Renovating the existing cottage Sep 2007

In September 2007 Guy and I had access to the cottage, prior to that a family were still renting it, they loved it too. They lived in a very natural eco friendly way, "off the grid" as people like to call it and they had been very happy there for the previous eighteen months. Since January 2007, when we first met the owners of the cottage and they agreed to sell it to us, Guy and I had been finding it hard to curb our excitement, literally having to force ourselves not to go driving up the track to see the cottage or go walking past it at every opportunity. We both felt that we would be happy living at the cottage, (albeit with a little modernisation!) and we were keen to move in, but, we had mixed feelings about it. Our moving in, meant the rental family moving out and we knew how much they loved being there too. Our reaction was similar when we thought about the couple that were selling to us, afterall the cottage had been in their family for a very long time and they had many happy memories of their times spent there.


As soon as we had access we made a start, first thing..... Getting a borehole dug!

Borehole drilling rig arrives

Rig erected....let the drilling commence!

Borehole rig

2 weeks later and the first water from borehole, it was a bit gritty!

We needed to get a running water supply to the house. There was a rainwater collection tank on the land, installed a longtime ago, that could be used for loo flushing, we weren't sure it was a good idea to use it for drinking from either, we decided that without a backup mains supply to cut in when rainwater levels were low, a borehole would be a good idea. This meant drawing our water up from underground, from a natural water supply right beneath our feet! I'd never given too much thought to water running deep underground, but as it turned out, alot of the people in our area were using boreholes and they were really happy with the 
results.  

Good enough to bottle it!

Guy's happy with the first bottle!

The borehole was pretty expensive to drill out and being quite high up on the hill might not have helped, would it have been cheaper if we hadn't been 400' up, and does the water table vary in height I wondered, anyway, we needed to go down about 180 feet to tap into a reliable (in times of drought!) depth of water. It took two weeks of boring before we got to the water supply, it was definitely a eureka moment! The rig used for the boring was a straightforward structure, the frame looked like a big sturdy version of a frame for a childs swing. Then hanging in the middle was a long tube of heavy metal, hollow, it was being suspended by a cable that was attached to a winch, which had it's engine attached to a big generator. The metal tube would be dropped down and because of its heavy weight it would pummel the ground and earth would be rammed up inside its hollow core. This was a repetitive process and noisey too, most of the time I escaped to work and left the two chaps on the job to it.  The water comes into the house and into a pressure tank which always indicates about 3.5 bar, from there it goes through a U.V. filter to kill off any nasty bugs and then out of the taps, tastes fine!

First water from the borehole into the house!  You can see the pipe running under the house, but as we had no plumbed in sink I had to send it straight back out the window!

We needed a holding tank for the water to sit until we turned on a tap to use it and this is it!  The tank maintains a pressure of 3.5 bar, if it's ever less than this it is an indication to us that there may be a leak out of the pump at the bottom of the borehole!  This isn't a hot water cylinder tank!

The long mirrored cylinder is a UV light.   When it is connected up to the blue holding tank (below out of shot)  by pipework, all the water will pass through this light before it goes anywhere in the house,  it kills the DNA in the water and as a result any potential water carrying nasties that could make you sick!

This  will be the shower room.  It was like a closet space before, we found a single mattress in it but no plumbing.  There's space to turn round on the spot....but not to swing a cat!  Ahead will be the sink and to the right is the shower cubicle.  Guy had to raise the floor to allow the shower outflow pipe to have enough fall

We're off mains drainage up here, which is hardly surprising! Some pongy whiffs led us to the septic tank about 20m down hill from the house. It was pretty well hidden in the thick of the surrounding undergrowth, a single chamber made of brick with a dodgy lid on the top which allowed the stench to leak out!  Lifting the lid was an unpleasent business and not far beneath it was a crusty layer of waste, Mmm....that really needed some urgent pumping out before it all spilled out, we had no idea when it had last been done, years maybe. We were just hoping that beneath the crusty layer was a liquid layer and beneath that, at the bottom of the tank, the solid waste that we would need to get pumped out, that's how it's supposed to be. Pumping out will happen annually, the heavy solids sink to the bottom of the tank and the bacteria breaks it all down...nice eh!

Sorting Out The Financing Jan 07 - Jun 07

January - June 2007

Between the time when we shook hands on the deal to actually moving into the cottage there was a lot to sort out. Guy and I assumed it would be as straight forward as moving house had always been, sell one place and borrow the money for another, pack up our stuff and move in, but it didn't turn out to be that simple!




So first up, we asked to borrow some money, we only had a small deposit from the sale of our house, but all the mortgage lenders we spoke to were keen for our business and said our joint salaries easily allowed us access to enough money to buy the cottage, this was an outstanding start to proceedings, but that all changed when they saw it! We couldn't get a regular mortgage on the cottage because it didn't meet the mortgage lenders criteria. The long and the tall of it was that there just weren't enough ticks in their boxes! They all said ".... the location is stunning, but the cottage is unmortgageable by our standards!" and they weren't prepared to lend us the money we needed on the basis of a nice view and some drawings of its future potential! It was considered too high a risk! It was quite bizarre to us that we couldn't get a mortgage....., we could easily afford it, we weren't expecting this complication and it left us wandering what we were going to do! Bottom line was that although the cottage came with full planning permission to knock it down and build a 4 bedroom house, we just wanted to live in the cottage as it was!

