Since we had some work done on the house, our latest obsession has become the nightly repeats from twelve or more years of the TV series "Grand Designs" where the sort of scary and obviously overpaid people (Most of whom I just know that I simply wouldn't get along with if ever I met them) build their dream houses whilst usually foolishly maintaining that they can keep it all within their already massive-seeming budgetary limitations.
We'd stopped this programme watching years ago, to be honest, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps we just lost interest, or moved on to other things and never really had the time, or the "revisits" seemed far too much like repeats for us to waste our time upon them, or maybe it was just that the people involved got far too annoying, but, for whatever reason it was, those daily weeknight repeats have provided us with an awful lot of material that we simply hadn't seen before, although towards the end of last week's run, there were beginning to be the suspicions that we had actually seen one or two of these before, as the episodes started to overlap with our own original viewings.
Perhaps the reason that we've rediscovered this show lately is because we are just feeling a need to empathise in some small way with other people living in far more chaos than ourselves as builders were ripping the guts out of our own little house. Somehow, when you watch people grinding their way through planning applications, and watching as rain pours through another not-yet-watertight house frame as another project looks as if it's about to fail due to an unexpected financial shortfall or bankruptcy, the fact that you have your own little problems of tiptoeing around the chaos at home doesn't seem quite so bad.
And it does always seem to turn out okay in the end, mostly, despite the sense of false jeopardy that the wonderfully dry presenter, Kevin McCloud sometimes tries to forecast just before the ad breaks, and, despite any misgivings that he might have along the way, he always seems to manage to eventually be hugely supportive of the people who embark upon these mad schemes, and the ultimate products of their labours.
In amongst all of the bankers and hippies, two sets of characters tend to crop up in conversation whenever you discuss the programme with anyone else who admits to watching it. One is the young man in the woods who wanted to build himself a structure out of local timber and who seemed to have his entire lifestyle so utterly sorted that he appeared to have such a calm and idyllic life, and such a healthy sense of proportion, that many people seemed to envy it.
The others were the elderly couple who built the rather impressive HufHaus in their back garden using a German team who brought an impressive air of quiet efficiency to a series in which builders can usually come in for quite a lot of stick. That time, Kevin seemed mildly exasperated (and perhaps a little astonished, too) at quite how swimmingly the entire build seemed to progress, because there's very little false jeopardy to play on when it's all going quite so well.
I should have house building in my blood. My grandfather built two houses in his lifetime. There was the grand detached house known as "The Hawthorns" which he built in the 1950s, and the split-level "retirement bungalow" that he built in the 1970s. Neither of these houses remained in the family, unfortunately, and I could never even begin to imagine having enough money in the bank to build such a thing.
Not that I'd want to, of course. The whole process looks like a nightmare to me, and as I rattle onwards towards my fifties, the thought of sacrificing at least two years to that sort of chaos really does not appeal at all.
Maybe it's that familiar lack of aspiration and ambition that stymies me...?
Who knows, but it certainly looks far too much like hard work to me.
Meanwhile, as I've been watching those old episodes, I've started playing a new game. It's called "Grand Designs On A Budget" and it works like this: You take one of the typical phrases that you'll hear in the course of one of the episodes, and you add your own DIY twist. So:
And it does always seem to turn out okay in the end, mostly, despite the sense of false jeopardy that the wonderfully dry presenter, Kevin McCloud sometimes tries to forecast just before the ad breaks, and, despite any misgivings that he might have along the way, he always seems to manage to eventually be hugely supportive of the people who embark upon these mad schemes, and the ultimate products of their labours.
In amongst all of the bankers and hippies, two sets of characters tend to crop up in conversation whenever you discuss the programme with anyone else who admits to watching it. One is the young man in the woods who wanted to build himself a structure out of local timber and who seemed to have his entire lifestyle so utterly sorted that he appeared to have such a calm and idyllic life, and such a healthy sense of proportion, that many people seemed to envy it.
The others were the elderly couple who built the rather impressive HufHaus in their back garden using a German team who brought an impressive air of quiet efficiency to a series in which builders can usually come in for quite a lot of stick. That time, Kevin seemed mildly exasperated (and perhaps a little astonished, too) at quite how swimmingly the entire build seemed to progress, because there's very little false jeopardy to play on when it's all going quite so well.
I should have house building in my blood. My grandfather built two houses in his lifetime. There was the grand detached house known as "The Hawthorns" which he built in the 1950s, and the split-level "retirement bungalow" that he built in the 1970s. Neither of these houses remained in the family, unfortunately, and I could never even begin to imagine having enough money in the bank to build such a thing.
Not that I'd want to, of course. The whole process looks like a nightmare to me, and as I rattle onwards towards my fifties, the thought of sacrificing at least two years to that sort of chaos really does not appeal at all.
Maybe it's that familiar lack of aspiration and ambition that stymies me...?
Who knows, but it certainly looks far too much like hard work to me.
Meanwhile, as I've been watching those old episodes, I've started playing a new game. It's called "Grand Designs On A Budget" and it works like this: You take one of the typical phrases that you'll hear in the course of one of the episodes, and you add your own DIY twist. So:
"Despite attempting to combine the mad juxtaposition of colours in all those matchpots they might just pull this off"
"Deciding to add the personally hand-painted second coat of emulsion has already doubled the expected cost..."
"This white bathroom suite has been personally hand-picked by them from the budget range at B&Q..."
"This radiator brush alone cost an astonishing FIVE pounds..."
Well, it's keeping me relatively sane, anyway, as I contemplate the list of jobs that are still needing to be done chez nous...
I still watch this occasionally and those two episodes, along with the couple who bought an empty old tower that was really just a pile of rubble and that awful Gothic nightmare home, still haunt my mind. Great phrases by the way, I could hear Kevin saying them as I read!
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