Our Day Of Acceptance
- foxglovelodge
- Jul 23, 2023
- 4 min read
During our period of waiting for decisions to be made on our house, I often imagined what the feeling would be like if they said yes. Would it be a day of celebration? a feeling that we can relax? will it be plain sailing from now on in? Breathing a sigh of relief?
Well I can tell you it was but only momentarily really. When we had the big yes from planning in March / April 2022 we felt elated, the relief was a feeling of acceptance after a six month wait.
With the yes also came the conditions spoken about in a previous post and also with Planning comes an expiry date for which neither of us can remember what this is. It could be a time constraint to start the work or a time limit to finish the work. Now, the time expiry seems a long time,(either 3 years or 5 years but we have blocked this out for some reason) you do think ah We have plenty of time for that, and maybe we would have before covid, brexit and the war. You would have been very comfortable in thinking time was on your side and be relaxed in your process.
But we were under tremendous pressure to get this work started. It felt like nothing was on our side, The question was how easy would it be to find a contractor to work with us. It seemed that everyone was booked out and so busy and the costs were becoming deadly.
We started the Tendering process April 2022, so we put some names of builders forward and Isabel had names of builders she had worked with previously.
Again my mind fails me for this information but I think there were about 8 - 10 contractors we had invited to bid on the work for our house.
We had to again wait. Everything is a process, and you have to learn to be patient.
If my memory serves me this was a wait of 2 months to allow time for the contractors to site visit if they wished to ask questions, to view the design and plans and to send their quote in.
Initially I felt quite excited as it felt like we were moving forward and getting somewhere. However, we have to remember the times we were and are living in. Brexit and the war had made buying and shipping extremely difficult and extremely costly. There was a wait for materials. Gas and oil prices were extortionate, Cost of living was rising rapidly.
Contractors that had signed up on contracts before Covid were losing money as they had agreed a price that didn`t reflect the price hikes that were about to hit us. So this is how it panned out for us,
Our first round of Tender bids, out of the 8 we invited we had 2 bids.
One which trebled our budget and contingency and one that doubled it.
I have to say we were floored, felt very lost and not sure what to do as we had worked hard to have the money we had which all of a sudden was worth not much.
We went to tender bid again, so another 2 months wait just to see if any other contractors would want to bid.
In the mean time we were looking at our options here. How we could try and afford this.
We came up with ideas that we thought my be cheaper, not what we wanted but we needed to reevaluate. For me it started to feel like one of those property horror shows where you are stuck not knowing which way to turn.
I had to keep telling myself this is such an unfortunate situation, as a result of world wide crisis. Our hands are tied.
Our first thought was to actually knock the whole house down and build a prefab eco house.
When you say prefab to anyone, the first thought is of the post second world war prefabs that were built to combat the housing shortage. These were built with a life span of approximately 10 years. The modern prefabricated house are much more sturdy and comply with all sustainable and environment friendly policies. Which would be right up my street. Now with the modern prefab, it wont have the character that we were hoping for but once ordered you can have a fully functioning house built in approximately 3 months.
We enquired about these, got brochures, went to view the show houses, and they really are great, definately an option I would happily have gone for.
However, on taking advice, to knock down our house the cost would have been approximately 100,000 euro.
plus then we would have had to build our own concrete base. I was ready to bulldoze it myself and bury the rubble in the garden, Seriously I was there.
Our other option was to knock the cottage down only and concentrate on the newer house.
This would have been completely wrong as the one house is in the wrong position on the
land to be on its own. We would have had to revisit designs and we wouldn`t have been happy with this.
During our wait we had a site recci from Peter, who is our builder of choice.
Cost wise it was no different from the last quotes, and now we are also aware that with the cost of materials escalating the cost can go up. We decided to phase it, in order for us to try and save more money in the meantime. We have also decided to embark on a little bit of the work ourselves which included the plastering. This has probably saved us a little money but, not alot. When the builders are finished the work is not over, it then becomes our work. We have already started to plan for this by doing our plastering course, Rob is designing kitchens bathrooms and bedrooms, and we will make as much as we can of these ourselves. This means we will have our very own unique quirky designs and we are both looking forward to learning new skills and seeing how we can develop this.
It seems a very long road but we have our contracts signed, and work was to start 31 October 2022 .
We are very much looking forward to bringing our house back to life.
`I am thankful for the struggle, without it I wouldnt have found my strength`
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