Our Grand Design: The highs and lows of building in a boom

Join us on our journey as we build our ideal home (a) to our own design (b) on a limited budget (c) in the middle of a boom. With hindsight, any one of these steps would have presented a challenge; taken together, it turned out to be something more than that.

But we were blithely unaware of this when we set out to create our ideal home. It was partly our own fault that our original modest and sensible sketches fledged into something quite different, but partly beyond our control when we were...