31 MARCH 2008

Buying a “project” such as our railway carriage house always entails a certain amount of time spent living with the possibilities. At first this is great fun. I always enjoy the “camping” stage when one has just taken possession – and even sleeping with our coats on in front of the woodburner had a certain romantic charm in the early days, when this splendid 19^th-century French model

 

was also our only means of cooking. Hot water was confined to an electric kettle or another ancient hob one kept permanently on top of the fire – and though there was an electric shower in the damp and derelict bathroom, the idea of taking off all of our clothes in the freezing cold and standing under a device with the dubious habit of dripping all over the wiring left a lot to be desired. Slowly we got things straighter, taking up mouldering carpet to reveal rather less mouldering lino beneath, laying seagrass matting and woven plastic rugs, hanging makeshift curtains at the windows and redecorating the rooms so that flakes of old paint no longer fell in flurries on our faces during the night.

Evenings were spent with sketchpads and a bottle of wine, making lists of our “dream home” elements and conjuring up ways to incorporate them into a house cobbled together from a pair of old railway carriages. Guests who dropped in for tea or came to stay for weekends all gave their twopence ha’penny worth – and a select few, including a couple of architects and designers, had their sketches filed away for future reference. At first we were just looking to make the place water-tight, windproof and comfortable – a bolt hole with eco-credentials for long weekends by the sea. Top of the list was some sort of viewing tower from which to observe the ocean – the front windows look out over a field of horses to the sea wall, but it is slightly frustrating to be so near to the sea and yet not be able to see it. Then, with the birth of our daughter came plans to make this our full-time residence in time for when she started school, and the plans got more ambitious, aided and abetted by a couple of architects, with whom we spent endless hours discussing possibilities and amending drawings.

The first one, a bluff and likeable local man whose own house and studio (a clever conversion of an old wool store) we had admired, spent a year getting one scheme into planning, only to have it turned down on the grounds of “massing” – too much new development in one place in the form of our large kitchen extension with two bedrooms and a balcony on top. Several other schemes followed suit, but we found them increasingly at odds with the rather ramshackle charm of the existing carriages – Frank still talks about one meeting when, faced with a flat-roofed structure stretching right over the carriages with a series of box-like rooms and triangular protuberances on top, I sat speechless with my head in my hands. (I must say I can’t remember being so rude, but was simply at a loss as to what to say.) An architect friend came to the rescue with a single-storey scheme with a row of rooms stretching away off the end of the kitchen, and the option to turn the corner and create a ‘U’shaped building around a garden courtyard enclosed on three sides, but this, again, was disallowed by the planners. Then, remembering an off-hand comment by another architect friend – “You could always raise the carriages up and build beneath them,” an ingenious plan took root to raise the rear carriage up in the air to create a couple of bedrooms and bathroom upstairs and leave a huge open-plan living space beneath it, with a woodburner with tarred black brick chimney in the middle of a glass wall onto the garden and an outdoor oven on the other side.

Somewhere along the line, the first architect had had to close down his practice when his wife (a lovely woman who endeared herself to us by calling us “the railway children”) became seriously ill, and another, younger chap came on board. Like us, he was a part-time Londoner and part-time local who shared our love of salvaged and reclaimed materials and seemed, at least in the early months, to run with these ideas. Gradually, however, the run slowed to a walk and then an inexplicable standstill as the project stalled for months and eventually went in for planning three months behind schedule. Only when the scheme had been passed, and more snail-paced drawings were permanently in the pipeline, did it become clear that, inspite of us being clear about our budget from the outset, we had planning permission for a building that we couldn’t hope to afford to build.

True, the scheme had become more complex due to a structural engineer deeming it necessary to raise not just one but both of the carriages, but the chickens started to come home to roost when quotes for the various different components specified by the architect – metal windows, zinc roofing and so on – started coming in. Two weeks ago, with still no sign of even a rough outside price for the job, Frank and I sat down and calculated, in our heads, the labour costs as far as we could manage, plus the already priced elements of the design (this was not including basics such as the metal beams for holding up the carriage, the cost of the timber, brick footings and chimney, half the roof, the stairs and upper storey). The figure we came up with was already outside our agreed budget. There was no way the sums could work. The builder confirmed that the scheme would cost double our agreed budget to build and another 50 per cent to fully fit out. Even more alarmingly, he estimated a year-long build, and we now only have five months before our young daughter starts at the local school.

So this is why we find ourselves now, architect-less, slightly shell-shocked, and reverting to our initial, less ambitious plans, in the hope of getting in by September. It’s hard, in some ways, to say goodbye to a dream – that huge open-plan space with doors opening onto the garden will always haunt me. But in others it is a huge relief to know we have saved ourselves from what could have been a nightmare – logistically as well as financially. Simplicity now rules the day, with a scaled-down plan I sketched up on the kitchen table and which the builders seem to approve of. It still gives us a nice big kitchen, by means of a glass-roofed conservatory extension tacked on to a couple of the train compartments knocked through into one. It still gives me a study, and Frank a separate sitting room – and an enviably large utility room with my much-longed-for airing cupboard and walk-in larder (sad, I know, but I have always dreamed of them). There’s still a solar panel, sedum roofing and a woodburner helping fuel an underfloor heating system. What there isn’t is an upstairs – for the moment – which, in the face of rising sea levels, might be deemed foolish. But we’re hoping to go upwards in time, and have scheduled sufficient footings into the plans to create some sort of room up top.

I can’t say more at the moment – and apologise, looking at the wordcount, for possibly saying too much already. But I guess I’m making up for lost time - the shenanigans of the past fortnight, combined with a nasty dose of flu, have meant I couldn’t see a way to keep up the blog. But here we are, still dreaming, still scheming – and hoping very much in the next few weeks that the project, reduced and revised though it may be, will be full steam ahead…. We’ve lived with the possibilities for too long now. It’s time for action.

To read the entire story so far, see the ‘Green House’entries listed on the main website.