Wajid & Anam/Heidi & Steven The £100k House: The Final Fix

-Ambitious ideas...

-You want four bedrooms, don't you?

-Yeah, just four.

-I want six.

..the tightest of budgets...

Basically we've got about ten grand left.

..and a need for inspiration...

I've not seen anything like this before.

..united each of the six projects Piers Taylor and I, Kieran Long,

followed on The House That £100k Built.

We're building walls!

Our self-builders created amazing houses

but they weren't yet finished homes.

Currently the area outside looks a bit like a bombsite.

So now Piers is making a final visit to tackle the remaining challenges.

And if that was sprayed-up, it would be perfect.

With money tighter than ever,

this time he'll need even more inventive solutions...

I'm still not convinced about circles, Piers.

..and to inspire them in fresh and unconventional ways...

It's like a little amphitheatre.

..as this time they try to finish their homes for good.

The first of our two builds is in Lancashire, where the Khans

are redefining the term house share.

Three generations live together

in three knocked-through terraced houses.

There are ten family members, all under one roof.

We are a very close, tightknit family.

Family's been everything to me.

Anam moved in when she married youngest son, Wajid.

We've been married for nearly two years.

It was a typical arranged marriage.

But I think now it's hard to imagine life without him.

Wajid, a university lecturer and aspiring politician,

and Anam, a customer services manager,

now want some space of their own.

We're expecting our first baby.

So we're hoping to get the build finished before the baby comes.

-I don't know about that.

-SHE GIGGLES

Wajid has been gifted the land on the end of the terrace

by his parents.

To build on it,

they're gambling £70,000 in savings and £30,000 in loans.

There's no endless budget. We have to make sure we stick to that.

We just hope we can get it all finished in that much.

But they have huge ambition for their £100k house,

and still haven't finalised the design.

You want four bedrooms, don't you?

-Yeah, I want... Yeah, just four.

-I want six.

Right. We won't talk about that.

One thing Wajid and Anam do agree on is that their dream is

of a three-storey building.

It will be their home, but also allow them to live communally

at times with their wider family.

Planning limitations mean the exterior will have to

largely mimic the neighbouring family homes.

Inside, the plan isn't finalised but they're thinking of going for

a fairly conventional layout.

A narrow hallway leads to a kitchen-diner.

There's a large bathroom, an office and a massive reception room.

Upstairs, there's a further generous living space,

plus three bedrooms with en suites and a family bathroom.

On the top floor,

there are three additional bedrooms and further en suites.

At 255 square metres,

it'll be three times the size of its neighbours on this street.

With just £100,000 to spend, it's an extraordinarily large build.

But the ambition doesn't end there.

Tell me about your taste and what your aspirations are in terms

of design for the interior.

I want a spacious house. I want a marble flooring.

We want underfloor heating.

We've been to Dubai a lot

and I think that's where we got the inspiration from.

That sort of luxurious, hotel room feel,

-which is nice places to spend time.

-Yeah.

We have big dreams of making this house a perfect home for us,

but I don't know how we're going to achieve it.

Wajid's big brother Naim is project managing.

He's desperate for decisions.

No. They're just confused, to be honest with you.

They're still chopping and changing, making up their minds and that.

Up another one, Joe. On the line.

It's a headache for Richie, the builder, too.

He's only in the budget for nine weeks.

The whole reception room and the kitchen is now open plan.

We're waiting on a decision upstairs about windows.

They need to sort it out before I get to it.

Piers must get Wajid and Anam away from the site

so they can focus on exactly what they want their house to be.

At the moment,

my question - is who's designing this? Who's controlling it?

Wajid wants a grand and luxurious home.

But Piers can't find much evidence of one here.

When you turn up, how do you know

it's the house of a local important person?

He begins by looking at the entrance hall.

Here, you know, you could have a fantastic lobby that you went into

-and you were received before you went into a reception.

-Yeah.

And actually do away with your corridor.

You've stolen the space of the corridor into that room.

I mean, I would do a set of double doors there

and this will feel like a grand space.

Maybe you need flip the bathroom and staircase.

To improve the conventional arrival into the building,

Piers' idea is to remove the narrow corridor

and switch the bathroom and stairs,

creating a more generous and surprising light-filled space.

It also allows for an open, sweeping staircase.

Double doors will also help add the touch of grandeur

Wajid's looking for.

Alterations must always be agreed with building control for

layout and fire safety.

I like that idea of the staircase.

That is something that we thought about but we've not been brave

enough to come up with them. We just stuck to the safest option, I think.

-I think maybe I'm just trying to worry about the builder's feelings.

-Yeah, yeah.

The only problem I've got, our project manager's my older brother.

-Yeah, OK.

-Culturally, the older brother...

-I can tell

-him, then. The older brother has a very big say.

-ANAM CHUCKLES

-I'll present him.

-That might work.

-WAJID CHUCKLES

So there's some good news and some bad.

Just give me the good and give the bad to them.

THEY CHUCKLE

Piers must keep both Naim and Richie onside.

We flip the bathroom and the stairs.

You're putting the stairs where the toilet is

-and the toilet where the stairs is.

-Right.

But no wall between the stair and that reception room.

So it's all open plan? Are we losing the corridor wall as well?

We're losing the corridor wall, yes.

At the end of the day, it's what these guys tell me to do, I'll do.

-No problem.

-Are you happy?

-Happy.

-Oh, good.

What I tried to do in there was represent Wajid and Anam,

because I don't really have a sense this is their house.

And there's this huge dynamic of older brother syndrome

and Wajid is nervous about making changes.

