Stop Press - Planning Permission Granted!

Narcissi, a Sea View and Some Nice Cars...

22^nd April 2018

We have now received our planning permission - more on that story later...

Progress has been slow but steady since Christmas. In January we visited the National Self Build & Renovation Show at the excellent NSBRC in Swindon, where we gathered (via scanning barcodes for emailing rather than collecting mountains of glossy brochures) lots of information & ideas, as well as talking to experts in their fields (actually they were inside...). A few weeks later we returned for a one day Project Management course where again, we learned some useful information, not least of which was that we seem to have been doing the right things at the right time so far.

In February, after a site visit and discussions with our architect, we agreed the design for submitting to the council for planning permission. We already had planning permission, but as our design is significantly different we had to go round the loop again. During our site visit, we noticed some narcissi in bloom - now these weren't part of the land deal, so look what we saved...

Meanwhile, we started having circa. 600 tonnes of spoil removed from the plot; progress was quicker than we imagined and the job was just about completed before the worst of the heavy snow - not even the tractors could beat Mr. Newton's laws of motion.

As well as that excitement, we have started the ball rolling to get electricity, water & sewerage connected, and also had a percolation test carried out - basically spending more money on digging another big hole, filling it with water (once we found a bowser small enough to fit up the lane) and waiting to see how long the hole took to empty, then filling it in again. Result: one drainage & soakaway plan. So things are slowly moving along in the right direction.

On one of our recent visits on a clear sunny day, contrary to one of our earlier posts we discovered we DO have a sea view: as Basil said to Mrs. Richards, it's over there between the land and the sky...

And as you may have noticed at the top of this page, we now have planning permission - thanks to Ben White Architecture for all their hard work, and advice, so far - exciting times ahead!

Meanwhile, we've been busy elsewhere - here is our latest fully reponsive, mobile friendly, website creation for the Nicholson 31 Association:

Finally, on another of our recent trips to Cornwall, we took a detour to the Haynes (of workshop manual fame) Motor Museum at Sparkford - a fantastic collection of vintage, classic, famous (and American) cars, bikes & paraphernalia, so here follows a small selection of gratuitous photos for anyone interested:

The imaginatively named Red Room: