Mingo.Life

Our house has always been a home.

A proper one, too. Not the sort you see on Instagram where everything is pristine cream, spotless, and apparently untouched by human life. Ours has always had toys everywhere, a coffee mug left on a surface for too long, and at least one “doom cupboard” filled entirely with stuff everybody recognises but nobody is brave enough to throw away. “We’ll sort it out later,” as any parent may be familiar with.

We bought it in 2019. We signed the paperwork, and sent over a deposit we had spent years (and years) saving for and later that very same day Emma gave premature birth to our first child.

I remember collecting the keys, not even having time to open the front door, and racing to hospital to be there for Poppy’s birth.

We would be blessed to become the parents to a disabled child. Yet another surprise, not so delightful, was that shortly after returning home from hospital with Poppy after 3 months in NICU, the whole world would go into lockdown owing to the infamous coronavirus.

Things have always been a bit… unconventional for us.

A few years later our second child, Evelyn, would come along. And with her would come about 3 million additional toys.

Then, Emma and I developed difficulties of our own. Working from home became essential. Stair rails appeared. Adapted chairs arrived. And slowly, without really noticing it happen, we outgrew the house.

Because Poppy doesn’t just need more space. She needs wheelchair space. Accessible bathroom space. Turning-around-without-taking-out-half-the-furniture space.

Months, no – years of planning would follow. Saving, borrowing, drawing down equity, and more saving. And even applying for grants…

And now? The renovation and building work has finally begun.

The following will be a series of mainly photo blogs documenting some pretty epic changes to our home. Adaptations, knock-throughs, mishaps and, eventually (hopefully), the end result.

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If you enjoy DIY, chaos, power tools, and financially questionable decisions, you should feel right at home here.

Parents, including our fellow SEN families, hopefully there’s some inspiration for you along the way too.

Week by week, changes are happening before our very eyes.

And so the story goes…

There was a problem.

Poppy relies on her wheelchair to get, well, anywhere really. She gets picked up and dropped off by the special school bus every day, with the staff trained to assist her. We take her out on adventures in it. She is doing great!

This is all good!

However, the new build home we bought has a step at the front with about a 1 foot drop. Which, to a toddler, is a sheer cliff edge straight to hospital.

This is bad!

So, we started planning.

The Local Authority confirmed they would cover certain elements of the work for Poppy under the government’s Disabled Facilities Grant, but not all – mainly just front and rear access. But, they did agree to provide Poppy with a new level access shower in a brand new overhauled bathroom!

The entire design and planning phase took just over two years.

(I hated it)

It cost us just over £8000.

Which, for clarity, bought us precisely zero bricks, zero walls, and not even so much as a small decorative plant pot.

Instead, the money disappeared into the great modern labyrinth of architects, structural engineers, occupational therapists, local authority planning departments, spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and repeated home visits.

We spent two years trying to figure out what was achievable, affordable, legal, safe, and above all else, what would actually work best for Poppy.

Thankfully, my Dad was there through a lot of it. After years in the trades, he’s developed the unique ability to look at a set of plans for about three seconds before saying: “That’s going to be expensive.”

Which, when you’re about to spend the sort of money usually associated with minor military campaigns, is actually very helpful.

The local authority required about a ten thousand meter runway for any metal ramps due to their legislation on gradients. Our steps in the back garden were even steeper than the front.

None of this would work.

My suggestion for a series of ‘Wallace and Gromit’ style levers and pulleys was met with disdain.

There was only one viable solution…

The garage had to go.

We would have to build something entirely new out of what we already had.

4 thousand exhausting builder quote visits later, we settled on the right guys for the job.

We would have to knock through, turn it into an extended length kitchen diner space, and construct a special low threshold side access door for Poppy. The driveway would have to be raised to meet it. Raised non-slip decking would have to go in at the rear. Roofs would have to be raised, and not in a party-fun kind of way.

Next: Cue more hair loss through stress, more pain flare ups and more sleepless nights.

This was not a simple project.

Space was at a huge premium inside too, and Poppy also needs a special high-low bed installed, which we don’t currently any room for.

We would also have to build another bedroom above the garage.

To make things worse, I spent hours doing extensive research and number crunching, and I realised something. There was no other option – We simply could not afford to move house.

Our budget was extremely tight, but maybe it might just about work?

Buuuuuuttttt it would only be possible if I grafted, and worked hard, and planned and planned and planned, and found ways and means to bring the overall build cost down. Which err… Is kind of a problem when you have Trigeminal Neuralgia.

Again here, Dad would step in – tools in hand – to help create a forever home for Poppy.

A true family legacy project.

We had to check the foundations before anything else. If they weren’t deep enough, then financially this project was a non-starter as we’d have to rebuild the entire garage building.

A company I contacted quoted us £5000 just to dig an “inspection hole”. Get lost.

Luckily, Dad dug deeply below the patio and at around 2.5m deep only just found the top of the foundations. They were deep indeed!

I also managed to convince the original home developer to share a few of the construction notes too, showing us a 3 meter deep trench under the garage.

Planning was eventually approved.

My next step was to create a ‘job’ on checkatrade. Tradesmen came to visit and gave me their estimates.

The opening line of one chap was “you can’t afford this” without even asking my budget. Another suggested I apply to BBC D.I.Y S.O.S, which I did, and received absolutely no reply. One guy wanted to charge me for a site foreman, and a project manager… and a portable toilet (I have 3 toilets already).

The others mostly made that hissing noise mechanics make when something is going to “cost a fortune” to sort.

I took on the role of bloody “Project Manager”, pulling in all the different components we would need to make this happen.

Despite the illness and family disabilities, this had to happen.

And finally…

It was time for the building to start.

Well… mostly for other people, thanks to my ill-health, Emma’s ill-health, endless appointments, and the small issue of trying to keep two children safe and away from what had suddenly become a very noisy, dusty construction site.

For Emma and I, the weeks ahead would mostly involve planning, organising, crying a bit, changing those plans again, then immediately discovering those new plans also needed changing. Expensively.

Meanwhile, I assembled a small Avengers style army of baseball cap-wearing tradesmen, and my Dad (the self-proclaimed Thor of the team), to help turn our house into a very special disability-adapted forever home.

During a heatwave.

Oh, and there would be problems. Many, many problems. The fact it was a recent new build property actually seems to make things worse.

Part Two, Week One, coming soon. Follow along, subscribe, and join us as we attempt to navigate builders, budgets, British weather, pain flare ups, holiday homes, where the f*** is the hammer, and my rapidly declining understanding of structural engineering.

Let’s do this.