A couple of years ago, Kev and I contacted a planning expert to ask for their opinion on whether we could build a house where we currently have a barn in our field.
The planning consultant turned up with an architect from his practice.
They chatted to us for a while and looked around the site.
The town planner concluded it really didn’t look hopeful to build a house on at all.
The architect stayed pretty quiet through the whole process because he couldn’t really add much to the planner’s bleak prognosis.
The best course of action, in their opinion, was to turn the whole site into a storage facility.
My internal reaction to that was “You can stick storage units up your arse, mate! I’m not looking out of my living room window to watch people come and go with their boxes of miscellaneous crap. That is not my vision for the incredible site that overlooks our beautiful woodland!”
My external reaction was, “Well that’s a shame. Thanks for your time. We’ll let you know if we decide to go ahead with that.”
It took a while to pick our heavy hearts off the floor after that dismal conversation.
However, we’ve never let the dream go (and we probably won’t until we either die or find a better place to build our own home).
A few months ago, we had a conversation with a friend of the family who works in the council planning department, and he sounded altogether more hopeful.
This led us to contact a different town planner who was like a breath of fresh air. She had high hopes for our chances of getting a house on the site, and introduced us to an architect who was young and full of ideas.
Our energy shifted as we were in the company of people who saw possibilities. Our dream was alive again!
We set up a proper pre-application meeting with the council to gauge official opinion on whether the site would be suitable, and as luck would have it, a really nice official who wasn’t just a pen-pusher but who also had a background in architecture looked around the site with great enthusiasm saying if we could get over a few hurdles, then our project looked as if it could get off the ground.
We’ve been thinking about it daily ever since. We’re currently working on getting the hurdles jumped over and we’re feeling enthusiastic once again.
We are a long, long way off from getting the house built, but we’re now enjoying the process of going through the architect's questionnaire as the first step to getting things out of our heads and into his.
Whether or not we actually get planning permission, it’s a really good lesson to bear in mind that if you have a goal then you might not always get to that goal in a straight line.
There are quite likely to be twists and turns along the way.
People might tell you it’s impossible.
They might be right, but by refusing to give up on a dream, you’ll either find a way to make the original goal happen or you’ll find something equally good or possibly better in the process.