Building our granny annex was a great success

The day that changed my life [and that of my family] was the day that my dad died, lots of things happened from that moment onwards

I lost my best friend and I was shocked into a world that I didn’t realise existed, that of my dad not being around forever.

With my dad gone it left my mum alone in an old house, she did have friends around, a part time job and her old dog for company.

All seemed well, we saw her as much as we could, rushed Sunday lunches, an odd evening staying over, but no plans to do anything different until a couple of things happened.

First she was conned out of money by cold callers and second this started a period of illness which knocked the energy out of her

This frightened me, as she had always been so strong.

Soon after she talked about the house being too big and asked whether she should move into sheltered housing!

As a result of the illness a series of visits to hospital were needed, fortunately my wife who worked part time as a nurse was able to take her and it was during one of these visits my mum joked that my wife as a nurse could look after her

We first looked around to find somewhere with an annex attached, but after about 6 months of searching we decided to look at other options including redesigning mums place.

To start this we sketched out some ideas and got a few quotes from builders on what we thought possible but in order to progress things we needed an architect.

I will never forget the moment the architect called at mums house, he carefully and thoughtfully walked around her bungalow, suddenly announced looking at mums large double garage asked her the question “how about converting the garage, you could live in there”

well we all waited for a reaction from my mum and to my amazement she said – ok that sounds like something I can do, where do we start.

And from that day well an awful lot happened, the drawings went to planning and with a few tweaks were accepted, the builders started in the wettest winter for years, but the new living space started to rise from the ground……until we ran out of money!

In order to continue we had to sell our house, which took us nearly a year, 2 sales fell through and many times my mum “wishedthat she had never started the project”

Living in a building site for over a year at 82 could not have been fun. Eventually we did sell, release money and get the project finished just before Christmas, seeing we had started on the previous January it had taken us nearly a year to complete, but mums new home was now finished, and mum and her dog moved in.

Well, it is now nearly 8 years since we finished and mum moved, we have now recycled her old bungalow into our family home and we all live together as a family, we know where mum is and how she is and wouldn’t have it any other way.

As it has been so successful I want to help and encourage others to do the same and have started MGLivingSpaces.com to share stories and advice with anyone interested in doing the same as us.

Thanks

David