All about the Benjamins... · Kensington House

I guess the two questions people have about our project is “how much is it going to cost?” and “when will you be in by?”, especially now that we’re going to be on Grand Designs, where every project always seems to go over budget and take twice as long. Normally the windows turn up late, and the wife gets pregnant as well…

In October, when we had our first ‘Kevin day’, he asked me the question, and I guessed it would cost about £350k and take about 18 months. He thought I’d be about right.

Well, it looks like the timescale is about right, and we definitely ‘could’ have done it for £350k or even under, but we’ve made certain decisions that will push the cost up to about £400k, but you know, that’s our choice.

So, we needed a mortgage of £250k to make sure we could finish it all off. We probably won’t use the total amount, but just incase, that’s what we applied for in February.

Why didn’t we apply for the mortgage before we started? Well, I took advice from our accountants that it would be better / easier if we built as much of the house as possible with our own money before we tried to borrow it, as it’s difficult getting banks to agree to lend.

So, in February, we had about 2-3 months worth of money left, and we were told it takes about 6-8 weeks to get the mortgage through.

Yeah, right…

So, we got let down by one building society who, after 8 weeks of having our plans, and who had initially said they would lend, turned round and said they would not lend because our house has a flat roof. Go figure…

So we found a different building society and made sure they were aware of the flat roof, and started the process again. Then we descended into paperwork hell. I guess it’s not as straightforward for me because I’m a director of my own company rather than an employee etc, but it seemed that everything had to be signed in triplicate, and despite my best efforts, and our agents, BuildStore keeping us upto date and pushing the building society every step of the way, it took about 6 months (MONTHS!) to finally get the money through from when we started in February.

It’s not that there were any problems, it’s just that the building society had to make sure every little bit of paperwork was in place, crossing every ‘t’, dotting every ‘i’, and not forgetting the lower case ‘j’s…

But now the mortgage is in place with Ipswich Building Society, thanks to our agents BuildStore, who were great. So everything will now go smoothly (hopefully) till the completion of our house.

But, we wouldn’t have got through those months without the support and understanding of our suppliers, where when we said we’d get them the money, they trusted us and carried on supplying us. We would have had to stop the whole project if it wasn’t for their understanding.

So, I’d like to thank the following companies.

Thanks for trusting us and letting us continue building our house. We really appreciate this, and you've won our continuing business hands down.