Originally Posted by Iain Mac

We built this place in 1991 (and it's still standing, so we must have got the main bits right!) Planning permission took a long time to come through thanks to a backlog at the council but, once we got that, we were finished and moved in within 6 months.

As stated above the land you buy should either have outline planning permission for the type of house you want to build or the deal should be subject to you getting it. You can get planning permission for land you don't own, but that just increases the value for the owner, so the deal has to be properly concluded before you waste your time and effort for someone else to benefit.

The biggest tip I can give you is forget the ideas of doing lots of work yourself to save money. The job won't be as good as a professional, and he can be working for you while you are at your job earning money to pay for it all. We thought we saved when I did stuff like the roughing joinery, but I was over 100 miles away so only had weekends and therefore paid interest on the bridging loan for weeks longer than I would have if I just got joiners in to do it in a week.

Some stuff, like electrics and gas, I think I'm right in saying you need to be certified to do yourself nowadays - and both of these make a real mess of your new home if you get them wrong, so why risk it?

Your bank or building society will need a professional (normally your architect) to supervise the project and will release money at pre-agreed stages (foundations/wind & water-tight/interior completed/landscaping etc)when your architect signs each stage of the work off as properly completed.

Can't recall the figures now, but for budgeting you normally work on a cost per squre foot + land and fees. A big contingency fund in the budget is very important - first day on our site the digger found a water culvert in the wrong place - right where we wanted toput the back wall of the house.

That killed all work for the day and the digger still had to be paid for. It took many days to get the permission revised to allow the house to move forard and one of the conditions is that the foundation had to go below the culvert and be twice as wide so right at the start we blew several hundred pounds more than planned with nothing to show for it. More importantly, the delay screwed up the whole schedule, so we had trades turning up with nothing to do, materials arriving with no-where to put them etc. So build some slack into the schedule too.

All told, I'm glad we did it. It cost about a third less than just buying the house and I have a great sense of satisfaction about it. I also know where all the wires and pipes are, which is useful if you want to change anything in future.

You do need to be very disciplined and highly organised, especially if you can't be on site every day. You also need to be good at motivating and encouraging your workers - they are no use to you if they are off working on another job somewhere. So NEVER, EVER, EVER pay in full for a job until it is FINISHED. EVER.