What's really important for me now is that they understand that

they've got to take ownership of this.

It's their house, their project.

With key decisions made, the build progresses.

The first floor walls have gone up and the front has been clad

in natural stone, costing £5,000.

With just three months to go until the arrival

of Wajid and Anam's baby, stud walls are going up.

But three quarters of the budget has already been spent.

-ANAM:

-I think it's scary how quickly the money's sort of going

in material, labour and everything.

Despite the money pressures,

Wajid and Anam are still hanging on to their aspirations for their home.

To me I've always wanted to have a luxurious feel.

The one big material that's influenced me has been marble.

It gives it a luxurious, grand finish.

I'll have pieces of marble here, there and everywhere.

High-end finishes like marble are out of the question

if they want to finish this home anywhere close to their 100k budget.

We need to try and show them an alternative vision

which they could achieve for less.

For Wajid and Anam, the per square metre cost

of laying marble or tiles and surface materials

can really start to add up.

I think it's really striking when you see houses designed for

architects themselves. They often leave out all of that stuff.

You can actually see the materials the house is made of.

That can be a great quality

and of course you save a lot of money and hassle.

We've got exclusive access to a house

in Stamford Brook, West London.

It's a two-bedroom home designed by Powell Tuck Associates,

which shows how even the most basic of floors and walls

can look luxurious.

It's so light up here. It's so beautiful.

-Yeah, definitely.

-Yeah, it's really nice.

It's the simple things in life that make a big difference

and you can see that cliche here.

When you walk in, you have this kind of wow factor.

It's really nice. I like it, yeah.

The floor finish is just a sand and cement screed

that has been polished.

When light washes across it, there is a subtle sheen.

Having that comfy rug there,

works well with the sort of raw flooring as well.

-Yeah, some very rich material next to quite a rough one.

-Yeah, yeah.

Unpainted render ordinarily used on the outside of a building

adds a natural texture.

It can be done for a fraction of the cost of covering

a bathroom this size in expensive tiles.

I like this material. I think it really adds value to the interior.

Do you think some of these ideas now you'll be able to embrace and

take forward to the house?

The problem I've got, I'm the youngest sibling in the family.

I always think, "How will that be accepted

"with the rest of the family?"

There's a danger Wajid and Anam's house could end up

full of poor compromises.

The biggest surprise of all was finding out from Wajid

that actually this build is not really up to them only.

He might be a councillor and he might be a real independent guy,

but he's still the little brother in his family.

CIRCULAR SAW WHIRS

-6.049.

-What?

6.04 metres.

Back on site, Naim's priority is to get the house done

in the most straightforward way possible.

He hasn't taken well to Wajid's new ideas for low-cost finishes.

I do like the polished concrete.

But to have it all the way through

is a bit too much, to be honest with you.

All of this part, put a thick shagpile in it, carpet.

I think that's going to be a better idea.

I'm going to talk to him and try to persuade him.

Wajid and Anam are losing the battle to make this home exceptional.

I've been searching for an interior that will prove to them that

design can have a positive effect on the way they feel.

I've got one more chance to show them ideas they'll fight to have

in their own home.

'They've told me they want something luxurious

'and I want to bring them to a place'

that, for me, sets standards in terms of aspiration

and perhaps can give them a little bit of inspiration

as to how they can create a beautiful interior.

Sketch houses a collection of restaurants and bars

in Mayfair, London.

It's a world-class showcase of interiors.

The restaurant upstairs draws on the owner Mourad Mazouz's

North African heritage with opulence at its heart.

Ideas here could help Wajid and Anam

create a show-stopping entrance hall.

So what do you make of this?

Amazing.

This room is doing it for me.

-It's so tranquil here.

-Yeah.

This partition though does look useful for you, doesn't it?

-Because it's that sense of connecting two spaces.

-Yeah.

I think it's a fantastic idea and it really kind of gives it

this huge, grand kind of entrance into it.

You know, cos you decided to go for that double door, didn't you,

-between the entrance hall and the lounge?

-We did.

And this is just a beautiful treatment of a threshold.

Doing something like that with textiles, with leather,

it's definitely luxurious, isn't it?

Feeling the cosiness. I'm feeling kind of tranquillity.

For me, it's phenomenal to just absorb and appreciate

and I'll take a lot away from this.

Yeah.

But however much they like it, there's still a hurdle to get over.

You know, it's our job to go and show the creativity

that we've seen here and transpire that into Naim's mind,

which is a difficult task.

I think the most important bit of progress today was that they

were no longer talking about which material they should buy

or which they shouldn't buy.

They were talking about how they felt in this interior

and the fact that design has communicated that to them

makes me really, really thrilled.

Determined to strike while the iron is hot,

Piers races to Burnley with ideas

for the dramatic entrance hall the couple want.

What I think we need to do is have a vision for this room.

So if you make an amazing metal screen

that is full height.

I mean, it could, you know,

you could have that actually etched out of a screen three metres tall.

-It's like a prayer.

-Yeah, that would be fantastic.

I really like the idea of that screen.

And he has an idea for much-needed opulence,

inspired by the leather panels Wajid saw in London.

This wall here,

if you got a whole series of leather offcuts,

and what you could end up with

is a wall built up out of a series of panels.

This isn't expensive stuff, but it kind of looks expensive.

-That's probably the most exciting thing I'm looking forward to now.

-Yeah.

With Wajid reenergised, Piers needs to act fast.

So he takes him to a workshop 20 miles away in Bury

that sells hides in every hue.

This blue-y grey is kind of nice.

