We’re currently in a 3 bed end of terrace in one of the less salubrious areas south of Manchester, great transport links to the city centre, airport etc but it’s not where we want to bring up our kids if we can help it.

Unfortunately to get something this size about 800m away (we’re literally the wrong side of the tracks) is an extra 150k or so.

Being the corner plot we’ve got a load of space to the side of the house, about 90% as wide as the rest of the 3 bed terraced houses round here.

Am I mad to consider knocking down my garage and building another house on the end? This place is already probably over spec for the areas ceiling price of around £160k so I doubt we’d knock a lot of value off this, 2 beds are going for around 125k.

If I could get a house built for <90k (and live with a building site next door) seems like a good way to go. Does that sound feasible?

Building it means I don’t have to get all handwringy about owning two houses for a bit.

Perhaps talk to some estate agents and ‘people who’d know’?

Sounds like a sensible plan to me. Getting planning permission will be pretty cheap and not that tricky so a worthwhile first step. You need to do your homework on property prices and building costs to get some realistic figures. At that stage it might be better just to sell the current house and the plot with planning. It’ll be a lot less work and risk for probably a decent proportion of the profit.

I live in wythenshawe a guy near me did exactly and sold it with no issues.

That’s interesting Chris, I’m just down by The Park pub. I’ve just sent you an email 😀

I’ve spoken to estate agents, they think it’s a goer but one of my mates thought it’d cost ~100k to build which would make the pain probably not worth it.

I’d have to find somewhere to put my bikes for a start, once the garage was knocked down 😀

Friend of ours did that in Crab Lane, Higher Blackley. Made about £100k from the build. They then escape Manchester….

First step is probably to ask your mortgage company if they have any objection to you carving up their asset. Probably not.
Then ask them if they’ll stump up the funds. Probably not!