Beginners Guide


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For many Britons the idea of designing and building a home of our own can seem an alien and rather frightening concept. It’s the sort of project usually reserved for those who have deep pockets and don’t mind standing out from the crowd – star footballers, captains of industry, famous actors.

Either that, or it’s a specialised task for those in the know, which generally means building professionals – builders, architects – people who are familiar with the tricks of the trade and can bring in professional friends, workmates and family members to help them out.

Why do we think like this? Most of our continental neighbours, particularly the Germans and Austrians, certainly don’t. Neither do the Americans, Australians and Japanese. But then they haven’t been spoon fed by a commercial housebuilding industry for over a century.

The result is that, for the great majority of Britons, acquiring a new home means buying somebody else’s idea of what that home should be. Our choice of internal layout, orientation and overall design is actually quite restricted.

Not surprisingly, our first reaction on moving in is to redecorate, and re-model to suit our individual needs. We create through lounges, expand kitchens, add on conservatories, convert lofts.

One result, of course, is a booming home improvement industry. The other is to massively inflate the cost – in time and effort as well as cash – of homeowning.

Selfbuilding is a way of cutting short that process by giving us exactly what we want straight off: a home built the way we want, hopefully in the place where we want it. It’s about taking control of how and where we live.

We have put together a Beginners Guide, giving you all of the essential advice about starting your self build project, and it can be downloaded in PDF format from this page.

Download the SelfBuild and Design Beginners Guide. (184KB PDF File for Acrobat 6.0 or later)

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