So, Wajid, how about doing it in pink leather?

No. Never.

-If it was an end-of-line one this size...

-Yeah.

What would it cost?

You'd be talking £60-£65 for an end-of-line one.

-That's pretty good.

-Yeah.

Piers wants to show Wajid how easily the leather

can be transformed into a luxurious wall covering.

He mocks up a panel using a timber offcut and some upholstery stuffing.

-It worked. There we are.

-One panel.

-Brilliant.

-It's really sumptuous.

I'd definitely go for this rather than the boring plasterboard.

-Great stuff.

-Good.

Wajid and Anam haven't managed to move in before the arrival

of baby daughter Amira.

But there is good progress on site.

I love the ceiling. I wasn't expecting them to do it.

It was more of, like, a little surprise.

I'm really excited now because I'm glad it's finally coming together.

They're racing to get key living areas done so they can move in.

They're also making a start on creating the padded leather wall

in the entrance hall.

All wall and ceiling linings must have adequate fire protection

and treatment to comply with building regulations.

Naim's not sure about his brother's interior design choices.

The leather going on the wall.

It doesn't look right, you know?

I'm not so keen on that, to be honest with you.

But for once, Wajid isn't taking everyone else's ideas into account.

We had a difference of opinion in relation to the leather wall.

But in the end, it's my house.

13 months after the first brick was laid

for Wajid and Anam's ambitious build,

Piers and I are back in Burnley to see if they've fulfilled

their dream of a luxury home.

-Good to see you.

-Hi, guys

-Good to see you too.

-Hiya.

-Good to see you.

-Great to see you. Great to see the house.

It looks super at home here.

It's been a long process. How's it been for you?

It has been a very challenging time period.

Stressful. There's been lots of disagreement.

-Blood, sweat and tears.

-Yeah. I think tears, mainly mine.

THEY CHUCKLE

But will all the tears have been worth it?

Wow! Look at this. Amazing.

Wajid, this does feel to me like the entrance hall of a public figure.

Absolutely. It's just the way I wanted it to be.

Because originally this was a very narrow corridor

with a single door into this room and a single door into this room.

It was a wise man that told us his ideas,

so we followed them ideas through.

The couple always strived for a high-end finish despite

their tight budget.

I think this is really such a good effect. It feels luxurious.

It feels rich. It feels generous. And it's totally unconventional.

It's pretty amazing the kind of effect that you get with just some

very basic materials.

Cos it looks really expensive.

I mean, how much did this actually cost?

-Overall, it cost short of £1,000.

-For the whole wall?

-For the whole wall.

-That's kind of amazing, really, isn't it?

If you went to a contractor and asked them to make you

a custom leather wall it would be many thousands.

Without this wall, I don't think this space would have been complete.

The £600 screen elevates the off-the-peg staircase into

something far more grand.

But of course this is also a piece of architecture in some way,

because you have something fantastic that does allow your eye

to carry through and does transform this space.

Much of the rest of the house is still work in progress,

partly because they haven't compromised on finishes

to get their luxury look.

So how much has it all cost?

Tell me, how much did you have in your budget

and how much have you spent?

I had a total of £100,000 for the budget

and I've spent £109,986.

That's extremely precise. Why did you end up going over budget?

When it comes to the interior, we're not going to compromise.

I think one of the reasons we went over budget,

-I don't think we realised how big the house was.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Until we started doing the decor, interior work inside,

then we realised it was never-ending.

I think we underestimated that.

Wajid and Anam have achieved a vast amount,

creating a large house with some huge rooms,

but there's still plenty

of work to do to fill those spaces and create a welcoming family home.

It's seven months since we last caught up with Wajid and Anam

and baby Amira is now a lively 18-month-old.

But that's not all that's changed.

We've finally moved in...

into this amazing house.

For the first couple of weeks, we were just still enjoying the space,

we were enjoying the fact that we've got a brand-new house,

like, "No-one's been here before."

Wajid and Anam have carried on finishing their home

and have completed more of the bedrooms.

This is our room, which is very spacious.

All those clothes that were, you know, shoved away in the suitcases,

they're actually hung up now.

They've also completed work on the stairwell and saw an opportunity

to incorporate more high-end finishes.

So we've gone for the chrome effect.

I'm really impressed with this because it gives you the

whole luxurious feeling all the way through to the top of the house.

But the heart of their home is a disaster,

the novice builders have got the huge living room

they thought they wanted,

but they're finding this key family room bland and unwelcoming.

Sometimes we don't actually even use that part of the room.

When it's just us three, it's mainly this side that's getting used.

We're just a bit confused whether we need a door in this place or

whether we need a divider or if we need a screen.

Something that would make it look nice but it gives you that

privacy as well at the same time.

Having overspent their original budget,

Wajid and Anam have scraped together £1,000 from earnings

to solve the problem.

They need a cheap way to divide the room

without losing the spaciousness.

Piers is heading to Manchester to show them an idea

that might help.

I need to find something for Wajid and Anam

that divides up their living room without introducing walls.

And the sort of thing I'm interested in

isn't found in most people's homes,

but I have found something in an amazing contemporary hotel

in Manchester, where the space is subdivided

and they haven't used walls.

Design agency Blacksheep created this custom-made honeycomb partition

out of interlocking metal hexagons.

Bespoke patterns have been cut into the surfaces.

It's interesting being over here.

This screen is just a series of very simple powder-coated boxes

stacked up, nothing else.

We've thought about having a kind of decorative, unique wallpaper

but I think it needs more than just having wallpaper on it.

