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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

To be jealous of couples on Grand Designs...

155 replies

MrsKittyFane · 16/04/2012 20:07

Who build their homes, borrow zillions, take a risk.
DH and I struggle to change a lightbulb.
(watching repeats on More4!!)

OP posts:

WhereBeThatBlackbirdTo · 17/04/2012 14:38

Does anyone remember the very grand house being built in a very early series of GD, like a huge new stately home. I remember the wife spent money like water and ordered hand made glass for each of her 50+ windows whilst the husband kept creeping on site saying she could spend no more on the project. She bought hugely expensive wallpaper for the bedrooms but it hadn't even been made water-tight.

I don't think it was ever finished and I've never seen it on a repeat or revisited (or perhaps I dreamt the whole thing....)

ArtVandelay · 17/04/2012 14:39

We've nearly finished building our house. Its really too soon to tell how damaged our minds and bodies are or how devastated our marriage is

bronze · 17/04/2012 14:40

I was just thinking about her. Double fronted thing, it was a bit odd

ArtVandelay · 17/04/2012 14:45

Some people on GD are very child-like. Don't they ever look at their spreadsheets and think "hmmm okay - I have 20,000 left, Homebase will have to do." No - its all "I must have my Nepalese ebony doorknobs at 10,000 each and the bank will have to increase my mortgage". Then in the next breath go on about how fab they are at project management

marshmallowpies · 17/04/2012 14:46

Oh yes, the one in Suffolk which the bereaved wife finished was lovely...she was lovely and the house, although it was still quite glass-boxy in style, was going to be a proper family home, you could tell, and even though she had to scale it back, it was clearly the home they had planned together and meant so much to her.

There was a water-tower one which I wasn't v keen on - it was all up on stilts and very long and narrow, a really odd-shaped living space and whilst I'm sure it was what the owners had dreamed of (it was built on land at the bottom of their garden), I just couldn't imagine living in it. It looked really cramped and uncomfortable, whilst also (with glass on every side), being very exposed and overlooked.

There was a recent one on a lifeboat house in Cardigan Bay - stunning location, but HOW that one is going to stand up to winter storms, I don't know. You would have to be pretty brave to live there!

QuintessentialShadows · 17/04/2012 14:47

Shudder at the thought of being pregnant for 2 years!!

Lilymaid · 17/04/2012 15:04

I remember one episode with a family who lived/worked in the country and didn't have much money and the house built was small and didn't have any expensive finishes but was lovely ... particularly because the children were so delighted to have their own bedrooms for the first time. I can't identify the programme from the list on the Grand Designs website, so may have been dreaming!

bronze · 17/04/2012 15:19

Presumably the lifeboat house has been there a while withstanding storms.

Meglet · 17/04/2012 15:25

IIRC it was Francis in the falling down castle in Yorkshire. They run it as a nice B+B now to help pay towards the renovation I think. They were great.

Was the one with the house curved round the tree the one with the gobby woman who took over and got measurements wrong or something. She was quite funny and the house was lovely.

marshmallowpies · 17/04/2012 15:32

bronze, true, it had been standing for a good long while, but there were structural issues which came to light when they started working on it, and I was thinking more of things like glass windows blowing in in high winds, etc, which presumably wouldn't have been such an issue in its previous incarnation, as a typical lifeboat house doesn't tend to have floor to ceiling glass...

Tanith · 17/04/2012 15:44

Liked Ben Law and the Hobbithouse.

The other one I really liked, just because it was so refreshingly different, was the couple who knew exactly what they were doing, what they wanted and had everything planned and labelled down to the screws. They didn't go over budget, build went like clockwork - didn't like the house, mind you

I really felt for that lovely man who was building his own and got those massive glass windows out by a milimetre.

Indith · 17/04/2012 16:01

I lloved the charcoaln burner man in thev woods too.

Also loved the lovely couple where the man sadly died part way through. That house was a real family home, so practical, eco friendly and cheap to build. I want a house like that.

