Mates' rates helped aTV DIY expert save Pounds 20,000 on his home
MAIL ON SUNDAY, 19th Sep, 2005
Property programmes on TV invariably make DIY seem easier than it is in real life, and Gavin Lowe's house in Epsom, Surrey, is in the same vein.Gavin has presented DIY shows for the BBC and ITV, so when it came to extending his own house he jumped at the chance to lay bricks, construct stud walls and fit new windows as if nothing could be simpler.
Property programmes on TV invariably make DIY seem easier than it is in real life, and Gavin Lowe's house in Epsom, Surrey, is in the same vein. Gavin has presented DIY shows for the BBC and ITV, so when it came to extending his own house he jumped at the chance to lay bricks, construct stud walls and fit new windows as if nothing could be simpler.
Gavin, 34, is a qualified electrician and has a string of mates in the trade he can call on at any time if he gets in a tight spot. So when it comes to calculating how much money he has saved getting involved himself, he is fully aware that he has an unfair advantage over the rest of us.
'It's difficult to estimate the true figure because you have to factor in labour, but I reckon that I must have managed to save Pounds 20,000 or maybe Pounds 25,000,' he says.
'Of course, not everybody can afford to put in the hours themselves but I'm lucky because I get a lot of downtime between filming TV projects.' He points to the carpets as an example of the way he can pull in favours. Through a friend working for a carpet company he was able to buy a Pounds 2,000 carpet at cost (Pounds 250) and have it fitted for free, so long as he cut the underlay and nailed down the gripper rods himself.
This kind of thing happens a lot behind the scenes on TV, he says, so no wonder the figures never seem to add up.
'My fitter mate often borrows my tools,' he says. 'I said I'd let him if he was willing to help me out with laying carpet. And I have a plasterer friend who'll do me a quick ceiling if I feed him and if I pop out to his place to do a quick electrical job. It works on a quid pro quo basis.' Gavin, who has appeared in BBC's Big Strong Boys, ITV's Moving Days and Five's Britain's Worst Builder, initially trained as an electrician after leaving school but then spent four years abroad as a holiday rep.
Back in the UK, he signed up for a job in the editing suite at the BBC for three months, intending to travel once again when the contract expired. In fact, he liked the work and was still there three years later when he was spotted messing around with colleagues by a producer who was looking for new talent.
He and his 34- year- old wife Pippa moved to Epsom three years ago from a twobedroom flat in Tooting, South London. Their son, four-yearold Charlie, was still a toddler and they had been looking for a home with its own outdoor space for him to play in.
The 120ft garden, backing on to farmland, complete with grazing cows, was the immediate attraction. Now that Gavin has built a playhouse, it certainly gives Charlie and his younger brother, two-year-old Harry, a secure play zone. The property was originally built in 1987 by a local farmer as a two-up, two-down starter home for his daughter and son-in-law.
Four years ago the previous owner, a single woman, sought to extend it by adding a conservatory and narrow galley kitchen. But she ran out of money and when Gavin and Pippa bought the house in 2002 the kitchen was still bare and unfinished.
They spent an immediate Pounds 8,000 bringing the place up to scratch peeling off three layers of wallpaper and repairing the plaster in each room where it had started to fall off, renewing the skirting boards and rewiring.
As he went along, Gavin made sure it would be easy to pick up the electrics and heating from the back of the property for when they came to build the extension. 'But we had to do it all one room at a time,' he says, 'and it was hard with Charlie bombing around we'll never do that again.' The couple then had to wait 15 months before planners approved their application to extend (the house is in a conservation area within greenbelt land). Finally, Gavin drove to Kingston Council
SITTING PRETTY: Gavin and Pippa in their huge garden, the perfect playground for sons Charlie and Harry, inset with three options drawn out on plans and made them choose on the spot.
One of the sticking points was that they wanted two storeys comingas far back as the house next door, but the planners wouldn't allow it. In the end, the couple compromised and built part of the lower level as single storey with a lean-to roof.
The roof then prompted Gavin to save money on the cost of new tiles he discovered that because the new lean-to was built at an angle of 22 degrees he couldn't use slate, which is only guaranteed to be weather-tight at angles greater than 25 degrees.
'So we found a company that took our old slate tiles and crushed and mixed them with 40 per cent resin,' he says. 'That made new tiles guaranteed up to a 15 degree slant and yet they still look like slate from a distance.
'It also meant we could have three predrilled fixing holes in each tile to make them secure and that's been a great advantage. It's so windy round here that next door loses a slate tile every few weeks, while ours stay put.' In total, the extension, which involved knocking through the back of the house to add a new lounge, a proper kitchen, two bedrooms and an upstairs bathroom, cost him Pounds 75,000 to complete.
'I had to go back to college and do a short electrical refresher course so that I could be classed as a registered domestic installer and certify my own work,' he laughs. 'But I don't mind I really think those new electrical regulations should have come in a long time ago.
'There are a lot of accidents each year from DIY and I think it's about time we had good checks in place to make sure electrics are put in safely.'
Upstairs he has also found a solution to the need for extra daylight on the landing. Gavin was one of the first people in the UK to have a sky tunnel fitted and has since written about it for Good Housekeeping magazine.
It's an ingenious idea flexible foil tubing sends light round two bends in his roof to a dome of frosted glass in SPACE AGE: Gavin knocked through the back walls of the house to create the lounge, left, and kitchen, right the ceiling. It's so bright it's hard to believe it's not an ordinary skylight.
This is the first house that Gavin has owned (his previous properties have all been flats), but now that they are finished he and Pippa are selling to move to Heathfield in East Sussex.
Pippa was invited to a hen party in the town last year and fell in love with the idea of living nearer the coast.
Gavin has been too busy filming a new series called My Place In The Sun for Channel 4 (a spin-off of A Place In The Sun with Amanda Lamb) to have decided on a property there, but his experience abroad over the past four weeks has helped him develop a clear investment plan for buying overseas.
'This show couldn't have come at a better time,' he says. 'I've visited ten European locations and it made me realise I would only buy in three of them: Abruzzo in Italy because it's so unspoilt, Girona in Spain because I can speak Spanish and Istria in Croatia because it's cheap and only a twoanda-half hour ferry ride to Venice.
'What I saw in France makes me think that all the opportunities there are now gone. Making enough money from buying a gite is going to be a lot harder in future because only the rubbish is left. People are going to have to start looking elsewhere.'
