Cleared barge

There is one area of creating your own dream (nightmare?) home that you never see on television – the mind-numbingly long and unhelpful full planning application process. Then again, it doesn’t make for good TV but nevertheless it somewhat misleads the TV viewer into the perception that four weeks after putting in a plan and a few drawings you get the okay and off you go. The same goes for this website/blog – there’s lots of exciting stuff about boats and land but we seem to spend most of our time in a never-ending planning process.

We recently celebrated (!?!?) a full year of being in the English planning process! That’s a whole year of our lives just sitting twiddling our thumbs, waiting and waiting, providing endless costly survey results, drawings and paperwork, watching supposed official deadlines come and go without any sort of acknowledgement that they need to be adhered to.

This glorious year has covered our initial planning application (4.5 months), our planning appeal (4 months) and now the associated conditions that need to be given the okay before works start (4 months again). There’s also been some amusing sub-plots around doing work on trees on the site and we’ve got months of pain awaiting us as a minor material amendment is considered.

Sadly it was only when I lost my patience and became the sort of gob-shite that I loath that anything progressed and we could actually start our site works.

With the shear stress of the process, plus the endless work involved it takes to get it all through, that one year to the outside world has been more like ten to us – the ageing process seems to have accelerated into the distance taking us with it…

The one core thing that kept us going was that we did get planning permission against all the odds and we will be creating our crazy boat home.