"We would never have got ourselves a house if we hadn't built our own, I just wish I had been 20 years younger that's all!"
Tuesday Documentary looks at some of the ways that people have helped themselves to cut the cost of a roof over their heads. You can save £2,000 to £3,000 on the cost of a house if you join a Self-Build Housing Association; mark you, it's a sweat - for two years every weekend, and slackers are fined a pound an hour and have to make up the hours lost.
Old houses - 100 to 150 years old - can be saved from demolition by determination and skill. In Macclesfield a group of 32 families got together and not only saved their old terrace houses but also helped to rebuild them, saving hundreds and - in some cases - thousands of pounds.
The programme also looks at the first experimental housing co-op for young people, due to open this month in South London; and we see what a co-operatively run group has achieved after three years' hard work starting from an initial down-payment of £50 a head. £50 for a house? "Not quite," says Peter Humphries, the organiser of the group, "you put down £50, work bloody hard - then you can have a house."
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