Now the hard part, finances ...

The next question was, how much will the bank actually lend us?
I had a rough idea how much equity was in our current home, but when we got it valued realised it was more. In ten years, the value had risen 140% - more than double!

Still though, we had incurred other liabilities on the way with renovations and purchasing a new car in 2005.

We did not want to have to sell up and rent while waiting for the new house to be built, and wanted to arrange some kind of bridging loan.

Porter Davis have their own finance company, and I had an appointment with a consultant. He worked out how much we could borrow and gave me some options on what we could do with our current home. He was excellent, and told it how it was without any BS which is the way I like things. The final figure he gave me showed it could be done, but probably not the way we wanted the house to be (base design, plus extras).

It looked like a choice of, 1) have the Francis 29 base plus a few of the extras we liked or 2) Francis 26 with most of the extras we liked.