Tim Bawtree and his wife Zoe have spent the last year renovating their elegant Cheltenham townhouse. But lovely as it is, they're moving out - into their two hundred foot back garden.
Tim and Zoe Bawtree and their young family live in an elegant Regency house in Cheltenham. But lovely as it is, the four storey house is expensive to run. With the aim of becoming mortgage free, Tim and Zoe decide to sell up and build an ultra modern, low maintenance house in their large back garden.
However the garden is surrounded by grade two listed houses, and because of height restrictions, Tim and Zoe are forced to build 60% of their new home underground. This doesn't deter them - and neither do 90 objections to their planning application from the neighbours.
The build is fraught with problems from the start. First, there's a worry that the earth from the neighbours' gardens will collapse back into the huge hole they dig for the house. Then, keen on new technology, Tim opts to build the entire house out of polystyrene and waterproof concrete, even though his builders are unfamiliar with the system.
They have to deal with a leaking basement, opposition from the neighbours, and planning wrangles. But all these problems are overshadowed when they part company with their builder and Tim and Zoe are forced to take over the build themselves.
Budget And Build
Estimated Budget: £290,000
Final Budget: £344,000
Tim and Zoe borrowed a huge £600,000 to cover the cost of the new build and the mortgage on their old house. They relied on the sale of the old house to pay off the loan.
It may have cost fifty thousand pounds more than they'd anticipated - and without getting the expected amount for their town house they aren't entirely mortgage free, as they had hoped. But they see it as a small price to pay for a stress-free life.
Tim and Zoe built their contemporary three bedroom home on a small and overlooked plot with height restrictions in the middle of a conservation area. So most of their house was built underground, and Tim used a system of hollow polystyrene blocks filled with waterproof concrete. Despite being thin, these walls give good insulation, waterproofing and strength. However, no one working on this build had used them before.
The key to getting this underground space working is getting natural light - as much of it as possible - into the basement. So the large open plan living, dining and cooking area are partially lit by a glass ceiling panel and by a full width glass wall that looks onto a sunken courtyard in the middle of the site.
On the other side of the courtyard there is a glass fronted children's playroom. The kitchen leads to the darkest and most hidden parts of the building, a bathroom, utility room and stores.
On the ground floor above, along with a study, Tim and Zoe have their master bedroom, with an adjacent bathroom and dressing room. Glass doors lead from the bedroom onto their own private terrace with a walkway across the sunken courtyard, while the top floor has two small bedrooms and a bathroom for the kids.
But since Tim and Zoe have jettisoned their architect to save money, the challenge here was realising this ambitious design in detail.
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Want to be a self-build guru? Then read on....
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