The pension black hole doesn't seem to be getting any shallower for people hoping to retire in the next few years, writes Sharon Roberts.

While the Confederation of British Industry recently announced that at the end of last year UK company pension schemes were only short of about £100bn (that's £60bn better off than six months previously), many people's investments remain low, in line with the stock market.

Others are in the unfortunate position of having had their company pension scheme close.

A further significant group of people haven't invested at all.

The stark truth is that hundreds of thousands of workers are not going to be able to live as they would like to live, once they've retired.

But an increasing number of those people - people like Bill and Bridget Lloyd - are deciding to do something about it. They’re turning to property.

A year ago Bill and Bridget were living in a four bedroom detached family home in rural Lincolnshire which was regularly overrun by a cocktail of visiting family members.

The Lloyds are in their mid-fifties with six children and four grandchildren between them and you'd be forgiven for assuming they were about to enter a more peaceful stage of life involving golf courses and Spanish holidays.

But any dream of a comfortable retirement was marred by the reality of worryingly lean pensions. They decided drastic action was needed.

They sold their home and bought a caravan and a former brick cart shed on a plot of land near Newark. The caravan was to be their home for the next twelve months; the former cart shed was to become their nest egg.

* Listed building

It's a mid-nineteenth century, Grade II listed building within a conservation area, overlooking open fields of horses and sheep.

But, whilst it sounds charming, the barn was dangerously derelict. It cost the Lloyds £135,000 and would need every penny of their savings and a hefty loan to convert it into a house which would eventually make them enough money to ease their retirement.

To make the scheme even more remarkable, neither Bill nor Bridget have ever taken on anything like this before.

Bridget is a full time youth work manager. Bill, a director with a specialist food construction company; a company which slid into voluntary liquidation just weeks before they were due to complete on the barn, leaving Bill with no job and no income.

It could have been a disaster, but the Lloyds are nothing if not resourceful. They tightened their belts still further, rejigged their finances and Bill-the-Project-Manager was born.

They gave themselves a year to complete the renovation work, and moved into the caravan in June 2003.

A local property developer who specialises in new-builds advised them to allow £68-£70 per square foot. With a total area of around two thousand square feet, they were looking at a renovation cost of £136,000.

Unfortunately that fell short of their actual budget by some £40,000, which they intended to make up by doing much of the work themselves.

An architect helped them draw up plans for a four- bedroomed luxury conversion which had to be approved not only by the planning department and building control, but also by the Conservation officers' department.

It was a laborious process which was to cost them dearly.

Underpinning was the first job and they were told that where possible, they had to use existing materials meaning every brick and roof tile had to be taken down and cleaned, before laying it in its new place.

Incorporating the main timberwork into the structure of the barn meant that additional steel had to be buried in the body of the building to support the floor joists and main ridge beam.

Even more confusingly, the planning department refused permission to take down the bricks from two of the walls, declaring that it would constitute a rebuild.

After scratching his head for a while at the way the barn was leaning (the West wall was a whole 120mm out of plumb), the architect came up with a creative network of jacks which - millimetre by millimetre - forced the wall into a near-vertical position.

By all accounts, the building control officer had never seen anything like it!

All these special measures, however, were taking their toll on the already-stretched budget.

Bill and Bridget were working 60-plus hour weeks each, learning everything from plumbing to electrical work. But as Bill points out, there was a limit to the number of skills you could learn in the short time available and some trades had to be employed.

"By November 2003," he says, "it became clear that the cost of restoring an historic agricultural building is actually more expensive than doing a new-build."

But instead of cutting back on the quality of finish, the couple applied for additional funding of £20,000 and focused still harder on their June 2004 deadline.

* Whilst the Floor is Up - Add the technology

The result is a barn conversion rather better than the average.

Every room has a telephone and television point (the kitchen has three) to suit today's technology-savvy family.

Two of the four bedrooms are ensuite, one has a walk-in wardrobe. The living space is vast - encompassing a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen and a family area.

There is under-floor heating, a galleried landing and, within the next month, the gardens will have been fully-landscaped.

* Bought well - by buying in the next hotspot

Estate agents have valued it at somewhere between £325,000-£350,000 but with the Halifax recently naming Newark as among the country's ten 'property hotspots,' this figure could quickly climb higher.

It looks as though the Lloyds have made a paper profit of at least £87,000 in the last year.

"We've thoroughly enjoyed it," claims Bridget, who's managed to hold down her full-time job alongside the project. "But not many people would have started this at 56. Most nights we have a conversation about which body part aches the most."

Bill agrees that it's not for the fainthearted but the couple don't have the slightest regret.

They now plan to live in the conversion until their retirement, when they will downsize and cash in on their hard work.

You can't help thinking they deserve it.