One man and his dogged determination to realise a dream

Viewers of Grand Designs will know that self-building is full of drama, which is why it makes such good telly.

Martin Whymet is a classic case. Against all the odds, he has leap-frogged several rungs of the property ladder from a two-bedroom cottage to a contemporary, four-bedroom detached. Predictably, his two-and-a-half year project has taken its toll.

He now shares the fabulous, almost finished house with his dog, although his faithful friend is there only part time on a pet-share basis. He had to negotiate access rights with his ex-girlfriend, who dumped him part way through the build. He’d quite like to meet someone else but can’t afford to go out thanks to his needy, expensive bachelor pad.

“I don’t blame my girlfriend really. I sold my cottage to buy the land, so I had nowhere to live. She wanted me to stay in Greater Manchester with her but I knew I couldn’t cope with the journey while trying to be on site here and run my pizza van,” says Martin, 31, whose self-build odyssey kicks off a new series, The House That 100k Built, on Channel 4 tonight.

Instead, he sofa surfed between friends and his parents while pursuing his ambition with impressive determination and serious hard graft. A former land buyer for Persimmon Homes, he bought his first property in 2002 for £80,000 with a discount from his employer and a deposit of £3,000. In 2005 he sold it for £120,000 and bought the cottage in Horsforth, Leeds.

When the recession devastated the building trade, he was made redundant and with no prospect of employment, he bought the pizza van in Leeds city centre, while keeping his eye open for property opportunities.

“I was looking for a plot to build my own home, knowing there was a chance of making some profit,” says Martin. His well-trained eye spotted the potential in the site where he rented a garage and with the same kind of chutzpah that earned him a gig at Prince Charles’s 50th birthday he cut a deal with the two sisters who owned it.

“It’s always worth asking and I learned that when I had a band with my friends at school. We wrote to the Queen to see if we could play at Buckingham Palace. We couldn’t believe it when we got a letter back asking us to play for Prince Charles’s birthday party,” says Martin.

His plan was to sell his own property to buy part of the plot but the owners persuaded him to use his £100,000 equity to build them two semis. When they were complete he was given the rest of the land for his own home.

“It was good because I couldn’t have afforded to buy the whole site and in effect I got my bit of land for £100,000. My friend from Niemen Architects did the design and I was told it wouldn’t be a problem to get a self-build mortgage to pay for the construction,” he says.

But Martin’s self-employed status became a big issue for the increasingly tight-fisted banks, especially as his takings had fallen. They refused him a mortgage.

While a small inheritance allowed him to put the foundations in, he needed another £100,000 to get the house off the ground. His dream home would still be a concrete slab if his parents Jeff, a retired woodwork teacher, and Elaine, a retired school administrator, hadn’t agreed to lend him their life savings.

Even then, money was still tight as he was earning just £700 a month as he juggled pizza selling and project managing. There was more misery when winter affected passing takeaway trade. So he negotiated hard for materials, laboured on site and bought a bargain of a second-hand kitchen. He combined the old units with some Ikea worktops and built the island himself for a total of £1,700. Offcuts of slate from the roof have been used to create a feature wall in the living area and he made a coffee table out of some old wood pallets.

Martin’s home, which he named Taylor’s Yard after his grandad, Jack, is almost complete apart from the house bathroom and two bedrooms. It has been valued at £375,000, giving him a profit of £165,000 if he chooses to sell, although he wants to stay and is optimistic he’ll now get a mortgage.

He’s also hoping to get back into the property trade and has tweeted entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones telling him to watch the programme and give him a job.

It’s almost a happy ending.

“It’s been stressful and I lost my relationship, which was regretful,” says Martin. “But there’s nothing I would’ve done differently.”