Heidi and Steven The House That £100k Built

We're in the midst of a low-cost, self-build revolution.

-And again.

-We're going to have a house!

It's harder than ever to get onto the housing ladder,

so a few brave, ordinary people

-are resorting to the seemingly impossible...

-Bend it.

-SNAPPING

-Oh, OK.

..building their own home from scratch

for less than £100,000.

I think it's scary how quickly the money's going.

I'm Kieran Long and, with architect Piers Taylor,

we're coming to the aid of six families

attempting this toughest of challenges.

That's bowing in the middle there.

-I wouldn't...

-No, no, no.

-We'll try to help them with design dilemmas...

-Stop there.

Why wouldn't you want to make that change?

..challenge them to think bigger...

There's just so much to look at. Just kind of soaking it all in.

..and search out innovative solutions

that make the most of their meagre budgets.

Ooh, look at that!

We'll all be pushed to the limit...

We can't afford to stop.

..as we attempt to turn these ordinary self-builds

into outstanding homes.

Wow, this is amazing.

This time, Heidi and Steven attempt to build a house for just £70,000.

-What we've got is what we've got.

-But will juggling family life...

-No.

CHILD WAILS

STEVEN SIGHS

..and problems with the build...

It wasn't that people had given us the wrong information,

it was because we didn't ask the right questions.

..leave their home unfinished and their dream in tatters?

Basically, we've got about ten grand left.

I'm in Scotland, about 12 miles from Inverness,

but stunning landscapes like these

sometimes come with a stunning price tag.

But people who grew up in these areas want to come back

and put down roots.

I'm off to meet a couple who've got exactly this problem.

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

They knew it was a great place to kind of grow up

and it's the same things that I enjoyed as child

that I want my own children to have.

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

I've got a wee bit.

Seven years ago,

Heidi and Steven returned to the Highlands from Glasgow

with plans to settle long-term.

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? - Nah!

..plus, actually, if we tried to buy a house with that space,

we couldn't afford it. We just couldn't afford it.

So when the dilapidated house next door to Heidi's parents

came on the market,

it was an opportunity the couple couldn't pass up.

The property that we bought originally was a two-bedroom cottage

and that property had to be done something with -

it was empty, it had rats in it.

Over the last month, we've got the roof off.

Next stage, I'll have the joyous task

of demolishing the internal chimney.

After paying 65K for the plot,

there's a total of just £70,000 left for the entire build.

Heidi and Steven put in their savings,

but to raise the rest,

Heidi's parents have taken the brave step of remortgaging their own 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 and, if I don't get that right,

it's a big deal.

It's two weeks since they knocked down the old house

and I want to find out how they intend to construct a new one

for just £70,000.

-Hiya, guys.

-Hi.

-Hiya!

-How are you?

-Good, thank you.

-Nice to see you.

And I can see why you want to build a house in this location.

This is an amazing spot, isn't it?

-It is.

-We're very fortunate. I think we're a bit spoiled, frankly.

It just, it's a lovely place to live.

I'm originally from down in Glasgow

and I just fell in love with the place.

This is where I'm going to grow old and hopefully never move again.

It's a beautiful site,

but what kind of family home can they hope to build here

on their tight budget?

This side of the house

will have the open-plan living room and kitchen dining room.

We went for a living/dining kitchen area because family life

all sort of centres around eating and keeping an eye on the kids

-and the kids running around...

-Yeah.

..so this is just one big space that we can share.

These novice builders have come up

with the design of the house themselves.

They're planning 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.

Is money going to be a challenge?

Oh, yeah, definitely, it's going to be a challenge,

but there isn't another magic pot of money.

What we've got is what we've got.

And it's not just the budget that's an issue.

One of the challenges is trying to put our personality into the house.

We can't really do much of that on the outside,

but certainly we've got the inside of the house to play with.

With a very basic design and pressure on finances,

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

-Hello, nice to meet you.

-How are you doing?

-Nice to meet you.

-Pleased to meet you.

So an amazing spot. I mean, truly spectacular.

Thank you very much.

Heidi and Steven designed their new home,

but already feel it doesn't suit their needs.

One thing that doesn't work with this design

is that we don't have a bathroom upstairs.

Cos that's a funny recess of space.

That space there has a hot water tank in it.

Perhaps, there's going to be bits of storage we can fit around there,

-so...

-But in theory, that could be a bathroom.

If it was me, I would definitely cut my stairs back to there

and start the stairs earlier.

And what that gives you the potential of in the future

is bringing a door in there. That could be a shower room.

I totally agree with you,

-cos that seems like a very simple thing that can be done.

-Mm-hm.

