Re: Grand designs on tonight

He had his own IT business of some sort, she is a teacher. His death made it rather poignant. Esp. as my SIL died of Breast cancer a month ago.

Yup, for what was pretty normal sized family home on pretty tight budget it came out well.

hmm, maybe. I did quite like the roof being in two halves

: That's the problem with architects. They got to : have some strange poncy design statement that's : only going to cause problems later.

Take that rational to its logical conclusions and we would all still be living in mud huts, any new ideas (or 'poncy' in design) would have been dismissed!

: I had a lifetime maintaining buildings with flat roofs. : I hate them. Spent days tracing roof leaks. I know : of several buildings were retro-fitted with pitched : roof due to this problem.

The problem is, architects live in a perfect world, builders live in the real world (which also includes errors caused through builders simply bodging the original build)...

Agreed

Coming out pretty well was, I think, a result of an architect who absolutely stayed on top of the job, and a builder who could produce high-quality finishes.

It was good, but I don't think Barret will be churning out the same thing any time soon.

I couldn't help wonder how she paid the architect, money being tight and all that.

mark

I though he was paid for the *original* design work, but after her husband died the architect seems to have become somewhat personally as well as professionally involved - often acting as project manager - due to the fact that he had a long standing personal friendship with the family.

Me three, it *might* have been nicer to have the glass tower, the rooflights instead of light pipes and the wraparound deck, I could take or leave znc instead of slate, but importantly it didn't seem to suffer from the downsizing, it hadn't become a rabbit hutch, what she got had plenty of unique features that had the character of the original design.

I felt sorry for her, I'm sure the architect did too and felt he had to do the decent thing to make sure it was built to what she could afford.

What happened to the threat of flooding from the river in the revised design?

I did wonder too, and according to the architect's web site the price of the amended version was £240K, when the initial price of the full version was supposed to be £200K

Soames Forsyte had that problem too.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Andy Burns saying something like:

I snorted with disbelief at the first costing. More like +50% of that, I thought.

Except that the heavy implication from the programme was that the design had been shrunk after the husband died to reduce cost, rather than to limit the increase!

I suppose so. This series, the programme seems to be glossing over details a bit, we didn't see if she got her ASHP, I didn't notice any radiators so assume they did keep UFH? Last week we saw lots of cable tray but not so much of the solar/backburner feeding the HVAC and no mention of their own borehole etc.

At least Kevin has ditched the 2/3 of the way through "doom and gloom" segment followed by "oh, it turned out ok" format.

It always has, it is after all a programme about design/architecture rather than the dirty, nitty gritty, of actually getting something into the real world.

Challenge Tommy Walsh is streets ahead of it, for that.

: >

: > It always has, it is after all a programme about design/architecture : > rather than the dirty, nitty gritty, of actually getting something : > into the real world. : >

: : Challenge Tommy Walsh is streets ahead of it, for that.

Even better are *some* of the US/Can programmes, even though much is irrelevant in the UK, the problem with Tommy Walsh is that he is either truly a typical tea swigging lazy UK builder or is acting to dumb down the programme. Also the time-line of building work within "Challenge Tommy Walsh" is often getting masked as it used to on those dammed awful BBC home design programmes [1] of the past...

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Liquorice" saying something like:

The earlier ones were better for that - recall the water pumping station conversion done in large part by the owners. Many of these progs seem to go down the same route - a bevy of owner-designed and built one-offs on the first series, followed by endless archtectural wankfests in subsequent programmes.

I think this programme has done more for the advancement of British architecture and public awareness in house design than anything else.

The early programmes were all about getting the house up, now they go more into design, which is more important. A well built bad design not worth anything much. A well built great design is something special.

Though not in its scripts ;-)

Cheers Richard

we doan need no friggin scrips.