The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Lovely. If you do rebuild, and need a shoulder to cry on, give us a
shout :-)

Oh don't you worry - you're already on my list :-). Thanks.


I also discovered I can do a good job on design, apart from the
structural bits, which I left to the architect..Someone asked me 'who
designed your house?' and after a lot of thought, I realised that how it
looks and how it works is entirely me, but how its built is 80% the
architect, 5% the structural engineers and 25% the blokes who built it.

There's a bit of me which would really like to rebuild - it'd be
nice to get exactly what we want, rather than a big compromise.
However, there's another (bigger) bit of me which would like to
save 80k. So I'm kind of hoping we're forced down the rebuild
route, but unless we have to, it's unlikely we'd do it.

The thing about our place is that the spot is perfect - 16 acres
of south facing slope, with the house slap bang in the middle of
it. That's why we were quite happy to buy it despite the awful
state of the house.

http://ixxa.com/alchey/hi.jpg

The blue line is our boundary, and the pink dot in the middle is
the house. We've no intention of moving, so we just have to
figure out how best to use what we have - whether it's
rebuilding or fixing up the existing house.

--
Grunff