Saving £137K by Building Home with Scavenged Materials | Grand Designs: The Streets | Channel 4

So what's wrong with the place you're living now in Newbury? Biggest problem is we're renting. Um, we can't do anything to it. I can't even hang a picture on the wall without getting permission. Can you find a three-bedroom house to buy that you'd like there? No. Why not? It doesn't exist. Not in the area we want to live in. Jack hasn't employed an architect. He's designed the house himself, which he'll build from simple traditional block work, clad with slate grey boards and western red cedar. The ground floor will be open plan and include a study. There'll be three bedrooms upstairs with an ensuite and dressing room. Jack's deliberately chosen materials he can build with himself, like his steel roof, and he's hoping this simple self-built route will save them a fortune on labour. Jack's struck on a way to eke out their finances by going scavenging. A colleague of mine called me up and basically said, we have some leftover materials, would you like them? And so I sort of came down and had a look and this is exactly what we're after. We've got one, two, three, four, five of those, so it's probably 65, 75 pounds worth of material just thrown away here. So we'll have that. I've always been a bit of a bargain hunter. I always like a deal. Joist hangers, probably eight or nine quid for one of those. We'll take them home and try and make a use for them. If your building materials come out of a skip, you need to be able to work with imperfection. Where are these for? These are for our main floor, first floor steel. Oh, OK, so they'll slot into the steel. That's it, yeah. Steel's a reclaimed steel, so it's a bit wonky. Seriously, that steel has come off another project, has it? That was buried underground to stop a forklift going over a hole. So we pulled it out, Hannah rubbed it down and painted it up. And that's what you see. Great, great. I'm just thinking of all this money being saved as a nice kitchen or a nice bathroom at the end. Jack and Hannah do want a swanky kitchen, but true to form, Jack's not prepared to pay for it. He's found an ex-display model being sold on the cheap. It's a medium to high range kitchen. List price is probably around about £12,000 just for the kitchen itself. We paid £2,100 today. That includes the appliances as well. The biggest challenge is trying to work out how to get it apart. It'll be a case of picking off the covers and seeing if there's a screw behind it and unscrewing it and seeing what happens. Got it? OK, if we spin it round, take it out and spin it round. By not being proud, but shrewd, they've saved £10,000 on this kitchen. It seems to have come together quite nicely. Yeah. Drop it down. Hi, Hannah. Hi, nice to see you. And you, and you. This looks nice. It is as beautiful and sleek inside as out. And there is not a hint of scavenge here. It's well hidden. In fact, probably every piece of furniture apart from what's in the lounge. Seriously? Found somewhere. I thought this place might look like a turned out skip. But no, it's actually very refined. Light, spacious, beautifully self-built. Do you know how much you spent on this place? Including the land, we're at £281,500. Which is really good value for what you got for the quality of finish. That's scavenging and doing all of this. Oh, there's a lot. Yeah, well, I think I'd put pen to paper and I think it was about £137,000. £137,000? If we were to just hand this over to a firm, we reckon that's how much more it would have cost us. Jeez. Wow. They're understandably skint and the house is in need of finishing touches. But what's remarkable is that aged 25, they've designed and built their own home.