Yeah. I think just adding wallpaper wouldn't be enough.

I think you need to change somehow the perspective or the

physical characteristics of the space.

We want to do something that would still sort of, you know, like,

for example here, I can still see what's happening over there

but it's a different space.

And there's all sorts of other things you could do.

I mean, you could paint the inside interesting colours

or you could do all sorts of things.

There could be things placed within them.

You could do something other than this.

I think what's nice about this screen is that it isn't just

a two-dimensional thing that sits on the wall, like wallpaper.

It's a three-dimensional thing that changes the way the spaces

are configured and still allows you to see through,

so you get a sense of the whole.

Something like this could maintain the spaciousness of Wajid and Anam's

living room while creating more intimate areas.

But to create and fit a bespoke partition for just £1,000,

Piers needs to be really inventive.

If you did do something on this wall that say

was a sort of translucent...

..screen of some description,

that was made up out of beautiful circular boxes

that started to change the way

that this big, long dining space worked.

You know, these could be different sizes.

So yours could be more playful and could be different sizes and you

could play with colour, so you could paint all of the insides of these.

What do you think about doing something like that?

Yeah, I'm definitely up for something like this.

Because it's not blocked off, I can still see the living room.

You see, I'm not convinced about the circle idea.

I like this concept.

I'm more of a diamond or a hexagon.

I think if I had shown you circles and I was saying,

"Nah, you ought to do a hexagonal screen."

You'd go, "Hexagons? What are you talking about?"

No. I'm still not convinced about circles, Piers.

ANAM CHUCKLES

Wajid isn't on board with Piers' vision.

We're going to have to work harder to convince him

if we're going to solve the problem

of the large living and dining space.

So to see how the idea might work in practice and be made for their

£1,000 budget, Piers is taking them to a nearby plumbers merchant.

So, circles.

SHE CHUCKLES

PIERS LAUGHS

These, potentially, could be what we need.

If you look at that as just a bit of industrial design,

it's actually a very beautiful thing.

It's a perfect sphere with a tiny, very thin lip.

And if that was sprayed up, it would be perfect.

I mean, it would look as good as powder-coated metal

or something else.

Just because it's made out of PVC doesn't mean that this

potentially couldn't be very beautiful.

-I'm trying to picture it at the moment.

-Yeah.

And you know what I'm like in terms of my visualisation

of your wonderful creativity.

I know that you would far rather us go and find something shiny

and bright that we could buy to magically transform that space,

but the problem is that there's nothing available off-the-shelf.

Piers gets straight to work on a mock-up out in the yard.

This partition needs to be built, not bought.

Plastic pipes are a really cheap material.

150mm wide ones cost just £8 a metre

and can be cut down into several sections.

To give the whole thing a sculptural feel,

Piers mixes up the sizes.

So you are going to have to use quite a lot of imagination here,

but if you imagine that these are big and small

and they're beautifully painted on the inside

and then they're lit beautifully,

you can see that this would be amazing.

It would look amazing with the right colours though.

The colour is really important, as you say,

but it could be more subtle than I was showing earlier.

It could be gold. You could line them.

They'd be white on the outside and gold on the inside

or gold and silver.

-That would be brilliant.

-It would be amazing.

What I wanted to convince you was

-that we could use circles, not hexagons.

-Yeah.

Yeah, I can see that now.

Now I've seen it with my own eyes,

-I can believe in that looking very nice.

-Yeah, yeah.

Six weeks later and Wajid and Anam have hired local shop fitter Chris

to build the bespoke partition and he's come up with

a set of technical drawings.

How will you put all the pipes together?

We've got silicon for that.

So if it falls down, we'll do a runner.

I can run fast as well.

THEY LAUGH

The first job is to put up a frame that will support the structure

while it's being built.

I feel like climbing up it at the moment.

Wajid and Anam embrace Piers' ideas using white plastic pipes

and experimenting with £500 worth of clear acrylic ones.

But will this low-cost partition look as good

as something professionally manufactured?

And can it transform the living room into

a welcoming heart to their home?

I think the big test is when the support mechanism comes off,

how well it kind of holds together.

There's a concern.

The moment of truth.

Two months after demonstrating his idea to Wajid and Anam,

Piers is back in Burnley, nervous about the outcome.

Usually, I would do a really comprehensive set of documents

that defined every aspect of how something was built.

But here, I've really only done a quick sketch for Wajid and Anam.

The other thing, of course, is that however beautiful these tubes are,

they can't just be a thing that is beautiful in isolation.

They need to serve a real purpose.

Look at this! Wow! Isn't it great?

Using the most basic of materials,

Wajid and Anam have created a stunning feature

which retains the spaciousness of their living room

whilst creating distinct welcoming zones.

Very different to what we saw in Cheetham Hill.

Yeah, I was really struggling then to give you an idea about what

-it could be like.

-I think we were all struggling then.

-Yeah, yeah.

We were all struggling.

I was really hoping that you'd read into these pipes

something like this. But actually, it's amazing.

It's far better than I could ever have imagined.

I've never seen pipes look so good.

I love what it does to the room.

This actually feels like a room that has a much better proportion.

Yeah, definitely, yeah.

And I love the fact that it is quite ornamental and decorative,

yet still really purposeful.

I remember originally we talked about using just white pipes

but I love the way that you've introduced these big clear ones.

But then also you've taken standard tube and painted it gold and silver,

-which looks fantastic.

-Yeah.

Wajid and Anam have transformed their living area

by evolving Piers' concept and making it uniquely theirs.

But have they managed it for their modest £1,000 budget?

