Bricking It Read Online Free PDF

onto the couch.
    So that’s that, then.
    I’ve just passed up an easy payday to keep my older sister happy. I must be mad.
    Having said that: six hundred thousand pounds . . .
    . . . Less the money we spend renovating Grandma’s farmhouse, and the cut the taxman will take, of course.
    I’d get fifty per cent of more than £300,000, give or take. That buys an awful lot of Xbox games and new tyres for the Kawasaki. I could also afford to rent a much better flat. Hell, I could afford to buy a bloody flat. Maybe one of those posh ones down by the quay. Lovely stuff.
    Maybe, just maybe, the effort will be worth it . . .
    I flick on the TV and start to channel surf. By startling coincidence, an episode of Great Locations is on BBC Three. I settle myself down to watch it. Previously, this show just used to be on in the background while I was doing something else, but now it has my undivided attention. I’m about to get into the property renovation game myself, so I figure it’s vital to pick up a few tips.
    An hour later I am as white as a sheet and reconsidering the whole bloody idea.
    I’ve just watched two people descend into madness while trying to renovate a barn in the Lincolnshire countryside. By the end of the show, he’d lost half his hair and she’d piled on three stone.
    What the fuck am I letting myself in for?

HAYLEY
    May
    £500.00 spent
    O f course, neither my brother nor I have the first clue how to renovate a property. You might as well hand us both a scalpel and ask us to perform brain surgery. On each other.
    But while I don’t know how to refurbish a house, I do know how to use Google.
    And the first thing I learn during a constructive couple of hours of research is that we need to enlist the help of two very important people if we’re going to have any chance of getting this project off the ground: an architect and a builder.
    I hand the task of finding the builder to Danny, while I search for an architect in our local area that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. I could go national, but if something goes wrong with the build, I want to be able to physically get hold of people, so hiring someone in the Outer Hebrides just isn’t practical. A local architect is a must.
    Sadly, there are surprisingly few of them – and all of them appear to be astronomically expensive. If I ever do decide that I want to risk getting into another relationship with a man, I will make it my goal in life to find the nearest architect. If nothing else, my financial stability will be assured.
    I wish I’d chosen it as my field of study at university, rather than teaching. There would have probably been less job satisfaction – but a lot more soft-top convertibles and holidays to the tropics.
    A lot of advice online indicates that the best way to find an architect is by word of mouth and through the local council. So I look at various property renovation forums, and write an email to the relevant council offices, asking for help. Over the course of the next two weeks I arrive at a shortlist of architects that we can probably afford if I’ve done my sums right on the budget, who work within a twenty-mile radius of the house. The list is very, very short: just three names in total. I am dismayed to realise that all of them are men. Maybe I should have studied to be an architect, after all.
    Of the three names, I have to discount two almost immediately. One is busy for the next two years with a variety of projects, and the other requires a hefty fee up front before completing any work – a fee that we simply don’t have. This means we don’t have to bother with the tedious process of putting the job out to tender and waiting for quotes to come back. A saving grace, I guess.
    The only local architect I can find who will take a minimal up-front fee, and has a schedule that’s not fully booked up, is a gentleman called Mitchell Hollingsbrooke.
    From his website it appears that Mr Hollingsbrooke is in his late twenties,