A bit of background
So this is the beginning of the scariest thing we’ve ever done. We’re selling our much loved mid-terrace, in the wonderful leafy Meersbrook and entering in to the unknown(ish). It all came about around 15 months ago, when I cheekily asked my Dad if they really needed all of that land, as well as the now unused victorian coach house in the garden. The next day, unbeknown to me a secret house meeting occurred, Where Alan, Lynn, Sam and My dad agreed to let us do what we’ve always wanted to do, build our own house!
Of course we’d not thought that far ahead and really didn’t have a clue what to do next. So things went a bit quite for a couple of months. We walked around the building a couple of times, making sketches and generally chatting about what it could be, how many rooms we could squeeze in, wether to knock the coach house down and start from scratch.
Things really got moving by chance really. For my day job I co-own a design agency called FIELD and we’d just started a working on a new brand for an Architects practice called GAGARIN. We just got chatting informally about the opportunity we had to build on our family plot and the rest as they say, is history! Steve (Gitner), Owner and founder of GAGARIN held our hands through the early stages, and broke down costs into stages so that we didn’t freak out about the cost before we even got started. He showed us early sketches and built a scale model so that we could start to imagine how the space might work as a home as well as taking in to account a quite restrictive budget.
So we’re just about up to the current date, after going through a rather protracted planning application, which came through with some minor conditions a couple of weeks ago.
We’re going to keep this page up to date with things we found interesting and challenging as well as a photographic journal of the entire process…
Jonny