Serial self builders Jo and Mike Dowland rolled up their sleeves and took a hands-on role in the conversion and extension of a rural barn, recruiting help from their family to complete the job

WORDS REBECCA FOSTER

PHOTOS NIKHILESH HAVAL

With several completed projects already under their belts, including a self build and two barn conversions, Mike and Jo Dowland are no strangers to the highs and lows of running their own building schemes. “By doing the hard work ourselves, we have always been able to live in houses that we wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise,” says Jo. Their latest project, the conversion and extension of a rundown agricultural building near the Hampshire coast, was completed in two separate phases over the course of a total of seven years.

Back in 2011, the couple and their two children were already living in a house they’d built from scratch. “It was lovely and in a nice area, but we were quite close to the main road, so we started looking for somewhere quieter,” says Jo. However, plots in their chosen region – the New Forest – were few and far between. Plus, anything that did come up for sale was out of budget.

Unique opportunity

When a derelict brick-built barn near Lymington popped up on Rightmove in 2014, Jo and Mike’s interest was piqued. The property had been on the market with planning permission to convert into six small holiday lets. “It was an awful design and the seller wanted a fortune for it; it sat on the market for years without moving,” says Mike. When the existing owners managed to change the planning permission to convert the building into a residential dwelling, Jo and Mike headed over to investigate the opportunity.

The plot was overgrown, with weeds climbing up to one-metrehigh around the barn. Despite this, Mike could immediately see the potential afforded by the building’s height. “It was way taller than it looked in any of the pictures – it only took me about five seconds to realise I could put a mezzanine floor in what, at that point, was a single-storey structure,” he says.