Grand Designs - What's it worth?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Indeed. So superlative are they that aircraft use them almost exclusively ;-)

[Derek *]

Not exactly a building project but the one I to this day find incredible was the couple who sold up and bought a hazelnut farm in France in early summer. They were more or less skint and were depending on making enough cash from the hazelnut harvest to see them through the winter.

They spoke absolutely *no* French, not even yes/no or hello/goodbye and knew absolutely *nothing* about hazelnuts. Once they got ensconced they noticed the immature hazelnuts were dropping off the trees. They got the leader of the local hazelnut co-operative to come and look at the crop in the fields. He was a helpful personable young chap keen to exercise his english. He saw at first glance the farm was running wick with hazelnut pests, and said the trees should have been sprayed in the spring but it hadn't been done.

The new incumbents had simply expected the previous owner to continue working and spending time and money on the farm whilst the sale went through leaving a full crop on the trees so that they could simply breeze in, scoop up the harvest and live for a year on the proceeds.

Life's not like that.

They did a belated spraying but the co-op leader said the damage had already been done.

They were expecting the harvest yielding them about £15,000 and were depending on it to support them through the winter. It actually raised about £2,300.

You could get a farm for that !

DG

[Nick Atty]

That was the bit I couldn't understand. One glance at it must have told anyone it would cost more than 65k. You must be looking at pretty well that (or more?) just for the kitchen extension, with glass link, and fitted kitchen, surely?

[Biff]

Why is everyone obsessed with the money but no-one mentions lime, oak and hand-made glass.

[Martin Angove]

Possibly because money was (or appeared to be) the big conjouring trick in this episode. From the first five minutes it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that £65k or £70k or whatever wasn't going to be anywhere near enough money, especially given

a: need to replace like-with-like (your lime, oak, glass and due to the listed building status)

b: stated aim to install large amounts of high-tech gadgetry

c: design for new kitchen in oak with glass wall and roof

d: they obviously bought it more through heart than head ("we just fell in love with it").

I for one was incredibly jealous of the whole concept. I would love to have £750k (or whatever the final total was) to play with and do something like this. I too would probably have pulled out all the stops to use appropriate and sympathetic replacements where necessary, but given a mere £70k at the outset I think I would probably have known that it wasn't going to be enough.

I suppose that *if* the house had been structurally sound, and *if* none of the timbers had needed replacing then £70k would have looked a little more realistic, but you only needed two facts to be able to guess that this wasn't the case: the house was several hundred years old, and had had no work done on it within living memory.

Was that what you meant?

Hwyl!

M.

[Rod]

Martin Angove wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Good answer, Martin.

There have been many GD programs where money has not been splashed around (classics being the Welsh hillside and the wooden house in the woods). But did you really feel that these Gloucester lawyers would have appeared at all for nothing? (Remember, lawyers simply don't appear for nothing.)

Over the years I have seen several GD houses in various places (GD's own website and magazine as well as other 'style' publications). I reckon that the total exposure achievable is quite significant.

I totally agree with Martin that 70k was a joke in the circumstances. That the extra money was found was not a surprise. But from where? Their resources? Or payments of various sorts, possibly including knock-down prices on some items?

OK, so lime and wood are classics. It is nice to seem them being used. But I am damned sure that the house is riddled with copper, plastic, plasterboard, etc. It is no purist's dream house.

[Biff]

Well I thought he had a twinkle in his eye and tongue firmly pressed in cheek when he mentioned the &70k, but their personal finances are their affair and we shouldn't be interested. The point of the programme was about how to make a historic house function in the 21st century with minimal damage to historic fabric. Kevin McCloud has been quietly pushing the case for lime over cement and gypsum for many years and this house was a great showcase for appropriate building materials and techniques. Sure the electrics use copper and plastic - this is a house to be lived in with all mod cons not a 16th century museum piece but I doubt if any plasterboard or Ordinary Portland cement was used on the site.

[Anthony James]

Still no banana. The fitted kitchen alone would have run to 20k plus probably that much for the extension and a few grand for the glass link. That leaded glass window would have been in the thousands, probabably 10k for heating and electrics on a 'normal' house. The initial budget was woefully inadequate but seemed to basically be a joke - as was the chilli bottle stuffing. "We're £120,000 short so i'm going to raise £100 selling chilli's in oil." I rather suspect that all of the two lawyers "working on it themselves" was just for the cameras and they actually did next to nothing.

Either they started with far more than they said (and the initial figure was for 'dramatic effect') or there was an advance on inheritance from some very rich parents.

I don't quite understand that either. I know that there are kickbacks on fixtures and fittings (it's not just GD but newspaper and magazine features in the future) and I can see that architects have a lot to gain from their designs being featured but i think a lot of it must just be showing off. People generally come across well on GD compared to most reality TV.

[Anthony James]

Indeed - Surely they should be fitting a full CAT5 structured cabling system running everyting over IP. Far more flexible and upgradable.

[Martin Angove]

They sure were - most of the partitioning in the attic was bog standard plasterboard (it was specifically mentioned at least twice) and skimmed, no doubt, with bog standard plaster. Apart from the one end of the attic, I don't think they even managed to use Oak floorboards. I got the impression that the partition they moved (living room) was also built as a normal stud-plasterboard wall, but I can't recall that being mentioned quite so specifically. Lastly, the extension (inner leaf at least) was built using standard blocks and cement as far as I could tell.

Hwyl!

M.

[Martin Angove]

I just wish to point out that, although I agree with the above statement, it wasn't actually me wot said it; it was the aforementioned "Mike".

Have you tried running distributed TV over IP?

Hwyl!

M.

[Martin Angove]

Come on, you've misquoted again. That bit above *was* me this time!

[snip cos I have nothing sensible to add at this stage]

Hwyl!

M.

[Mike]

One of the researchers for GD has contributed to the www.periodproperty forum in the past and confirmed they don't pay for appearances. I wonder if these pair intend to set up some form of project management company - with law qualifications as well they could offer a turnkey solution.

[Mike]

I have running over ADSL as well. Needs care with buffering and run-on but quite achieveable.

All seat TVs on the new A380 also use IP, albeit using a special switch which does implement priority routing unlike certain Ciscos :-)

[Cynical Git]

turnkey solution?

turkey solution more like

[Mike]

Quite possibly :-)

But apparently that pair of gays (not the Scottish ones on Ch5) from Beeny show a few series back make a very good living this way now.

[Anthony James]

I've had a very brief attempt with a Nebula DigiTV server. Whilst I didnt get it working other people have done. That's a £100 TV card on a low spec PC.

However, live TV is very last century. The only time live tv becomes important is for Sport. What I actually do is stream programmes to a second location from my Tivo and it works perfectly well though it's a little clunky because it's using 3rd party hacks. Alternatively i can grab files from the Tivo and play them locally rather than streaming. With US Series 2 Tivo this stuff isn't a problem and transfer speeds are much quicker.

A Windows Media Centre PC will do this with 'media centre extenders' as remote clients. I dont think you can buy them in the UK yet but an X-Box will do it.

I've also seen a large scale TV over IP multicasting install that is working very well. -

???