-Mm.

Now he wants to 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, not to make that a wall,

but to make that part of the living space.

It can be a post and a lintel across and still be load-bearing above.

Opening that up makes this room feel bigger again.

Makes the staircase less dark as well.

It makes the staircase a lot less dark.

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

so Piers wants them to think outside the four walls

and start designing the space beyond.

The drama of the landscape is so immense

that I would be wondering, "How could I maximise that?"

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

in summertime, when these doors are...

-Permanently open.

-..permanently open,

your living territory is a third as much again.

Then I would make those all steps going down,

so you could sit on the edge.

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.

-That could be the brick-built barbecue in there.

-Exactly.

The poetry of how you live in a landscape like this

is so simple, in some ways,

cos all it needs is actually a piece of deck and a bigger kitchen.

Moving the staircase back

would allow for direct access from an enlarged landing

into the room that could become a much-needed upstairs bathroom.

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 lots of potential design changes,

but Heidi and Steven need to make decisions fast.

RICHARD: Smashing, 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.

It's definitely a two-man job

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

You can get a lot more done with the two of us.

Steven works full-time as a tree surgeon,

but he's spending every spare moment on the build.

Machinery here that I'm not used to.

More cautious of the nail gun than I am of a chainsaw.

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.

We've still just to decide

on how we're going to finish that opening off.

Heidi and Steven have already spent £29,000

on the frame and foundations.

They need to save every penny

if they're to bring the build in on their 70K budget,

so they need to recycle and re-use materials where possible.

What I've got here is all the roof joists from the old house

and we're going to be using this as the frame for our decking.

We've not really planned exactly how the decking's going to be,

but we've certainly got enough wood to get quite a large space outside.

With new decking starting at about £13 per square metre,

this could add up to a significant saving.

But Steven's resourcefulness and ambition

are soon tested by the Scottish weather.

A month later,

he's desperately trying to get the structure watertight...

without success.

We've had gale-force winds,

amber storm warnings up here, flooding.

And some heavy rain as well.

Yesterday was probably the worst weather we've had

throughout the build.

It was a bit windy putting the gable ends up,

which was a bit hairy at some points, but we can't afford to stop.

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

to make the most out 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.

Mm!

-Wow!

-Spacious.

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

and some 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.

-Makes you feel like you're outside while you're using this room.

-Yeah.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

What we are looking at at the moment is polished concrete

all in the ground floor, but I have also thought about,

"Would it be nice to have concrete going all the way out?"

I think what's really important,

regardless of what we do 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.

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,

proportionally it's all about that idea that you can sort of be outside

while 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 barbecue station or something out there.

Granite worktops similar to this

cost from around £200 per square metre.

Just like the flooring, this one's been used to create the illusion

of one continuous space, along with other techniques.

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 is quite good to be able to see there

is how they continued the units outside

and that's something we'll have to think about,

how we can maybe continue the kitchen island,

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.

It's December and two months since the frame went up.

The under-floor 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.

Completing everything else for just 20K is going to be impossible,

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 saw 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.

It wasn't that people had given us the wrong information.

It was because we didn't ask the right questions.

The delivery driver was only meant to be there 35 minutes

and he kept on saying to us, "Yous have 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."

We weren't even halfway down the house

getting the concrete out

and we were also charged a pound a minute.

He was there about two and a half hours over his allotted time.

After the rush to get in, the concrete set unevenly,

leaving them with an undulating floor

which varies in places by up to four centimetres in height.

We've ended up with a bit of a lumpy floor.

Yeah, it's about 23mm there as well.

-But we're grinding that down.

-Mm-hmm.

We're hoping it will be able to be fixed.

It's going to take a lot of time and effort to get it pretty level

so our builder can get internal walls downstairs, cos at the moment,

he just doesn't have the levels to get any 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.

Steven is now spending every night

grinding down the huge volume of concrete floor.

After a long day at work, coming home, it's cold, it's dark.

It's hard to get yourself motivated to do it.

Yeah, it's just...

..fun(!)

With added pressure on their build schedule and budget,

Piers now needs to come up with low-cost solutions

that will have a big impact on this build and help them move forward.

-Hi, Heidi, hi, Steven. How are you doing?

-Hi, Piers, not bad.

-Hi!

Wow, a house!

-Yes.

-It's beautiful.

It may be beautiful, but with many costs underestimated,

the finished house is now expected to come in at £84,000.

To continue the build,

Heidi and Steven will have to eke out money from their wages.

Even so, the projected cost per square metre is still low.

80-something grand for a house that's 100 and something square metres

is a really tall order.

Almost no-one builds for less than £1,000 a square metre, ever.

