“To design and self-build an outstanding example of an autonomous environmentally friendly Cotswold stone property while benefiting from all the latest sustainable building methods.”
My partner and I, felt that it would benefit other fellow self-builders, if we kept an electronic diary version of the trials and tribulations of our own self-build to help others embarking on similar projects. The true inspiration for the lengthily and time consuming process of creating a website and updating came from the very excellent website www.cloud8.org.uk. The site is an encyclopedia of information that follows Tom and Judy’s very own self-build of a superb contemporary house under construction in the Chilterns, Buckinghamshire.
Self build takes many forms, from doing absolutely every thing yourself, to just organizing the various subcontractors yourself, or having a house built for you from the many self-build package firms out there. Some 24,000 homes are built this way every year saving their owners any where between 20 – 50% of the build cost. These builds are usually of a significantly higher build quality than your usual housing estates developed by the country’s big house builders. Our self-build we see me, carry out the demolitions, excavations, foundations and basement walls, mucking in as well as a general labour to the various other skilled stone masons, carpenters and tillers on site. A software package called ArchiCAD will be my stable companion, ensuring we are on target with the build, offering up savings on project time and improved design details. To this end we hope to achieve a 50 – 60% saving on the overall build cost, which is estimated at £1.2 million to completion.
We intend for this website to catalogue the complete process of designing a home; achieving planning permission, and completing the building process. We cannot respond directly to emails as this is very much a live building project and time is extremely precious.
The project has been affectionately called “The Moonstone Project”, and is named after my very first underground home that I created some 10 years ago. Moonstone is also the birthstone of us Cancerian’s
