Grand Designs Extras Doing It For Themselves

Date Published:

06/11/2008

Dominic's self build

Dominic’s unusual three-bedroom house nestles in stunning countryside in Ireland’s County Leitrim. The family home has evolved over time — when the property was first built in 1999, the children were very small; as their needs changed, Dominic adapted the layout of their home accordingly.

When it comes to self-builds, most people pay professionals to do the big jobs, but learning the tricks of the trade could cut your mortgage payments and equip you with some valuable skills

When architect Dominic Stevens pitched a tent with his family and several others in 1999 to build a house from scratch in County Leitrim, Ireland, he might have been expecting bad weather, a few cuts, and the odd wild animal, but he wasn’t expecting his neighbours – who he had never met – to turn up and start mucking in.

‘All my neighbours had built their own homes, or were living in houses their families had built,’ he explains. ‘There’s an Irish word, meitheil, which means work communities did together. This tradition allowed communities to not be reliant on banks and mortgages. They were just reliant on each other.’

Indeed, the first person you would call if you wanted to build a house in rural Ireland is a musician rather than a mortgage adviser. ‘It would be done in a kind of party atmosphere,’ says Dominic. ‘You would be supplying the food and drink and music, and your neighbours would build your house with you.’

‘Everywhere you look there are things to be done. Then there’s things to do again, because when we built it our children were very small, and now our needs have changed,’ he says. The most recent additions are a couple of mezzanine levels – one for watching movies and one for the children to play in. ‘It’s like this big flexible kit that you can pull things off and put things back on to.’

This is housing as an evolution of a need, rather than the production of a designed object, where making changes is not a big deal, it’s ‘just part of your life.’

But DIY – at least in initial stages – is not something Mike Hardwick encourages for novices. He built his house (a 250sqm four-bedroom home in Wiltshire) in 2002, and now runs seminars at the National Self Building & Renovation Centre in Swindon and other places, focusing on project management. He did easy labouring tasks while his home was being built, such as laying underfloor heating and putting up gutters, but left the big jobs to the professionals.

‘I’d advise anyone who hasn’t got the necessary skills to avoid doing these, unless they’re really confident in their own DIY skills,’ he says. ‘Jobs like plastering and bricklaying look easy but they’re not. They’re very skilled trades, and if you don’t do it right you’ll be forever looking at the house, wishing you’d paid a few quid to get someone to do it properly. And it can devalue your property.’

This article was written by Mark Tebbutt, with photography by Mark Luscombe-Whyte, and is taken from the December issue of Grand Designs magazine. If you would like to subscribe for as little as £9 then head here to find out more.