OT: Room to Improve

Isn't that the standard Grand Designs dynamic? Must be a crisis before the second ad break. I suspect projects which go according to plan don't make good TV.

Theo

Pity. I would have though that a good analysis of why project A didn't go to plane, while project B did, would be useful to viewers.

Sounds suspiciously like 'Changing Rooms' to me

TV isn't supposed to be "useful to viewers". Just keep them watching.

And if you can throw in a deadline due to the owner having a terminal disease, so much the better.

Have you ever looked at planning applications in local authority web sites? Often a very nice application is put in and accepted then during the build you find permissions for non material amendments or changes without detailed plans being submitted under certain town and country planning acts. This is due to many reasons, I am told, cost is one, ability to achieve the end result or merely that it means somebody changed their minds!

Brian

On any of these type of programmes I've yet to see an architect willing and/or able to design down to a budget. They all seem to work on the basis that the client will find another 20% to 50% from somewhere, then throw their toys out of the pram when the client starts cutting corners or cutting things out. I know it's made for TV entertainment but it still annoys me, and doesn't do their reputation any favours.

To me (and probably nobody else) it would be more interesting to do this kind of programme with, say, a housing association. They need to build XX houses to fit within a certain budget, but they have a series of constraints to work within, notably planning, local council housing department, tenants' requirements, etc. And also they're probably redeveloping an existing site, so have to move the existing residents out (a story in itself).

That probably causes a number of difficult meetings where the architect proposes X but they can't afford it, or they decide to cut Y or Z from the project - this sounds more interesting than 'we went over by £100K but we just put it on my credit card and ooooh shiny' that you get on Grand Designs.

In particular, there are various people claiming you can build houses for cheap - John Prescott's 60K house, here the erstwhile Mayor had a 100K house (three built) - and it would be interesting to look into how that actually works.

Theo

Theo formulated the question :

I liked the one which followed the charcoal guy, building his home from scratch in the forest, using forest sourced timber for his build. He seemed such a quiet simple type in the early episodes, I got the impression his build was just pie-in-the-sky. but he made a tremendous job of it by the end.

There was another, where the home was built from cheap recycled bits, alongside several others similar. That unfortunately burnt down, as soon as it was finished.

You can build a house cheaply, IF its a small square box, simple roof with no hips, unusable attic space due to prefabbed joists, prefabbed cladding on a timber frame, and cheap plasticky details.

i.e. what you will find on any new build housing estate.

If you want it more aesthetically pleasing - well then be prepared to empty your bank account

But most of the houses on Grand Designs don't look if they have ever been, or could be, lived in. Dogs everywhere during the build but white carpets and no dog bowls in the kitchen. Three young kids but spotlessly clean bedrooms with no posters or anything on top of the furniture. Bathrooms/toilets with plain (non-frosted) plate glass windows with no curtains. The rest of the family or visitors/postman can see what you are doing from the garden :) Hundreds of copper pans hung up in the kitchen to look good but no sign of anything in the purpose build vegetable racks - maybe the big glass jar full of dozens of lemons that are likely to go rotten within a week.

Houses get built for way less than that, but they're not BR compliant in UK. Some are better than our usual boxes, some not. It's partly BR that makes housing so expensive. Of course with no regs at all it would be like China's tofu dreg housing.