The handmade house - Geraldine Bedell

We didn't intend to build a house. We just wanted to move - somewhere a bit bigger, with more of a garden: commonplace enough ambitions, especially for families with young children, especially in Britain, where property is wealth, and so, in some vague and unexamined sense, identity. Not that we were thinking about anything like that.

The true and very funny story of how Observer journalist, Geraldine Bedell and her husband Charlie Leadbeater, with no savings and no knowledge of architecture nearly make themselves bankrupt in an attempt to build their dream home. Far more than that, it's about the ultimate fantasy - creating your own made to measure living space; the
21st century family in all its step and half sibling glory; and the very comic story of how a couple
used to living in a messy regular house found themselves living in the ultra minimalist modernist house.