BUILDING ON GOOD GROUND

The site for David and Linda Snell’s self-build bungalow had an upward slope from front to at a cost of £72.83m ,” explains David, which was a considerable saving on their original estimate. “We’d opted for a concrete oversite rather than the, these days, more usual beam and block floor. The reasoning behind that was the fact that we’d carved out level plinths into a substrate mixture of sand, clay and stone that compacted beautifully and, when damped, set, almost like concrete itself. Our builder had retained the ‘spoil’ from the foundation trenches, and that was used in the oversites to bring up the levels and then blinded with sand.”