Grand Designs.

[dellzeqq]

well, you can blame the planners for that too! In the 30s you could buy a plot for £100. Now a small plot in Deal will set you back £150,000

 

[Andy Pandy]

I dream of owning a Huf Haus (featured a couple of series ago). They build it in a aircraft hanger, ship it over, and a crew of German builders stick it up in under two days.

 

[dellzeqq]

they are remarkably small. Beautiful, but having bedrooms under a low sloping roof might just be a disappointment.

 

[andy_wrx]

My favourite one was the Gothic house, where Kevin obviously despised it but was forced to grit-out positive comments from between his teeth, with the odd one escaping like it "having the decor of a pub in Ilford" and how it looked "Gothic to someone who knew what Gothic was from reading about it"...

http://www.channel4.com/4homes/on-t...s/monmouth-the-gothic-house-08-06-05_p_1.html

Land cost: £150,000
Estimated Budget: £250,000
Final Budget: £450,000

The biggest expense was the £30,000 ornate hand carved staircase. One hundred and thirty pieces of oak for the faux beams cost £26,000 and the fireplace £6,000. Jo did however manage to save money in some places by using a prefab panelised structure for the timber frame of the house. As plans changed and the build evolved, the costs escalated, which meant there was no contingency for any problems that occurred - waterproofing the roof, for example, or having to reorder wrongly-measured window profiles.
After re-mortgaging, Jo and Shaun eventually had to borrow money from their fathers to finish the build.


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This house isn't to everyone's taste, but Jo and Shaun's love of Gothic pastiche permeates every element its design. Watch the computer-generated plans for an ambitious project that will inevitably challenge these inexperienced self-builders.

 

[rich p]

There was one from a previous series when the posh woman spent something like £25k on a stove because she liked to cook for dinner parties of 30 people. Yeah, right. It was similar to the cookers in the Savoy I think, about 20 feet long.

 

[ColinJ]

that was, by a margin, the worst house that there has ever been on Grand Designs. Consider. It's a cold day, much like today. The birds are nesting. Your house depends on being airtight. How much birdsong will the child in the house hear? And the rooms were just boxes.

If it is a cold day, and your house is so far from being airtight that you can enjoy the sound of birdsong from inside, then you are going to be paying a fortune to heat your house and will have cold draughts everywhere. The couple who owned that house reckoned that they'd actually be making £1,800 a year exporting energy back to the grid.

I think 'the child in the house' should put a warm coat on and go and play outside if (s)he wants to enjoy birdsong at this time of year!

My house isn't airtight and I still can't hear birds in the winter. I can just hear them when it is warmer and I leave the upstairs windows open.

As for boxy rooms... The rooms in all the houses I've ever lived in were/are boxy. My bedroom for 20 years in the midlands was 7.5 ft x 5 ft x 8 ft - they don't come much boxier than that!

 

[andy_wrx]

Ah, Colin was locked in a cupboard for 20 years, that explains things

(sorry Col, couldn't resist...)

 

[dellzeqq]

my problem with the boxy rooms was that they'd gone to vast expense to create an odd shape of house, and then filled it with boxes...

the energy/opening window thing is instructive. The government's strategy for reduction in energy consumption in housing is based on airtightness. Sadly human beings simply cannot resist opening windows - I once did a sort of census on my way across London at 5am on a winter's morning en route to a conference on part L of the Building Regulations, and 50% of what I took to be bedrooms had a window open. Now, it's possible to reduce space heating costs to next to nothing and not rely on airtightness, and the cost of airtightness, spent on insulating a 1930s semi would reap a far higher benefit.

And, to be honest, if all they wanted was to sell juice to the grid a turbine would have done the trick...

 

[Kirstie]

I quite liked that one.
Shows how much I know...

 

[ColinJ]

Ah, Colin was locked in a cupboard for 20 years, that explains things

(sorry Col, couldn't resist...)

Actualy, I bolted the door from the inside to keep the rest of the world out... (afraid to insert smiley!)

 

[colly]

I enjoy the show when I see it because some nice ideas come up.
Having 400 grand to spend on something that suits YOU must be great but how much more innovative and impressive would it be to build a house for people of more meager means.
One that was packed with good design, was economical to run, looked good and really was affordable.

Any designer worth their salt can come up with something good when money is a secondary consideration. The acid test is to do the same when money is in short supply.

 

[Piemaster]

My house isn't airtight and I still can't hear birds in the winter.

Is that just because they've just flown somewhere warmer?

 

[ColinJ]

Is that just because they've just flown somewhere warmer?

No, it's because I'm slightly hard-of-hearing! There was a flock of crows up in the trees on the hillside behind my house last week. Must have been about 100 of them and I couldn't hear a sound from them from inside the house.

I actually agree about the boxes in the house built under the big arch. The arch was an interesting idea, but the rooms seemed like an afterthought.

Also agreed that people seem desperate to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on big fancy houses. I'd rather live somewhere modest, work less, and spend the rest of my money on lots of great cycling holidays.

I quite liked the Grand Design this week which didn't cost a vast sum of money. The house walls were made out of reclaimed car tyres and bits of old timber. I'm not keen on the idea of embedding bottles in walls though...