Like most of us, Inge Coenen, Cluster Coordinator of the Finance department at FASoS, saw a lot of fun activities disappear due to the corona crisis and new interests emerge. Inge got more time for biking when the corona crisis hit and she had finished building her house.
That’s right, what many people probably don’t know about Inge is that she and her partner built their own home, without a contractor. “My partner’s parents have built their own home twice before and he always said he wanted to build his own house too. So we bought a piece of land in idyllic Montfort, where I grew up and many of our friends also reside, and decided to just do it: build a house ourselves.”
“At first I thought: oh boy, what have we gotten ourselves into. I obviously had no prior experience building houses. Luckily, my partner is handier and a bit more technical than I am and his parents gave a lot of good advice and helped out where they could. We hired an architect, and together with him, we designed our dream home.” Inge describes her house as modern, “but Cerien has once called it a ‘blokkendoos’ [a box of bricks], after seeing a blueprint,” Inge says laughing.
Together with her boyfriend, Inge made a plan how to build their house. “We discussed what we would do ourselves and what we would hire experts for. We for example worked on the reinforcement of our house, but we hired someone to pour the concrete into the foundation. The same goes for the bricklaying: we hired bricklayers to lay the bricks, but we grouted the walls ourselves. We also did most of the electricity, sewerage and things like underfloor heating ourselves. YouTube videos helped us along the way, but we were also lucky that some of our friends work in construction, so we could always ask them for advice.”
Building the house involved a lot of hard work, but she wouldn’t have done it any other way. “My partner and I both work full time so all the work on the house had to be done after work and in the weekends. It was exhausting and we worked our butts off, but it was also very satisfying to see our house ‘grow’. Every inch we built felt like a small victory.” And they managed to build the house in the speed of light: after 1.5 years their house was ready to live in and since November 2019 they call it their home.