Despite the pressures on the budget,

all the hard work attempting to fix the concrete floor

seems to be paying off.

This side of the house is pretty much done

and then it's basically bringing back the grinding machine

to get the smooth finished.

You can see the finish.

If you look over here, it's going to look really beautiful.

-You'll be able to see...

-Mm.

-It's very nice. Yeah, very nice.

-That's what it'll look like.

The concrete floor created a huge headache,

but the decision to lose the wall

between the staircase and living area

is already looking promising.

For me, it feels really exciting that you've taken this wall out

and, you know, previously, your eye would have stopped here

and this would have been the boundary to the space,

whereas now, it's a metre over here, which I think is great.

Also, just this sense of coming downstairs, seeing the view,

incorporating some of that upstairs into the downstairs,

those sorts of things I think have been really successful.

A conventional wooden handrail and spindles for a staircase

could quickly tot up to well over £100

and the sky's the limit for more adventurous designs.

Piers wants to explore ways of doing something unconventional

and exciting on a modest budget.

You've got this Douglas fir post, your ceiling is there.

What I want to sort of focus on is this thing here

-can do anything you want.

-Mm-hm.

It could be the most beautiful, delicate steel rods

that just enclosed that gap.

Could you not just have, instead of having this handrail here,

not have a handrail and maybe just have something

that would fill in this gap and be all different angles, perhaps?

That's a nice idea. That's even nicer.

Then you wouldn't have that breaking up your eye.

That is a really beautiful idea. Then you don't need a handrail at all.

You have one handrail the other side,

then this is just a spider's web, it's not a handrail at all.

Just very, very fine 3mm tensioned wires in a web

and then it's delicate enough that you look through it.

When you're saying about the tensioned wires,

I'm not always so keen on that kind of metallic finish.

You could use nylon rope for that.

It's fun and quirky and cheap.

-Yes.

-You could build this whole thing for 50 quid, probably.

Which is a lot better than a handrail made out of steel

-that you'd have to get bespokely made.

-Yep.

-Absolutely, totally.

With the concept agreed, they'll develop the design further

to ensure it complies with the building regulations

that ensure safety.

Next, Piers wants to hear the current thinking

about the plan to extend the kitchen and living space onto the deck.

I know recently you went to look at that amazing house in London

that has that fantastic outside kitchen.

What did you think of that?

I liked some of the elements of it.

I liked the fact that you had that one level that went...

the kitchen and out, but to be honest,

it felt a bit strange, though.

You don't really have a kitchen outside.

I like the idea of having the sense of living outside,

but not actually the kitchen. We will do stuff outside,

but we'll just cook it in there and take it out, or put a barbecue on.

So Heidi's been working on an alternative plan for the kitchen.

It would define the whole ground floor of their family home.

So show me, Heidi, where the kitchen is now.

We've got this island, we've got this row here.

I think that's probably enough cabinets and, in my mind,

I haven't got anything on the wall.

I haven't got any wall cabinets,

and a lot of...would be to naturally stick some up,

but I think, if I put them up, I'm going to make the room feel smaller.

I think you're right, actually. I wouldn't have any cupboards up there,

keep everything at low level,

which means that you can chuck stuff in the sink and not see it

-and not have a sense that you're sitting in a kitchen.

-Yeah.

Ditching wall units will maximise

the feeling of space on the ground floor.

The challenge now is to ensure this part of the house

reflects their character

and isn't dominated by a cheap, off-the-peg kitchen.

What Heidi and Steven could do now is just finish the house

in the most conventional way

and just go to their local DIY superstore

and buy off-the-shelf things for everything, but it won't be beautiful

and special and interesting and they don't want a really flashy house,

but it needs to be theirs

and it is a bespoke house and what Heidi and Steven need to do

is find a strategy for getting what they want and spending no more

than they would if they went down to their local DIY outlet.

We've got to inspire them with ideas on how to achieve this

on their dwindling funds and within their compact footprint.

BIRDS SCREECH

Heidi and Steven are just at the point of their build

where they're beginning to think now about the interior

and how they're going to inhabit this space they've created.

That's really exciting, but before they get into that,

I want to show them a building that makes really inventive use

of every square metre of a very constrained site.

In fact, you could say that this house

makes a virtue out of necessity. It is a product of its constraints

and I think it's one that's really going to give them loads of ideas

to take back to Scotland.

This house in North London

was designed by Nicholas Kirk Architects.

It's squeezed into the tiny plot between two existing properties,

but actually has almost the same square footage

as Heidi and Steven's home.