It was fair to say that compared to modern day standards the cottage was basic; it's wooden frame forms a bungalow with asbestos boarding for its walls and ceilings, lift a floorboard and you see straight down to the soil two inches below, the walls had no insulation and neither did the roof, the windows and doors were draughty, other than two open fireplaces there was no heating, cold water was pumped into the cottage by hand from a tank situated outside, but it wasn't drinkable and to get to the toilet you had to go outside, as there was no running water supply there was no bathroom to wash in and the electric supply was only wired up into two of the rooms, there was no telephone line, no waste collection and no postal delivery.........but we loved it and really wanted to live in it!





Although the cottage was a little rough around the edges it was far from being dilapidated and we could see that with a little rennovation, simple improvements it would make a lovely home. In our mind there was no need to be in a rush to demolish it! Unable to convince any of the regular high street lenders to take us on, we had to consider knocking the cottage down and rebuilding it. We started buying the self-build magazines and searching on the internet to find out what funding was available. There were lenders around who were prepared to fund a building project, but they would only give you the money once they could see that you had completed each stage of the build, for example once the groundworks were done they would inspect them and if they were satisfied they were pay you the money you just spent to do that stage of the project, it was called stage payments.....which is a sensible idea, from their point of view. Immediately we could see that it was going to be a problem from our perspective because only having a relatively small deposit from the sale of our house, how were we going to buy the house in the first place let alone do the first stage of building! Luckily "Buildstore" offer an "Accelerator Mortgage" which meant that we would be able to borrow the money in advance to buy the house and land and begin.....phew! We exchanged on June 11th 2007 and completed the purchase on the 24th October 2007, we were incredibly happy and relieved that everything had worked out!

The beginning 2005 - Jan2007

Sometime in 2005 - January 2007

We've got the plot.....but have we lost the plot as well, psychologically speaking! Only time will tell and it's going to take a while to turn this vision into a reality, so patience and determination will be required.....lets hope we've got what it takes! Lets start at the beginning, how did we get to be so lucky and come to live in this beautiful spot......?

My boyfriend Guy and I used to live in a maisonette in Denham Green, Bucks and some people considered this to have quite rural surrounds, but we lived on a road that had bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours and often the neighbours above and adjacent to us were noisey with their music or loud arguing........we wanted more peace and quiet! We would usually drive out to the Chiltern Hills only 30 mins away, to go walking above Chinnor, the woods up there are lovely. We enjoyed Autumn walks most of all as it was always a spectacular time with the trees showing off their combinations of brilliant colours; bright reds, golden yellows, and rustic browns. Each year just as we reached the hills, one of us would always turn to the other in the car and say ".....the trees look great at this time of the year don't they?" and after about the third year we noticed that we ALWAYS made this comment at the same point of the journey, it was like a deja-vous, we just used to laugh, as we so clearly loved the changing colour of trees that we just couldn't help ourselves commenting on it! We still do it today and now we are surrounded by the trees all the time! We ended up moving out of Denham Green in December 2000 to a little village called Bledlow, just down the road from Chinnor......it's a lovely place.....quintessentially English!

From Bledlow you have access directly onto the Chiltern Hills by foot and most people set off from the village pub "The Lions" and do a circular walk to end up back at the pub for a pint and some lunch in-front of a roaring fire! Countryside living really suited Guy and I and we spent a fair time walking and cycling around the hillside loving it! Oneday in 2005, whilst Guy was out walking he noticed a little cottage just off the edge of the "Ridgeway", he had seen it before but paid it little attention, it was different now though because we had been thinking about moving house and had been looking out for a small detached cottage! Guy told me about this place and the next day I walked up with him to see it! I knew instantly that this would make a perfect home for Guy and I and considered it to be in pretty good shape! It was old, 100 years or so we reckoned, liveable, but appeared to have no-one occupying it at that time. It looked like it was being used as a holiday home, lots of books and games, but not much furniture. Guy and I were curious and set out to find some explanation behind this little cottages existence.

There was no letterbox in which we could place a letter of enquiry, so Guy began asking the locals! It didn't take very long to find a connection to the owner because as it turned out some of the locals in this area had used the little cottage to stay in themselves at one time or another! It was owned by a lovely couple who had bought it from within their family a long time previously and were now living down in the West Country. They allowed Scout and Cub groups to use it and various other people, but no-one was permanently residing in it!


It begged the question...."Do you want to sell it and if so how much for?" As it happened they were thinking of retiring the following year and were unsure whether they would live in the cottage themselves, sell it to a member of their family or sell it on the open market....it was a price that at the time we couldn't afford! I think we were disappointed but not surprised. We didn't hear anything more on the cottage, but walked past it often.

About a year later we were still looking for a place to move to, but nowhere was as pretty and unspoilt as Bledlow with a house to match our budget. Banks were as keen as ever to lend huge sums of money, and we now had access to a much larger mortgage if we wanted it! Shame we didn't have such easy access to a much larger income to pay for it! If we were going to move it had to be somewhere special and everywhere we liked was a stretch financially. Our friend Tim had been looking on the local planning website as he was doing some research for his own home extension and noticed the cottage had been granted "Full planning permission" for a rebuild, he mentioned it to us. We had longsince lost the contact number for owners, so Guy sent an email to the architect who had drawn up the plans. As luck should have it they were thinking of selling, so we all met up at our house to discuss the possibility of us buying the cottage over a cup of tea, then we all shook hands on the deal! No haggling, they named their price and Guy and I felt that we wouldn't want to be anywhere else! We planned to move about a year later in September 2007!

From this amazing little spot nestled in the Chiltern Hills you can see miles across the Oxfordshire plain.....it's gorgeous and it is a place, that as a young girl I could only have dreamed of living! It is peaceful country life! Well, maybe not when Guy's playing his drums......a huge bonus of having no neighbours!