Being there…
October 11, 2007
After reviving skinidin.com, I start getting questions again on building a house on Skye. We found that one of the difficult things of doing a self build project, is whether you have the opportunity to follow the project as close as possible. Which ultimately means, being there! On site! When you’re on site, you can monitor day to day progress and discuss issues with all involved parties before they become problems. Also, you’re in a much better position to negotiate changes with your builder.
Luckily we did not have any real problems with our project, although sometimes things appeared to be problems from our position (well over 1.000 kilometers away, in Holland). Like the supplier of the floor tiles, who insisted time after time that we had to come by his shop again to specify exactly what type of tiles we wanted, while we had been perfectly clear about it. Or the different cabling options for the Sky TV system. Or the choice of paint. Or the lack of water, or…
We did not have the opportunity to be on site all of the time, as we were still had our lives in Holland. We popped over every month or so. So we decided to do the next best thing and employed a surveyor, who would monitor the project on our behalf. I choose the word “monitor” and not “manage”, as he wasn’t acting as a project manager. In the end we were responsible for the overall planning.
Also important was the choice of the builder. We choose to tender our project with the larger builders working on Skye, all companies who were familiar with a turnkey approach. You will probably pay more as the builder also manages the different trades, but in our situation that was the only viable option. If you’re capable of managing the project yourself, on site, you can cut cost here and and employ/manage the different trades yourself.
All practical things aside, the whole process of the house being built is quite an experience. Funny to realize: we learned far more from our Skye home - being built well over a thousand kilometers from where we then lived - than we did from the build of our last house in Holland, which was built basically “under our nose”…
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Hi,
I’ve enjoyed reading about you home building. Is it possible to ask you about the costs of building in Skye, and in particular the costs of building a SkyeHomes kit?
Cheers, Tim.