So you can see just how constrained this site is -

four and a half metres wide, the whole site,

and tapering too, but it's quite a robust

and I think quite welcoming space

and that, combined with all of the light that's coming, of course,

from this double-height window,

-it's a fantastic combination, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Even though it's not a massive space, it's got a great quality.

Oh, I love it, I really love it.

I think what I really noticed immediately was

there's the concrete floor -

it's not pristine, it's not over-polished.

This is a proper kitchen where people actually cook.

The architect and owner have injected functionality

and personality.

The worktop was made by the owner for £400

and the unique splash-back is a remainder of vintage wallpaper

covered with a glass sheet.

Every inch of this small space is utilised.

Each nook and cranny, each bit of wall,

the whole depth is used for storage

and I quite like the way this piece of furniture

is just flush with the wall and there's a little open part here,

where you see the edge of the plywood.

I really, really like it,

because what they've done is practically hidden stuff,

but kind of made something of this interest of the book.

By minimising expensive fittings,

the architect has designed a cheap, elegant kitchen.

-So there's no handles?

-No handles.

-That's really good.

I think plywood's such a nice material, when you see those edges.

The least obvious of spaces have been used to great effect.

This hallway's interesting, cos it doesn't look much,

but there's some, I think, interesting tricks here,

just using the depth of the wall.

This is quite useful stuff, isn't it?

This is exactly the kind of idea that we want in our entrance way,

and this is a really simple way of doing it,

where you don't have to make a big deal about it being a cupboard.

-It's not a cupboard, that's really important.

-It's just a wee nook.

It's just a bit of the wall and this can be for whatever.

Even here, you've got really useful storage

-built into the staircase, it's just really handy.

-Yep.

The stairs at the back of the property could have been

the darkest part of the house.

Just look how much light is flooding in from this slot window.

It must have been a lot of effort to do that, and expense,

but somehow, for me, just really works.

-It's paid off.

-Yeah, it's turned this into something

that's an actual space, a room, almost.

The £700 balustrade is simple, but fun,

and the house is packed with practical design ideas

that make the most of the small footprint.

In the living room,

built-in storage is constructed out of inexpensive plywood.

This low unit was made by the owner for £180.

These are not pieces of furniture they bought

and put against the wall. It's all integrated.

And it doesn't have a cluttered feel about it at all,

even though there is a lot of stuff in here.

And this is a very family home

and you can feel, in this space, you feel cosy...

I can tell you feel quite warm about this place.

You seem to really respond to it. What is it about it that you like?

It's beautiful, yes, but that's not its key thing - it's practical

and that's what I really like about it

and that's how we're designing our home.

Splashes of colour add personality throughout the house

at very little cost.

This is sort of how I'd like to see our house.

This house shows the character of the people that live here

and that's what we'd really like to bring through in our house.

They've used some really good ideas that we'd really like to take away

and have a go at ourselves, I think.

Heidi and Steven seemed to get a lot out of today

and I really enjoyed spending time with them

in a really interesting, intricate work of architecture.

The challenge, though, is whether they can realise their ambitions

with the same kind of elegance and economy that this place has.

Down you go, down.

A crocodile? It looks like a big hole in a box.

CHILD: It looks like a crocodile!

Oh, it looks like a crocodile.

By May, seven months into the build,

enthusiasm is understandably fading.

Heidi is struggling to run her consultancy business,

be a wife and mother and project manage the build.

Every day,

we've got to do all the things that you have to do

in ordinary family life and then, on top of that,

try and find the energy and the time to get on with the house build,

when it feels like it's been going on forever.

Mmm!

'I feel really worn out at the moment,

'physically, mentally.'

I'm making mistakes left, right and centre,

I'm forgetting things...

Go and take your shoes off in there now, Verity!

-No, listen.

-VERITY SCREECHES

'..which isn't like me.'

I'm usually just really quite organised

and I'm not enjoying that,

so when you start to make mistakes and stuff,

then you start to doubt your ability to do it

and that's not a pleasant place to be.

They've now spent 90k, well over their original budget.

As well as funding the build with their wages,

a friend is bailing out the project with a loan.

Steven, too, is worn out by the relentless demands on his time.

It was hard to begin with

and it's getting harder as the build goes on,

cos, obviously, we're more and more tired now,

because I've not had a break since Christmas.

Come and get your teeth done now.

VERITY WHIMPERS

-Come on!

-I've already done my teeth!

Who's driving the fire engine?

-Is it Goat?

-Slug!

STEVEN GROANS

BOY SCREECHES

Goodnight!

STEVEN SIGHS

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

No, I'm not pulling all that out, Heidi.

-You need to...

-Not tonight!

