Still waiting

This isn't quite a blog yet... there's not that much to blog about. Lock Farm is still just a disreputable pile of very second hand buildings and extremely well established nettles. There's a separate post to be written about the garden, but that's really the only thing that's changed.

So far the delay that has held things back since the start of the year is the flood risk analysis - proving to the environment agency that we can survive without waterwings. Most of the time has been spent trying to work out how to prove the site won't flood without doing a full flood analysis. We're not far from the lock that gives Lock Farm it's name, so we have a river at two different levels, flood protection banks and acres of fairly flat floodplane (this is the edge of the fens!). A full flood analysis would cost around ten thousand pounds, which in self-builder's terms is one good kitchen, a double garage or a couple of bathrooms. So, as we'd rather spend money on real things than on paperwork, we've been working on an alternative.

Happily, the alternative turned out to be a set of engineers who appear to be more interested in solving the problem they're given than in doing the job they can charge the most for. We've compromised with the Environment Agency and agreed to build some basic flood protection into the site (actually a low bank along one fence), and in turn they've accepted that a detailed, technically accurate flood analysis is not practical on a small self-build project such as ours. We've saved thousands of pounds, though as usual the trade off is in time.

So finally, our flood protection proposal is with the Environment Agency and we're waiting on a (hopefully) positive outcome that would allow us to return to the planning department with a clean bill of health. Sadly it looks like the wait will be for a while yet, as they're estimating that it will be at least a month before they'll get to our submission thanks to illness and holidays taken by their staff.

It's all progress of a sort, but it would be such a relief to be moving beyond the planning stage to actually building something.