Nicole Collison and her husband Rob, along with their two young daughters, are moving from the coast to the countryside, renovating a Grade II listed Kent barn in search of a rural dream in their home county
We’re the Collisons! My name is Nicole and my husband is Rob. We have two young daughters (five and eight) as well as little Luna our Maltese. We decided to embark on this rollercoaster self-build journey at the beginning of 2023. For years we’ve had itchy feet and have wanted to move from our four-bed Victorian coastal home, in search of more outside space for our daughters and dog.
However, after countless house viewings over several months, none of which really hit the mark, we decided to change up our search and start hunting for some land to build our own home. We love where we live and didn’t want to up sticks and move far away from family and friends, plus our daughters are both at a local village school, so we knew this constrained search wouldn’t be easy.
After registering with every local land agent and online plot finder site (which we highly recommend!) we finally stumbled across a site in one of our favourite local villages – surely this was too good to be true? The morning my husband and I viewed the site for the first time in midwinter, the weather couldn’t have been more horrendous – imagine torrential hail downpours plus howling wind! However, that did not stop my husband from falling in love at first sight and him putting in an offer there and then. Being soaked from head to toe, I on the other hand, would take a little more convincing.
Ever the optimist, once agreeing on a purchase price, my husband arranged for us to visit for a second time (on a much sunnier day) and the beauty of the site came alive. Fields and open space for miles in all directions – once we saw our daughters walking off hand in hand through the fields, we knew we wouldn’t regret our decision. The 1.5-acre site is surrounded by beautiful countryside including arable fields, with the bonus of a Grade II listed timber-framed Kent barn and various other outbuildings within the plot. The site already had full planning permission granted to convert the listed barn into a three-bedroom dwelling and demolish the tin-structured car port and rebuild.
There were however some ‘tweaks’ to the floorplan that we hoped to make, so our first job (after instructing our solicitor) was to find a good local architect to amend the drawings for us and resubmit them into planning. We ended up going with the architect who did the initial drawings when the plot was up for sale as he had a history with the site and was able to impart a lot of knowledge right from the get-go as to what was likely to be approved and what wasn’t. As total novices to renovating a Grade II listed barn, we were happy to soak up all the advice from someone who’d worked on many similar listed barns and new-build barns in the local area.
We are looking forward to visiting some of these barns in the near future (a great learning experience if you’re able to) – it’s a great way to pick up some design ideas you may not have considered. We have now edited the initial floorplan and put it back into planning as a ‘variation,’ so fingers crossed that our dream design is approved in the not too distant future. In the meantime, we continue to battle the solicitors to complete the land. To say it’s been an emotional journey so far is an understatement, and we haven’t even reached the build yet, so this route is definitely not for the faint-hearted! We’ve faced ‘right of way’ public footpaths through the centre of what will be our garden, bats supposedly roosting in the barn (delaying proceedings) and a list of pre-planning conditions seemingly longer than The Great Wall of China!
Nevertheless, we plough on, bashing down obstacles like a game of whack-a-mole – no sooner has one issue been resolved, does another rear its ugly head. Without repeating the mantra ‘it will all be worth it in the end’, I’m not sure we’d be this far down the line in one piece still. Looking to the future, we’re excited to finally reach an exchange on the site, put up our fence/hedging and claim ‘our land’. My husband’s dreams will come true the moment he gets to sit on his very own ‘ride-on’ lawn mower, and make some serious stripes. Then it would have all been worth it. We’ve been documenting our build on Instagram (@thekentbarnproject) to have a safe place to save our memories as the restoration progresses. Give us a follow if you’d like to track our journey!