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Hi! We are Malcolm and Helen and we are building a house. We've never tackled a project as big as this before and it's a bit scary, but also very exciting. If you'd like to follow our journey, whether you are family, friends or just someone considering doing your own self build, then read on.....
Introduction
In April 2019 we got planning permission to demolish our house and build a brand new home on the site. It had taken us three years of planning to get to that point and we were slightly taken aback when our first planning application was granted permission with no quibbles at all from the Lake District planning department. We only had one question..... now what do we do?
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This website will hopefully answer that question.
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On this website you will find not only a regular DIARY, with updates on general progress and photographs, but we also hope to include more in-depth technical descriptions of each stage under the TECHNICAL tab and background INFORMATION on why we're doing what we're doing, useful tips, etc. We've never built a house before, the whole process is a massive learning curve and we have benefitted from other people's experiences both online and by visiting self builds, mainly through open days organised by the excellent Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfS). We hope that our experiences may be of some help to others who might be thinking of going down a similar self build route.
Setting up this website
We'd been thinking for a while about having some sort of blog so that family members, many of whom live hundreds or even thousands of miles away, could follow our progress. Although Malcolm's quite good with computers, Helen's a complete luddite and neither of us had the knowledge or confidence to set something up, so we just kept putting it off. But then one day, as a complete surprise, Emma (Malcolm's daughter) and her boyfriend presented us with a website that they had created for us. After a couple of tutorials and a lot of playing around with it we are now competent enough to add content and change things around as we like. So a very big "thank you" from us to Emma and Brent for making this possible. We hope you enjoy browsing and following this mad adventure with us!
The 'old' Cragside - Summer 2019