Star Letter: The lie of the land
The star letter writer wins an Einhell cordless drill, worth £119.99
I recently found a dilapidated property for sale that I’m considering renovating or demolishing and replacing. However, having used your build cost calculator online, the plot’s guide price of £80,000 seems so high that there is no way the final expenditure would make sense given the value of other properties in the area. Regardless, I doubt a rebuild from scratch would get past the planners, unless it resembled pretty closely what is there already, namely a rundown Victorian brick cottage. I am guessing a complete renovation would cost about the same as knocking down and starting over?
I simply can’t raise that kind of capital from the sale of my ex-council house – even if I was determined to spend more than the final value warranted. All I want is to finally get out of a council estate and have a simple energy-efficient dwelling on a patch of land big enough to grow my veg. It seems I’m up against grand designs dreamers with bottomless wallets. Where do I go from here?
Jerry, via
www.self-build.co.uk