Project timeline

Those who have not built a house may not be familiar with the various steps along the way. First you need a concept design for the house - our earlier posts explain how we went about that. If you live in a conservation area, the next stage is usually a thing known as a pre-app which gives you informal pre-planning- application advice. It's a very cut-down planning application - you supply a sketch of the house, idea of floorplan etc, list the likely materials, and in return the planners hawk it round the various departments for their initial view. It's not mandatory but a useful way of finding what the planners, tree conservation team, highways etc think of your approach. Our pre-app came back a couple of weeks ago with all parties broadly happy, however they'd missed the fact that we want to take down the huge ash tree smack in the middle of the plot (see the earliest pics). There ensued a couple of nervous weeks while we chased them up on this and the tree-man cogitated over its loss, but they've come back saying they are happy so long as we plant some sort of replacement. So while Planning are not beholden to this, their initial view is that they are ok with this approach. On this basis we've gone to the next stage which is to submit the full planning application and it went in on Friday. Pics will follow. We have been sorting out detail of the internal plans and the next step is for us specify all the materials and fittings - everything from bricks to electrical points to bathtub, doorhandles, etc etc and this week we're meeting our architect to get schedules and start on this. Meanwhile he gets on with producing the building drawings. The planning application is due to be decided in 2 months which takes us to the start of December. Once we get approval, - which hopefully will be within that timescale but who knows? - then we can put the drawings out for tender. It's over Christmas so may take a while to get quotes in, analyse them, wrangle with the suppliers/revise the design if it's over cost (big worry!) and choose our builder. Only then can we start demolition - February at the absolute earliest. Oh and of course before we swing that wrecking ball, we need to move ourselves back out of the bungalow and into... who can say?! Then it's around a 9 month build, so we should be in the new house late next year. ...we will doubtless look back at this post at some point and see what happened really ;)