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

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

What's that like? Some sort of thin cabinet?

Yes.

You have to remember, we need to put all this back.

Steven, it doesn't stop me needing to know what's there, dear.

Well, we could always do that when they need to come out.

As much as, like...

you might want to not move it,

I don't want to design a kitchen and then find I don't have those units,

so if we just move some of them over here...

-There's one over here as well.

-One, two, three...

-Four.

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

That would make seven, the dirty one.

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

I totally appreciate that it's annoying, but...

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 are at the end of their tether.

With all they're going through,

I want to find out if they've any money left to even finish the build.

What is the state of the budget?

How much has it cost you so far and where are you?

Basically, we've got about ten grand left.

That doesn't feel like a lot.

The way you did raise the money to buy the land

and to build the house is by borrowing it.

We had to go on my mum and dad's mortgage and remortgage the house.

They'd effectively nearly paid the whole thing off

and we had to put them in a massive amount of debt,

and ourselves.

The thing that I don't try and think about too much.

I just look at it as a project

and just keep going, cos otherwise, you'd just be overwhelmed.

With just 10K to finish the house,

it's crucial that Piers comes up with design ideas for the interior

that add personality at a very low cost.

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.

Effectively, it's just one room

and 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.

-Some of it.

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

-Yeah.

That is a kitchen that you would only choose to offend nobody,

-but to please no-one either.

-Yeah.

-Ha! That's... Yeah.

The cupboards themselves are fine, aren't they?

The question is, how do these work as a cohesive whole in that room?

-Yeah.

-How do these do more than just be kitchen cupboards?

-The biggest challenge is perhaps the island.

-Yeah.

How do you make a beautiful island

that is a kind of dramatic piece of furniture out of these?

Because the main brief for that space

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

-Mm-hm.

What money do you have associated

with turning this into something that works as a kitchen?

Ah. Some money.

Few hundred quid.

You'll magically infuse us with wonderful ideas.

I'm not sure I can magically do it,

but I do have something in the car I want to show you.

-Sounds good.

-Excellent.

-Good, I'm going to go get it.

The conventional approach to reviving units

is a lick of paint or new doors,

but Piers has a 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!

-This is a kind of aqua blue.

-That's lush.

-I like the matt.

-This is matt one side.

-Yeah, I like that.

I'm thinking that you could knock up this island in some really cheap

-studwork and this gets glued on to the face of it.

-OK.

The front of the island and the fronts of the cupboards that you see

-behind the island.

-Yeah.

-Mm-hm.

-And for splashbacks and things like that.

-Interesting.

I suppose I feel the rest of that space is very simple

and this is the jewel that sits in it.

And it's also the thing that zones and separates the kitchen proper

from the living space. So it's an important thing.

It's not just the kitchen that needs fresh ideas.

Heidi and Steven want to create an eye-catching design

for the side of the staircase.

Piers has an ingenious plan for using low-cost materials

and he's brought Heidi to a local marina.

There's a kind of richness to the way

that boats use material that I really like.

For me, it goes way beyond what you can get at a conventional

builders' merchant. And I think, for me as an architect, these are

the places that I often come to to look for inspiration.

You can get things in marinas and chandleries

that you can't get anywhere else.

There's tension wires with those nice turnbuckles.

-So this is what I wanted to show you.

-Mm-hm...

This nylon braid.

So, theoretically, these could be used - strong enough -

-to do what we want them to do.

-Absolutely.

Here we are, your favourite colour(!)

THEY LAUGH

Well, you never know, it might tie in with the kitchen.

-I like that, that kind of...

-The dullest...

-I like the dullest.

..most dour colour here.

This stuff is amazingly strong. This has an incredible breaking strain.

That is £1-something a metre.

The thicker it is, the more expensive it is. So this is...

What's that, 7mm or something, and that's about...£4.39 a metre.

It's kind of four times as expensive as something like that.

And that's, you know,

that's well over-specified for what you need it for.

-Yeah.

-By the time you start to bend it and join it and tie it,

that might get slightly clumsy.

-The electric blue's nice.

-It is nice, I agree with you there.

I do quite like that yellow. It's interesting and it's fun.

Interesting and fun is what I think you need to do in your house.

-I think we should go and play with a few ideas.

-OK.

-Yeah.

To see how the design might look,

Piers creates a timber frame that echoes the shape of the gap

next to the staircase.

With cord from the chandlery

and steel eyelets screwed in at random intervals,

the experiment can begin.

My instinct was that we should start with the brightly coloured one.

I thought that might be your instinct, Piers!

The instinct would be to go here,

but actually I think just pick a point and go for it.

-It's already looking good, isn't it?

