Anyone built their own home?

[Pennies]

DH and I are having probs finding somewhere to live that we like and we're toying with the idea of just buying the land and building from scratch.

Does anyone have any experience of this? If so can they share their tips / caveats!!

TIA

Good luck!! This was our plan..but we spent over 2 years looking for land but ther's not much out there and found builders snapped up that avaiklable as they had the cash. We used plotfinder and plotsearch as well a sregistering with estate agents in places where we fancied. My friend bought a plot from someone by knocking on their door and asking if they could buythe corner of their land next to their house!!!

Bump for daytimers?

We bought an old bungalow and demolished it, once we had planning permission for a new house. The whole project took about 2 years from buying to moving back in and had some really stressful moments.

Caveats - get everything in writing. The electricity board promised to reconnect us with an overhead connection and then, changed their minds. This cost us to the tune of a thousand pounds and we had to dig up the newly laid garden (grrr).

The other thing is, to be very honest, it cost us a lot more than we had ever planned and my partner is a brickie, so he did know what he was doing and had loads of contacts, but even so, we went a third over our original estimate.

Overall, it was worth doing but there are some very bumpy moments.

The hardest bit seems to be finding the land to build on.

My father did this about 20 years ago, in North Wales when he lived in Essex. He lived in a caravan on site for weekdays during the build. He used to say he would do it again, but purely as a project manager (he did some of the labour himself). It was a full-time job for the best part of two years, as far as I remember.

Do you have any experience of large-scale building works? If not, it may not be a good idea.

The people across the road are doing this. A retirement place apparentely. They've been building it for seven years now and it is doing my head in. I hope that they own that big yellow digger cos if they don't, it will be costing them a FORTUNE in rent!!!