (very prickly). 

A picture from the top of the site,a good size about 30m x 16m.

In case you are wondering, we are not qualified builders, plumbers or electricians but we are very experienced and accomplished at DIY and are also viewers of 'Grand Designs', 'Escape to the Country' and 'Sarah Beeney'  from where we got much of our inspiration. We didn't  plan to do all the work ourselves, it sort of evolved, but if you are thinking of doing this much work yourself, be warned it can take a long time.

Anyway, before we actually get on to talking about digging any holes in the ground I will tell you about how we planned the design of the house and details of the materials and specifications we used. But that is for my next post.

If you have any questions about my blog or self build in general please email me. You can find my email address in my profile (top right of page). You can also become a follower of my blog by pressing the follower button or click on 'Comments' below to leave a message.  

Thanks for viewing.