What always confuses me is how people always make everything open plan. I always think "well what do you do in your big open plan living space when your tiny toddler is a teenager and wants to watch TV and you don't? They never have separate space for noisy stuff. Or they have a bedroom for the child but their own is a mezzanine/open type thing. Again, what do you do when your child grows up and is awake after you go to bed making noise?

The one that makes me laugh is the cube. Hideous house, tiny and cramped with just one bedroom for them and a little one for the child then when Kevin goes back to visit she is pg with another one. Where the hell are they going to put it?

margoandjerry · 17/04/2012 16:05

Yes I thought hte cube was hideous although they seemed really nice. They ended up building an extension...

Indith · 17/04/2012 16:10

rather defeats the point of building a cube

I saw an engine tower a little while ago. It was fab because it was one of those ones where the bloke was a stone mason and called in lots of talented friends.

Booboostoo · 17/04/2012 16:11

DP is a serial renovator and I am constantly at him to call Kevin!!!! He won't do it though.

It's all terribly glamorous and would make amazing TV viewing. Yesterday we heard a noise while in the bathroon and I said to DP that it sounded like a pipe breaking. He was then late for a meeting and didn't check to see what had happened. Cue this morning when I went into the barn to get the dog food only to find a pool of poop! Turns out I was right it was the toilet pipe and it had broken!

Still waiting for the emergency plumber and we haven't formulated a plan of action re the poop yet...

margoandjerry · 17/04/2012 16:24

I know - it was like a cube with a lean-to

Pendeen · 17/04/2012 16:32

As an architect, I would be driven (quietly but completely) mad by every single client on that programme - but love their tolerance of all the - inevitable - problems and staggering acceptance of some massive overruns on cost and time.

Most of my clients are public sector organisations who are holy terrors when it comes to budgets and programmes so seeing the weekly financial and time disasters is very therapeutic.

I would also cheerfully strangle Mr McCloud.

EdlessAllenPoe · 17/04/2012 19:24

so far as i can make out from building trade, whilst cheques are cashing, everyone gets on fine.

when payment is held.....not so much.

I often think of GD when i come across a 'windows wrong size' payment dispute..

no-one ever admits its their fault without evidence!

or one of my favourite payment disputes was a joinery firm that supplied £5k massive oak doors that shrunk in situ, then the invoice remained unpaid for months whilst they waited for the new doors to be acclimatised first, then fitted.

Lazydaisy55 · 17/04/2012 20:35

I saw the first GD when Ben Lwa was building his lovely house. His girlfriend was working with him. When they did the revisit, there was a different woman plus a baby.

Turniphead1 · 18/04/2012 00:29

This reply has been withdrawn

This has been withdrawn by MNHQ at the poster's request.

bronze · 18/04/2012 09:08

I don't remember a girlfriend in the first Ben Law
He revisited and there was a wife and a baby
Then he went back again and there was wife and two? small delightful urchins and he had extended. Need another room? Just add one on

Meglet · 18/04/2012 16:03

There have been a couple of houses with almost open plan upstairs / gaps between tops of walls and the ceilings. Those couples obviously never have sex.

margoandjerry · 18/04/2012 16:12

yes there was a weird London house with an open plan upstairs and a glass walled bathroom. I think the wall was actually a huge, designery fish tank but it still means I can see you on the bog, you know.

Indith · 18/04/2012 16:14

Yup, they want the house to "flow" or some such shite. They all have small children or are pg with number 1. They have their head full of toddlers loving the open space then settling to sleep in their little room, the only one to be completely closed off. They just have not thought about having a spotty 15 year old sprawled on the sofa watching dvds until midnight on a saturday night when they want to either have noisy sexor go to sleep. I've seen some where the bathroom just has privacy walls which are open at the top, do they never have smelly shits?

bronze · 18/04/2012 16:18

Was there a grand designs, it may have been another housey program I watch many, where he had designed it so you could move the walls around according to your needs.

I like that idea

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