The British televisual airwaves are almost saturated with home improvement, home design, house selling, house buying, and garden designing programs, and it's a pretty good bet that once you sit me down in front of one of them, "girly stuff" happens in my head and I start getting ideas. However, one idea I've had for the past five years was the one that popped into my head as I had my house rewired, walls replastered, and was laying laminate flooring in the lounge, which was "wouldn't it be great if we could build our own place, so we wouldn't have to put up with other people's decorating decisions, or layout decisions?".
Since I had that thought, a fabulous program emmerged on Channel 4, and it's probably been running for about four years or so now. Presented by the ever-calm Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs has been a firm favourite on my TV since it started, and building our own house is still something that interests James and myself. I don't know how likely it would be that we'll ever fulfil this particular ambition - it's scary, logistically a complete nightmare, and goodness knows how the finances would work out, but we'd still love to do it.
There are numerous common threads in all of the episodes (it really does feel like a soap opera at times, so I feel that calling them episodes is appropriate), so it dawned on me that The Rules of Grand Designs needed to be devised. So, for the benefit of anyone looking to build your own house, here they are...
- You will not be in by Christmas
- Once you get the bricks up to about window height, the wife/ girlfriend/ partner will be pregnant
- You will go over budget
- There will be at least one major setback
- Never assume you'll get dry weather. If you are in Britain, it will rain
- The word "caravan" will become associated with the concept of "cheap and practical"
- Kevin McCloud will congratulate you with something along the lines of: "They've been daring, taking on a difficult project in persuit of their dream, and after investing huge amounts of time and money, making many sacrifices along the way, their passion and vision have helped them through to the end." He'll also wow and enthuse about the amount of space and light you've managed to involve in the finished house... "and, while the result may not be to everyone's tastes, they've put a lot of themselves into the project, and the result is something unique and special, and all their own."
It should be noted that point 2 does seem to happen to almost every male+female couple who take on projects with the Grand Designs camera on them. Now I can't possibly imagine having that type of conversation with James... well, ok, here's my attempt at imagining it: "Hey babe, I want to put a huge amount of financial and emotional stress on top of the huge financial and emotional stress of building a house by having a baby".... not entirely convinced? Still, there's no doubting that the majority of these self-builders and rennovators that have featured on the program seem to have decided along those lines. Mind you, all of the programs are presented by that same enigmatic, thesauraus-digesting, intensely polite presenter; so perhaps there is another possibility that has not yet been considered...