Tell me now how much have you spent on materials for this?

The clear acrylic pipes, they've cost a total of £500.

And the other tubes and pipes,

the mixture of different sizes, have been in the region of £250.

The temporary frame plus labour and paint,

bring the total spent to £1,000, right on budget.

That's pretty good value for what it does to this whole space, isn't it?

The distinctive element to this is that you're knowing that nobody,

nowhere in the world, has got this.

I think what I was trying to do really early on was get a way

for you to see the beauty in ordinary things.

I mean, these are ordinary tubes, ordinary pipes,

and actually you've transformed them through design

into something incredibly special.

'I was really worried today, coming here.

'I had no idea what they'd end up doing.'

And I couldn't have asked for more.

This screen looks amazing and it also does something,

which is to transform the layout of the house.

And that's really successful.

I think the house was still unfinished or maybe ambiguous

in terms of how the spaces worked.

But now, everything makes sense.

The second home where Piers' architectural experience can help

is nearly 300 miles north of Burnley.

Seven years ago, Heidi and Steven returned to the Scottish Highlands

from Glasgow with plans to settle long-term.

My family have been in this area since I was two.

They knew it was a great place to grow up and it's the same things

that I enjoyed as a child that I want my own children to have.

I just can't see how we would be happy anywhere else, to be honest.

Got a wee bit.

They're renting locally but can't afford to buy,

so the only option to have a home of their own

is to build one from scratch.

We obviously need a home for our family.

We want to live close to my mum and dad.

-Yeah?

-No!

-And plus, actually,

if we tried to buy a house with that space, we couldn't afford it.

So the couple purchased the dilapidated house next door

to Heidi's mum and dad.

They've been demolishing it and have borrowed £70k

from her parents to build a new home.

It can't fail because it's so tied into everybody's finances

that the whole family will massively suffer

and we could lose my mum and dad's house.

And that is horrendous. That is quite a stress.

Cos I know, ultimately, that's my side of the deal.

I've got to manage the money.

If I don't get that right, it's a big deal.

Heidi and Steven are planning to build

a two-storey timber-framed house with dormer windows.

Downstairs is their main living and dining area,

the heart of their home.

Plus a TV room, utility room

and the only bathroom in the house.

A closed-in staircase leads to three bedrooms upstairs.

One gives the only access to a large storage cupboard

housing the hot water tank.

It's small and compact, but even building this for

just £70,000 is going to be extremely tough.

I need Piers to interrogate their plans to see if he can help.

It's vital we increase the sense of space in this small home.

The first thing he wants to do is tackle the enclosed staircase

in the middle of the downstairs plan.

This area here, which is the bottom of the stairs, needs to work harder.

And I think not to make that a wall,

but to make that part of the living space.

Opening that up makes this room feel bigger again.

Heidi and Steven have a modest 104 square metres of usable space.

So Piers wants them to think beyond the four walls

and start designing the outside space.

If this is your kitchen here and this is your deck.

-In summertime, when these doors are, you know...

-Permanently open.

-..permanently open, your living territory is a third as much again.

-Yeah.

But I would be imagining, "How can I actually make that

"an outside living space that I could, on a night like this,

-"just decide to cook outside?"

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-That could be the brick-built barbecue.

-Exactly.

All it needs is, you know, actually

a piece of deck and a bit of kitchen.

Finding a way to remove the wall next to the staircase would

bring light into the stairwell and living room

and increase the sense of space on the ground floor.

And extending the kitchen out onto the deck would expand

the usable area of the house and take advantage of the amazing view.

Piers has come up with two key design changes,

but Heidi and Steven need to make decisions fast.

That's it. Thank you.

Just ten days later, the timber frame is going up,

and local builder Richard

has joined Steven on site to help with the work.

Definitely a two-man job,

with somebody that knows a lot more about it than I do.

Steven works full-time as a tree surgeon but

he's spending every spare moment on the build.

There have been some big decisions following Piers' visit,

particularly on the side wall of the staircase.

Originally in the design, the wall would come right here solid.

So it would be enclosed on both sides.

So what Piers suggested was having this open and having a post here

so then we can have more light coming into the stairs

and into the living room.

With a revised plan in place,

Steven and Richard push on to get the frame up.

And two months later, the shell has taken shape.

The underfloor heating and windows are in

and the roof is almost complete.

But costs are spiralling and over £50,000 of the £70k budget

has already been spent.

And to make matters worse,

there's been a totally unexpected blow to the schedule and budget.

Aiming for a cheap and durable floor,

Heidi and Steven have attempted to create a concrete one themselves.

I've seen it on the telly and thought, "Ooh! That looks lovely.

"That looks nice and easy.

"Concrete floor, that seems straightforward."

But their DIY efforts backfired.

The delivery driver was only meant to be there 35 minutes and he kept

on saying to us, "You've only got an hour left before

"the concrete starts to set in the machine.

"And if that's the case, I'm just dumping it at the front door."

After the rush to get it in,

the concrete set unevenly,

leaving them with an undulating floor which varies in places

by up to 4cm in height.

But we're grinding that down

and we're hoping it will be able to be fixed.

Going to take a lot of time and effort to get it pretty level

so our builder can get internal walls in.

It's delayed the whole build by two months and had

a big impact on their finances.

Tool hire plus materials for fixing the floor

have cost well over £1,000,

more than doubling what the couple budgeted.

BIRDS CHIRP

It's tough going and I'm worried they could miss the opportunity

to make the most of this small house and its surroundings.

I want to try to help Heidi and Steven start to think about

design beyond the footprint of the house they're building.