-Yes, it is, actually.

Damn, should have got more rope.

So the moral is that 12 metres of rope doesn't go very far,

and I hadn't realised how much we'd need.

It's all a learning experience.

But I suspect, for an opening this size, you might need 25 metres.

But at £1 a metre, it's pretty good value, isn't it?

A turnbuckle device costing just a few pounds tensions the rope.

I think, because we've got the other colour ropes,

why don't we just add in another 12 metres of another colour

and just see what it looks like with two colours?

With the blue cord also in place,

it's time to see how the prototype looks against the staircase.

So it goes about here, doesn't it?

Wow, that looks great!

Heidi and Steven will need to liaise with building control

before finalising the design

to ensure it meets all safety requirements.

But this test run gets the thumbs up.

It's so much better than having a banister...

big bits of wood or metal.

-And cheaper.

-Yeah, much cheaper.

25 quid for the rope, the eyelets were a couple of pounds.

-You pay that for just one of these wooden banisters.

-Yeah.

Much more fun!

-That's really exciting!

-It feels really kind of bright, youthful,

it's lovely seeing through it, it's so much more than background -

it actually adds character, it's lovely.

When I come back hopefully you'll have done something like this,

but even better.

I think it's really exciting to begin to see

something beyond the building site.

And now there are glimmers of bright colourful things

that really reflect your home.

I think it was a worry for me - what do you do with this new house?

It'll be empty rather than actually we're going to go in and it's going

to already have character

and this is actually giving it its character, which is good.

Nine months since the frame went up, the joiner and plasterer are working

alongside Heidi and Steven.

But there's still a long way to go before the house is finished,

and nothing comes easy.

Why are all the sockets so far along?

-What do you mean?

-That's the only place you can put the microwave.

The budget and schedule are being hit daily by setbacks.

As well as using second-hand kitchen units,

Heidi had planned to economise by fitting a used cooker.

My dad's garage flooded and our cooker got really wet.

So that's going to have to go to the dump.

Going to have to also buy a new unit.

Didn't have that in the budget.

-I'm sure you're getting greyer the more you work here.

-So are you.

Spending is now at 95,000

and the finances for completing the build are on a knife edge.

Heidi has been forced to put over £3,000 on credit cards...

I don't think I've got a future as a painter and decorator.

..and cash flow is fluctuating wildly.

With our boiler, we were part of the government scheme that allows you

to get an interest-free loan, so that freed up a little bit of money.

Freed up probably about seven grand

to enable us to keep going with the project.

Today, with the cooker, that was not in the plan.

Some things are working out a little bit cheaper

and some things are working out more expensive,

because things have changed on site.

-Oh!

-Can you repair that?

-No.

The most important job now is transforming the old kitchen units

into a piece of design that'll give character to the living area

at minimum cost.

The idea of using acrylic sheets went down well...

..so Piers has brought Heidi to a major supplier for inspiration.

I think the overall thing is doing something that's

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

And then what it needs to do is take some 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 islands or the whole island

is something that could be explored.

There's a vast range of textures, shapes and colours to argue about.

-You love a lime green.

-How could you not like that?

How could you not want a kitchen made out of that stuff?

Because I feel it's going to date.

-This is a bundle of amazing colours.

-Look at these amazing colours.

-Those are rather muted colours.

-No, they're not.

-That's your favourite colour.

-Well...

-Look at that!

-It's lovely.

-Apple green.

-Apple green's nice too.

-Like emerald - you could have Emerald City.

-That is beautiful.

It is really clean and bright and crisp

It isn't just the main body of the kitchen and the fronts

and splashbacks and island,

there's the handles, all sorts of other things,

and these rods are fantastic.

Look at these rods.

That could be cut down into inch-length...

and just glue it on.

It's that simple and you cut it with a fine-tooth saw, a hacksaw,

and you can sand the end, but it is so beautiful and so unexpected

and simple.

The acrylic rod is 1.8 metres long and costs less than £12,

so could make lots of handles very cheaply.

You could go for a solid front with a clear handle.

-We like the blue.

-Yeah, we like the blue. Really nice.

-Beautiful.

Parts of the kitchen island could potentially include curved surfaces.

Piers and Heidi want to see what's possible.

So, can we see this curved into a gradual radius?

Yeah, we can put it in the oven.

It'll take about 15 minutes to do.

To create curves in acrylic, it's heated so it's malleable

and then left to harden over a form that gives it the desired shape.

It's a process called thermoforming.

If you took a single sheet of this and bent it to make, say,

three shelves going down a wall, how much would it cost per bend?

It varies on the thickness and size of the panel.

