Kit yourself out with a new home

Our favourite way to build in the West Highlands and islands

The kit home is the most popular way to build in the West Highlands and islands and some leading kits come from manufacturers in the region.

The kit emphasises ease of transportation with maximum time in the factory and minimum time on site before it is wind and water tight and ready for all trades to work alongside each other completing the project.

This is an added benefit in an area like the West Highlands and islands where the weather can be unpredictable and often very wet. Entire rooms can arrive, sealed, on site. The hard work has been done undercover in the factory and the time spent on site getting the property weather-tight is minimal.

Today’s technology means a kit home is totally customisable. Want to flip the interior lay out or think the porch would be better over there? No problem!

Today’s kits have flexibility built in as standard and some kit home manufacturers can take your architect’s drawings and use their production techniques to build your home from start to finish and give you a bespoke service.

The one proviso for a timber frame home design is making sure you know what you want at the design stage. Alterations once the kit has been constructed will be costly.

One advantage of having a kit home supplier build your home for you is they will have their own team of proven tradesmen and women who have worked together before and know the product inside out – literally! You are saving on time, but paying for expertise and experience.

You might decide to put the work in the hands of a building firm you know and trust. In the West Highlands the chances are that good building companies will have worked on all the big name company kits and have a proven knowledge and understanding of the product. Or you are in the building trade yourself and can put together your own team.

Kit homes came into the nation’s consciousness in the aftermath of the Second World War but your grandparents and great-grandparents would not recognise the luxury kit homes of today. This year the UK celebrates the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. The threat of bombing ceased, servicemen and women began to return home and the country slowly returned to a peace-time economy. One big problem was housing or the desperate lack of it. The first kit home most people encountered was the ‘prefab’ a tiny, single storey utilitarian construction designed to fill a need. Photographs exist of Dunbeg, near Oban, showing rows of these houses., now all long gone.