They've been in the depths of trying to get the thing up,

but the most important aspect of the house is that beautiful view

and the beautiful landscape.

I'm going to show them a house today that I think elegantly and

beautifully solves the problem of how to connect inside and outside,

using just a few elegant architectural techniques.

-Hm. Wow!

-Spacious.

-KIERAN CHUCKLES

Yeah, it feels really... It just feels really, really light.

It might be in the centre of a city rather than a rural landscape,

but architects Mikhail Riches have redesigned the back of this

terraced house in West London to cleverly extend the living area.

The main reason I wanted to show you this is though because of the way

that it links this beautiful room,

adds a really usable outdoor space with level thresholds,

with obviously large areas of floor to ceiling glazing

and that continuous surface of the same material.

'Pebble resin flooring inside and out, like this,

'costs from around £60 per square metre.

'Here it creates one continuous sweep,

'leading the eye to the exterior.'

It makes you feel like you're outside

-while you're using this room.

-Yeah.

-Yeah. It's very interesting.

I think what's really important is that we get the level,

that sense that you're not going down or up.

Eliminating the threshold as much as you can

-is really important, I think.

-Mm-hm.

Here the architects and the owners built up the level of the garden

quite significantly.

It's kind of interesting to be standing in this space cos although

it's quite tight, it's all about that idea that you can be outside

while sort of cooking or being on the phone or whatever it might be.

I think what's interesting here is just how much effort you see

they've gone to to try to create that continuity,

even when there's a glass facade in the way.

This stone worktop continues outside, giving you some usable

kind of barbecue station or something out there.

The colour is used on the units inside and out and on the wall.

There's lots and lots of effort, I think,

to try to break down the boundary between inside and outside.

The budget for remodelling this house was far more than

Heidi and Steven can spend,

but it's a design idea which I hope they'll embrace.

Piers had tried to describe some of these ideas to us.

Getting to see them really, really helped.

One of the things that it's quite good to be able to see there

is how they continued the units outside and that's something

that we'll have to think about - how we can maybe continue

-the kitchen island kind of going out into the outside as well.

-Yeah.

I think having it as one space rather than two separate spaces,

certainly that's the feeling I got in there. It was just one space.

But once back home, the stark reality is they don't have the funds

to extend their kitchen out onto the deck and costs are still mounting.

Go and take your shoes off in there now. No.

Seven months into the build, they've now spent 90k,

well over their original budget.

HE GROANS

CHILD SCREECHES

Right. Good night.

As well as funding the build with their wages,

a friend is bailing out the project with a loan.

With a need to limit further spending as much as possible...

I'm not pulling all that out, Heidi.

-I do need to see what's...

-Not tonight!

..Heidi has sourced second-hand units free from friends.

She wants to use them as the basis for the new kitchen.

-There's on over here.

-One, two, three...

-Four.

-..four, five, six hanging wall units.

-Well, what about that?

That would make seven, that one, the dirty one.

Without taking all of this out, Heidi, I can't really tell for sure.

I totally appreciate that it's annoying.

No, it's not annoying, Heidi,

it's impractical to do this right now.

I'm not pulling all this out, no way.

Heidi and Steven have just £10k left to finish the entire build.

The kitchen may be free but it's utterly bland.

It's crucial Piers finds a cheap way to make this kitchen quirky

and personal.

A lot needs to happen in the downstairs

of Heidi and Steven's house for it to work

as a really good family living space.

I'm worried that the kitchen will dominate

because I think what they're doing is just putting a normal kitchen in.

I want to really encourage them to actually still be bold and

still hang on to this sense that the house can be really exciting.

So here's our lovely kitchen.

-Here it is.

-Yeah.

-Some of it.

-It has seen better days, hasn't it?

-Yeah.

The question is how do these do more than just be kitchen cupboards?

Because the main brief for that space

-is that it doesn't feel too kitchen-like.

-Mm-hm.

But I do have something in the car I want to go and get and show you.

-Sounds good.

-Excellent.

-Yeah.

The conventional approach to reviving units

is a lick of paint or new doors.

But Piers has a much more inventive solution,

acrylic sheets, which can be bought

in a huge range of colours and finishes.

That would definitely not be the colour I would go with.

Are you looking for something more subtle?

-I think architects love lime green.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-This is a kind of aqua blue.

-That's lush.

-I like the mat.

This is mat one side.

-It's nice.

-Yeah, I like that, I like that.

You know, you could knock up this island in some really cheap

-stud work and this gets effectively glued onto the face of it.

-OK.

The front of the island and the

-fronts of the cupboard that you see behind the island.

-Yeah.

-Mm-hm.

I suppose the rest of that space is very simple and this is the

jewel that sits in it, you know?

It's also the thing that zones and separates the kitchen proper

from the living space, so it's a kind of important thing.

Keen to explore how the idea could work in practice,

Piers takes Heidi to a major supplier to see what's possible.

I think the overall thing is doing something that's

a block of colour down at the end of the room.

And then, of course, what it needs to do is to take some very

ordinary cupboards and somehow repurpose them.

And I think using them for fronts is a really good idea.

I think using them for the back of the island or the whole island

is something that could be explored.

You love a lime green.

How could he not like that?

-We like the blue.

-Yeah, we like the blue.

-It's really nice.

-It's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah.

Having shown Heidi the possibilities,

Piers can start designing.

That is one colour that does that and I think that would be really

easy to do, really easy to make.

But I think it is an opportunity to use another amazing colour

cos as soon as you add something else to that,

it just really transforms the space.

Could you do the same colour but in a different texture?