To create a shelf of your description would probably

cost somewhere around

75-125 quid.

The heated acrylic is now flexible enough to go on the form,

but it will harden again within two to three minutes.

Whether curves will be in the final design is up for debate.

If I come back with a curved kitchen Steven will not be very happy.

You could make a beautiful, curved chaise longue.

SHE LAUGHS

Having shown Heidi the possibilities,

Piers can start designing.

That is one colour that does that

and I think that'll be really easy to do, really easy to make,

and, if you were worried about it scratching, you could just put

a piece of glass on top of it.

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.

-That as a block of colour would be amazing.

-Yeah.

And that as a piece that was folded up is enough.

And I think that's where you'll probably spend your money.

And then you really do just...use your...

old kitchen as a backdrop.

You don't need to conceal it, you just paint it white and it's fine.

When we looked at those rods, you've got that option,

if you wanted to pick out a colour, you could use those for handles.

-Great idea.

-Yeah.

-Sold to the woman in Scotland.

SHE LAUGHS

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 use in various parts of the house,

with transformation of the bland kitchen units the top priority.

It's Steven's first glimpse of what's in store.

-No, are you not excited?

-I'm...intrigued.

-You're intrigued?

-Yeah.

-I'm very excited.

You're just upset, cos you didn't get to go to the acrylic factory,

that's why.

You didn't get to see all the colours.

-Oh...

-Oh, wow!

That's the shelves.

They've chosen green acrylic for the island and shelves

but, desperate to save wherever possible,

Heidi negotiated a discount by arranging to cover

the cupboards in whatever colours the supplier had cheap as offcuts.

It's a very brave decision.

-Oh, purple!

-Pink, Heidi.

Oh, it's exciting. What colour's this one?

-White. We've got green and yellow.

-Cool. Happy with that?

And with the colours?

Yeah. Well, I'll see how they are when they're up.

SHE LAUGHS

Next, Steven deals with the reality

of another of Heidi's design decisions.

Put the eyelets in this row.

Put the eyelets there and there and we'll work it out.

-So, basically, it's every 14.14.

-OK.

Pythagoras, that chap, he's dead clever and all that, he knew it.

The most demanding job still lies ahead.

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.

You ready?

SAW POWERS UP

This is the main room, this is where everything happens.

It's really important that the kitchen does something interesting.

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

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 ago, Heidi and Steven took the huge decision to try to

build a home for their family with a budget of just £70,000.

It became a project that pushed them to their limits

and brought them to the brink of financial ruin.

After months of long nights and early mornings, I'm back to see

if they've been able to create a house that really reflects

who they are and the way that their family wants to live.

Piers and I are returning to see if they've realised the dream

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

-Hi, guys.

-Hi.

-Hi.

-Hello, how are you doing?

-Good, how are you?

-Great to see you. Look at this.

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

Feels really exciting. It's good to see it nearly there.

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

this is your home.

There's a few things left to finish, and the render is one of those,

but how close are you to finishing the whole thing?

The outside is pretty close.

The render has held us back due to the weather.

-It's either been too hot or too wet.

-Well, it's Scotland.

THEY LAUGH

-I can't wait to see inside. Shall we go and have a look?

-Yeah.

This is just such a great space.

Sort of sensible, ordered, well-planned,

but most of all with this fantastic view.

And it's so well planned. Your circulation is all to one side

so you're not constantly crossing over, whereas most house builders

seem to think that you add features to make a room better.

Here there's just the space and the light and almost nothing else.

There's also this, which works,

because it lets all of this light through.

This is space that you've borrowed from the stairwell

and brought it into this room.

Yeah, and it does it in an interesting way.

We keep saying that this now feels like a little framed piece of art.

'Heidi's created a unique design for around £400.

'The bulk of the cost is the clear acrylic panel

'which makes it meet building regulations

'without compromising the effect.

'Having been so busy actually building, Steven's been less

'involved in the design process and unsure about some of the decisions.'

Up until pretty much yesterday, still very sceptical about how

it's going to work and it's, yeah, I love it, I think it's really good.

And this whole sense of the move here just to reveal

-the staircase to the room, does that work for you?

-Yeah, totally.

I don't even know why it was never on the plans to begin with

and I think Piers just sort of lit that flame under us to go,

"Oh, yeah, that's such a logical thing to do."

'Steven has contributed ideas for a design on a shoestring.

'This timber panel has added a unique piece of history

'to a brand-new house.'

You've unleashed your inner designer here, haven't you,

with this cladding?

One day, we've got this old tongue-and-groove

from the old house sitting in piles next door just doing nothing,

so we came up with putting it here.

