grand designs 2013 - will there be polish builders this time?

[MousyMouse]

starts tomorrow.
sooo excited!

how many pregnant ladies?
major building desasters?
blown budgets?

I have just found this thread - joy! Have been quite bored by many of the projects so far this series, but tonight's looks great. I love the look of the cob houses he has already built, so pretty!

crazy!
but I guess it has pretty good insulating properties.
huge and very interesting.
wonders if we can add a cob layer to our vic terrace as secondary insulation

DH currently looking quite nervous at how enthusiastic I am being about the house...

WHy aren't they playing 'mud, mud, glorious mud'?

love the white hair of the engineer.
biblical as kevin just said :o

What a grafter! Sheer bloody hard work

Oh dear about the money.

that truly is a grand design.
even if it were to fall down now it's still grand!

They always seem to muddle though financially on this show. That's what I cannot understand.

I still think I prefer bricks.

The aerial view is amazing. I really hope they make it as I would love to see it finished.

arch That's why I like Grand Designs Revisited where he goes back a couple of years after.

Only 10 mins left to build and reveal

hatty agreed - so disappointed if they can't make it in though. Doesn't look likely at the moment!

"Shaggy muddy grip" ooh eerr Kevin

No not finished. I love the tree he's carved in the mud wall.

not ready, but for some reason I'm not dissapointed.
alteady booking my spot on the sofa to see it finished in a couple of years time.

I really hope they get to finish and that GD goes back to see it. Such hard work and so beautiful glares at own 1970's box house in disdain

Now that was more like it - back to good old traditional GD (even if he did have a £1.2 million house ready to sell to fund it).

Getting a mortgage on a cob house? - Will that be difficult? If so he may have to wait a long time to sell his existing cob house.

Apparently GD has followed Kevin on this build for four years so I'm sure that they will be back to see progress and finish.

Lookin at the estate agent's details the old house and barn part of the new house seem very close together, which may be off-putting would be buyers.

I do think these people who do Grand Designs have very special laid back tempéraments. DH and I have been driven almost to divorce by having the roof redone.

Apparently GD has followed Kevin on this build for four years..

Ahh. That explains why Kevin looked so much younger at the beginning of lasyt hight's episode. I'm sure he was helping to make cob walls on a very early GD barn conversion in Devon.

That stairwell is impressive

Is this the first gd where they've followed the same person twice?

Hatty totally agree. The wives/partners are generally amazingly laid back. Was saying to DH what a great couple the cob housers were.
Mind you, there was that couple the other week where the wife nearly lost her temper with her husband on screen because he seemed to have got them over stretched before with no house on the horizon. I sympathised with her!

wetaugust mortgages on cob houses are no issue. Buildings insurance can be a bit annoying though. My parents restored a cob farm house in Devon a couple of years ago and now live in it, and planning to convert a barn into another small house. The house started pretty much derelict and when stripped back was a three by one room footprint, two floors but with no actual floors/ceilings, just an earth floor and a cavernous mud/straw walled space right up to the rafters. They built on another three-by-one double height behind, paid for mains water to be run from the road half a mile across the neighbour's land, put ufh throughout, woodburners, PV on the roof, Rayburn, interiored it completely in more green oak and oversized slate tiles than you have ever seen, and altogether it cost some figure like 700k (I don't actually know). Anyway, my dad helpfully gave this figure to the insurance company to say this is the rebuild cost, max, and they said no they thought it would be more like £1m. But how - we literally just had this whole house built for this much, if it burns down tomorrow how can you say it's going to cost 50% more??

They told him he could 'underinsure' if he really insisted and save on the premiums, but any claim he made however small would only be paid pro rata. So if a washing machine leaks and causes 1000 of damage, he'd get 700 from them, less his excess. Bastards...

Very interesting Lex. Sounds like a huge project!