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At three o clock one morning in late November, years ago, our house burnt to the ground. It wasn't insured.
Some missing mortar in the chimney stack had allowed the flames from our fireplace to get into the roof space, earlier that evening.
Someone suggested I rebuild the house - which was a joke because I couldn't hang a shelf! The idea haunted me for a couple of months, and in the end I guess I was desperate enough to try.
We went on to re-build the house we'd lost; and then - carried away with the success of that - began to wonder if we could build a classic wooden boat (as you do) ...and go travelling?
I pretty soon discovered that I wasn't a boatbuilder, either, but having sold the house to pay for the boat building timber it was too late to turn back. Over the next three years we built a fifteen ton sailing boat - learning as we went.
For the next seven years we lived on board in and around Cornwall - working in the winters to pay for our summer sailing between Scottish sea lochs, down the coasts of England and Ireland to France to drop the anchor in quiet rivers and inland waterways of Brittany - eating cheese, drinking wine, and meeting the characters who lurk at pier heads or make their living chugging out of tiny fishing harbours and coming home at sundown - laden to the gunwale and stinking of fish.
When the time came to be shore-based again we moved into a rented farmhouse on a Hebridean island where we spent eight joyous years amongst the carefree chatty locals who'd walk down to the Co-op (the 'co') - but be away so long that by the time they got back home the peas had defrosted. They admired us for our wanderlust when occasionally we visited the mainland (the 'world') by ferry and wondered how we managed on roads which had roundabouts, traffic lights and markings.
Eventually we had an opportunity to buy an inexpensive building plot in the South West of England within the beautiful Exmoor National Park - from where, years earlier, our adventures began.
With no credible access to a mortgage, only limited savings - yet grand designs for the kind of house we would actually like to live in we set about finding out how much 'house' we could afford if we did EVERYTHING ourselves!
When we told the planning department how much money we had to build the house drawn on the paper in front of them, they suggested we took some professional advice to try to avoid a disaster. But I'd done my costings twenty ...fifty times - even I couldn't believe the paltry sum all this was going to cost - yet I couldn't make it come to MORE than the money we had!
In the event the house was built UNDER budget. The Planning department now feature our self-build house in their literature offering advice about the kind of development they would like to see MORE of!
And a local charity who work hard to keep young rural families in the local area, in spite of inflated property prices, have invited me to be their Self Build Mentor encouraging young families to solve their housing need with their own hands!
The charity asked me to write a book: a manual explaining how a first-time self-builder with a limited budget can build a house their family will be proud to call home; that's how my book - 'How to Self Build your Dream Home for £99,000 - or less! - came to be written.
You can take a look at our self-built house on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rspw81VzwDQ - or search for 'Justin Tyers' using the YouTube search bar. We chose a traditional timber frame construction inside an envelope of straw bales - but your house can be built from any material you choose.
The story of the house fire, years ago, which kick-started all these positive life-changing events, and of our seven years living and travelling aboard our boat - and of the people we met along the way - is told in my books 'Phoenix from the Ashes'; and 'Canvas Flying Seagulls Crying'.
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