This has got life in it, life from the old house. That cost us nothing.

'The centrepiece of the main living area is a remarkable kitchen.

'The acrylic came packed in sheets of MDF, so Heidi and Steven used

'this free resource to create flat surfaces on the old fronts

'and then glued the acrylic to the MDF.

'An old worktop donated by a friend sits above the spruced up cabinets.'

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.'

Must be great to create a completely unique kitchen.

Yeah, no-one's got a kitchen like this, that's for sure.

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.

I was just going to paint the cupboards and then,

when we could afford something, maybe change the doors.

You know, the kind of thing people do. And actually it wouldn't have

made a statement, it wouldn't have done enough.

'Heidi was in the driving seat when it came to the kitchen design

'so what does Steven think of the result?'

We didn't have control over what colours we were having

-and I was worried about having...

-Somebody else's choice.

..somebody else's choice and the colours not working together.

And I think...

Yeah, they do work. I... Yeah.

THEY LAUGH

Oh, my goodness!

'He may not be 100% convinced about the colours,

'but the concrete floor that nearly broke Steven is now

'part of a bigger design scheme that he actually likes.'

There's whole sections shiny new, there's old wood,

there's rough floor, and it all works together, I feel.

It's bigger than maybe we wanted to spend initially,

but I think it's made such a big difference.

They just make the whole room come alive.

Work to be finished includes an upstairs toilet and basin.

A full upstairs bathroom was too expensive,

so the couple settled on this compromise.

Clearly moving in is still some way off,

but how does Heidi feel about the house?

I still can't quite believe it's mine. I really can't.

I feel quite emotional looking at it.

I think I feel more emotional about it

when I think about how much Steven's done.

-I feel quite emotional, actually!

-He's been working really hard.

I do feel quite emotional about it.

And it's just absolutely fantastic to think my children will grow up

right beside their grandparents. It's a lifestyle choice.

It's not just about us, it's about the fact I want to look after

my family, my parents and be close to them as they age.

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 the build

and how much you've ended up spending.

We had, when we first started

and when we kind of demolished everything, we had 70 grand.

We're now at 98 and the place, it's taken us in a year, from 70 to 98,

we've got 20 grand that we managed to borrow from somewhere else,

another three grand on some credit cards,

and the rest of that was from our wages, basically.

Tell me how much you think you've still got to spend in order to get

-the thing finished.

-I think it's going to take us to about 105.

Once the build is complete,

Heidi and Steven will get a mortgage on the new house

and pay off the one on her parents' house plus the other loan.

EXCITED CHATTER

Having come so far, it's time to celebrate what's been achieved,

and their sixth wedding anniversary.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Heidi and Steven wanted a house that reflected their personality

and what's good about this house is that they haven't gone mad

with features everywhere, they've built a really robust,

well-insulated, well-built building.

And then, they've known where, in one or two key places,

to invest time and energy.

And that's changed this house from something fairly standard

into something that is really full of life and energy.

-Cheers, everyone! ALL:

-Cheers!

Having put her home on the line to finance it,

what does Heidi's mum make of the new house?

I think they have built the dream, actually, and it suits

Heidi and Steven and it'll suit their children to grow up here.

Today, the children get their first look at their new bedrooms.

What do you think? Oh, my goodness, look at that! Is it good?

-Yeah? Is it good?

-Yeah.

-Yeah?

The children's rooms are given life with a patchwork

of wallpaper remnants that cost between 50p and £3 each.

-What's on your wallpapers?

-Flowers!

And what's this? What's up here?

-Stripes!

-Is it what you wanted?

-Yeah!

Rabbity! I'm going to bring Rabbity in here!

It feels just intuitively right that a family should be able to

bring up their kids in a place where they grew up

and put down roots in the place where their family has roots.

But in Britain today, that's not always easy.

High house prices and high land values means that, sometimes,

that's really difficult.

Heidi and Steven have taken on that challenge in the only way that was

available to them, which is to build their own super low-cost house,

and I think the result they've got tackles it in fine style.

They've created a building like a prototype of a low-cost house.

But they've also found a way for them to put down roots

in the community they care about and want to be part of,

and that's a great thing for a work of architecture to achieve.

Next time...Sue and Tim try to build a modern masterpiece

in the countryside...

We're building walls...

..by making it up as they go.

When we build, we'll walk around and say, "What do we want?"

When you design a building, you design the plan of the building.

But as they race ahead, are they making the right choices?

-Is this what you want?

-Haven't thought about it.

And how will they cope when they run into big problems?

It moved enough to actually be structurally unsound in the end.

There's an awful lot that needs to come together now

to have any building at all.