Yeah, absolutely. That's a good idea.

Then you really do just use your old kitchen as a backdrop.

You don't need to conceal it. You just paint it white.

Sold to the woman in Scotland!

I think Heidi's going to do something really good.

I'm not quite sure what she's going to do

but I'm really excited to see what it is.

Acrylic delivery.

Heidi and Steven are now battling to finish the family living space

that will define their new house.

Heidi has ordered £850 worth of acrylic for the cupboard doors,

kitchen island and elsewhere.

She negotiated a discount by arranging to cover the kitchen

cupboards in whatever colours the supplier had cheap as offcuts.

It's a very brave decision.

Ooh, purple!

Pink, Heidi. White. We've got green and yellow.

Cool. Happy with that?

We'll see how they are when they're up.

SHE LAUGHS

The kitchen island worktop needs to be cut to fit precisely,

around an uneven old sink.

One slip and one of the most expensive pieces of acrylic

will be ruined.

It's really important that the kitchen, you know,

does something interesting.

When it's in your living space, where you've got your couch and your

fire and everything, you're going to be doing all your entertaining, the

family's always going to be around there, so you want to feel proud of that space.

Whoo!

Heidi and Steven have struggled to find every penny for this

build and taken some bold and brave design decisions.

The question now is - will it all pay off?

12 months after they started building,

Piers and I returned to see if Heidi and Steven had realised the dream

of creating a home in an area they thought they could never afford.

How does it feel to be standing next to a more or less finished building?

Really exciting. It's good to see it nearly there.

It's getting to the point where you can start to imagine

this as your home.

Outside there's a long way to go

with rendering, painting and landscaping still to do.

But what have they achieved on the inside?

This is just such a great space.

It's sort of sensible, ordered, well-planned,

but most of all with this fantastic view.

And it's so well-planned.

I mean, your circulation is all to one side

so you're not constantly crossing over.

There's also this which works because it lets all of this

light through, doesn't it?

I mean, this is space that you've borrowed from the stairwell

and brought it into this room.

A home-made balustrade is constructed from rope

and clear acrylic.

And Steven has used reclaimed timber from the old house

as a free wall covering.

But the centrepiece of the main living area is a remarkable kitchen.

Well, this part of the house is certainly impossible to miss.

Impossible to ignore. It's so colourful.

The kitchen island contains a reclaimed sink housed

in a custom-built surround made from leftover timbers.

The only major expenses were one sheet of plywood and the acrylic.

This all started from - how can you take this kitchen,

which was salvaged from somewhere, wasn't it?

And how do you put it in pride of place in this room?

And what this does, this acrylic, is completely transform this room.

Heidi and Steven invested a huge amount of time and energy

in this build, but it's also been a tremendous financial strain.

So just how have things worked out?

Tell me how much money you had in the beginning for this build

and how much you've ended up spending?

Well, we had, when we first started and once we had kind of

demolished everything, we had 70 grand. We're now at 98.

And the place has kind of taken us in a year from 70 to 98.

We've got 20 grand that we've managed to borrow

from someone else, another three grand on some credit cards

and we've got the rest of that was from our wages basically.

The hard work is far from over, especially as the garden is unusable

and an eyesore in the surrounding landscape.

But Heidi and Steven have achieved a wonderful low-cost family home.

It's seven months since our last visit to Heidi and Steven.

The exterior render has now been completed and the family have

settled into their new home.

Who's having apple juice again? Just Verity?

'It's been so good to be living here.'

I think I'd actually kind of forgotten that we actually lived

anywhere else already.

Family life is just really, really easy.

So we just spend all our time in this big room.

Felix, are you having a little bit of brown sauce?

'I'm really pleased with the acrylic.

'It looks really, really good.'

Loads of people have come in and they've commented and they

really are surprised at it.

A few people have said it's very retro '80s, which I quite like.

I like to imagine it's a bit like the test card.

Piers pushed Heidi and Steven to lose an internal wall and

open up the ground floor of their small home.

And they've ended up with a flexible living space.

During the winter, we'll have the seats round the fire.

And then when it becomes summer, we'll swap the dining room table

over with it, with the sofa,

and that will be out in front of the big window.

So during the summer we can sit with the doors open,

the kids are out playing, we can sit on the sofa and watch.

Heidi and Steven still haven't been able to extend

the key living area beyond their four walls.

And at the moment, their outside space feels disconnected

from the home and unsuitable for them and their children.

There's a steep drop yards from the back of the house

and beyond that - rubble heaps.

Currently, the area outside looks a bit like a bombsite, really.

-Yeah.

-It's just a total dumping ground of all the waste materials

that we've used as the build's gone on.

A rule of thumb is to allow £30 per square metre for planting a garden,

rising to £100 or more for hard landscaping.

Heidi and Steven have saved up £1,000 for work in their garden,

just £20 per square metre.

Piers is meeting them

at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh

to show them an unconventional piece of landscape design

that could help give them a vision of how to make the most

of their exterior space on a shoestring.

At the moment, the house is built on a slope and there's

no real connection to the landscape or even their garden.

And what I want to do with them today is find a way

to reconcile those two things.

I've brought you here to show you this amazing landform.

-Oh, wow! It's pretty cool.

-Yeah.

-It's like a little amphitheatre.

-It is.

The award-winning landform was designed

by the acclaimed landscape designer and architecture critic

Charles Jencks.

It is something that really invites you to sit on, walk on,

run down, walk up, those sorts of things.

The curved, stepped design and crescent-shaped pools of water

were inspired by chaos theory

and shapes found in nature.

The result is a combination of artwork, garden and social space.

It is nice, isn't it?

The way there's this top path that goes all the way around

and then there are these lower terraces that you can walk down it,

walk around it,

sit on it and it's a beautiful thing,

as well as actually, in a way, being quite practical.

-I quite like the shortness of this section, actually.

-Yeah.

This scale is pretty good, isn't it?

I mean, that's about 600 mil or something.

Even if it was that little bit shorter as well,

you could actually, it's almost like the scale of it makes you feel

-like a child because it's a bit like a big step.

-Mm-hm.

This is clearly an amazing piece of landscape but actually it's

pretty low-tech.

It's just some earth that's been moved around and shaped

and that's it.

It is big and grand but it's easy to imagine it smaller.

The only thing, I think, when you look at it, I think,

practical-wise, you think about the cutting of the grass.

You could plant wild flowers or herbs or something

so they're on the banks and they don't need mowing.

Cos clearly you want to make something

-that's pretty low-maintenance.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

I think importantly though, this isn't about gardening,

this is about making a beautiful space for you and your house

and I think that's what we need to go and talk about now.

The big thing is, why we're here, is -

how do you connect that with that?

And the most interesting way to do it could be just to wrap

around here a beautiful big series of long steps of some description

that were sculpted.

Shape-wise, how do you feel about something that has more

of a curve to it?

Perhaps. I do like some of the... I like quite sharp angles.

So what about some sharper shapes?

-You see, I quite like a sharp shape.

-Mm.

-Like that.

-Yeah.

I think you'll actually get on a digger and you'll start

to sculpt it and play with it until you're happy with it.

And actually, that's how you make things like this.

You'll actually do what feels

-right for the space that's there.

-Yeah.

-Yep.

So there's the material for all of this

-which you kind of have already, don't you?

-Mm-hm.

You've got earth that you need to lose,

you've got spoil you need to lose.

-Here you're spending your cash on the hire of a machine.

-That's it.

-That's it.

-Yeah, exactly.

-Bit of seed.

-Yep.

That's where I would invest my cash if it was my place.

Back home, translating the inspiration into reality

means moving tons of earth, turfing it

and creating a large deck.

But can Heidi and Steven do it for a fraction of what such work

normally costs?

We have built the frame for the decking out of the old wood

that we've kept stored from the house that was here

before we knocked it down.

All in all, we'll be saving about £1,000, I would reckon.

It's a great saving, but moving tons of earth requires digger hire,

a huge £500 out of the budget.

The digger's taken down all the big lumps and bumps

that we had in the garden.

We've still got quite a bit to do to kind of get them right,

but the main shape of it seems to be quite good.

Who uses a shovel when it's a spade job?

The base for the decking brings total costs

so far to £850, leaving almost nothing for turfing.

Heidi and Steven are going to have to be more resourceful than ever

to turn this mud bath into a beautiful landscape.

Is that going to be good? What are you going to have on this?

Six months after he showed them

the Charles Jencks landscape in Edinburgh,

Piers is back in Scotland to see whether they've managed

to pull off the near impossible one more time.

Way back when I first came here, the conversations were about how

can the house and the landscape really be one thing?

As well as looking great, it needs to effectively double the

size of the living area in what is quite a modest ground-floor plan.

This is great, isn't it? I mean, what a great space this is.

I mean, that is fantastic. That is exactly how it should be.

-Yeah.

-That's perfect.

It's better than perfect, actually, cos those boards are fantastic.

-And what a view.

-It's lovely.

-I mean, just fantastic.

And also, we've managed to get it almost exactly the same width.

-Well, that's what we discussed, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

-We discussed doubling the size.

-Doubling the size, it does.

From the door to here is about 3.8m and that's 3.5.

And it just makes you feel like the space is bigger.

The deck's a triumph and struggling for funds to finish the garden,

Heidi and Steven pulled off another masterstroke.

This is really beautiful. I love these terraces.

They found a local golf club with surplus turf,

happy to part with it in return for £100 donation.

And it's lovely the way you don't see them from the house,

you just see this infinity edge here with the distant views.

I mean, it's so beautiful.

And it's also so great not to have a hand rail, conventional steps,

but all these bits of platform and space that you just want to sit on.

It's lovely. An amphitheatre. And it works so well.

-It really contains this space.

-Mm-hm.

I mean, this is great. Of course, you can't go straight down,

you actually have to walk along them, haven't you?

I mean, it's beautiful. It's beautiful, really.

-It's a nice way to enter the garden.

-It's a lovely way.

It's very... It's very sort of...

It's beautiful, majestic, descending into the lower lawn.

THEY LAUGH

And actually, I mean, look at the house from here.

It is a really good-looking house, isn't it?

Actually, the transition between the high bit of garden

with the house and the lower bit is usually very tricky.

But actually, here, this is a beautiful bank, isn't it?

And how much has it cost you to do the deck and the landscape?

Just over a grand.

-For all of this?

-Yep.

-I think so, yeah.

-That's great.

-Well, it would cost you 1,000 quid for just the deck.

-Yeah.

By the time you bought all the timber,

probably more, actually.

And then, this beautiful landscape, I mean, that's incredible.

It just shows if you can be a bit more ingenious and

a bit more creative with what you've got,

you can get something really special that suits you, suits your family.

I remember talking to Heidi and Steven about how the deck

would double their floor space effectively

and in my mind I was sort of prepared for it,

but coming here today and seeing it, experiencing it

and seeing the scale of the landscape from the deck,

I mean, really it's fabulous.