Who knew how many decisions it takes to build a house!
On Grand Designs, Kevin Macloud visits the site and over an hour watches the structure emerge, and through his brief chats with the enthusiastic owners they ponder the wisdom of a picture window or a badly placed septic tank. Inevitably they run out of money and we bite our nails during the commercial break, but after the adverts the money issue is inevitably resolved and the septic tank lives happily ever after. All rather easy I thought. To be fair I have been known to fast forward a little bit during the boring parts of the build to the bit where they are showing Kevin around at the end, all beautifully decorated and worth the wait.
As an avid "cushion scatterer, come interior designer in waiting" myself I can fully appreciate the merits of spending hours debated whether a red cushion is more magenta (colour of 2023), claret or berry,.But its harder when you are debating the colour roof tiles.
How many versions of roof tiles could there really be? Well, loads as it turns out.
Just like there are varieties of dropped and inverting ceiling, taps, light switch plates, and pretty much every detail in every square meter of the build. It's easy to become overwhelmed, particularly when decisions, and more importantly wrong ones can be costly.
If you can, the assistance of your architect or an interior designer can be useful. They have so much experience and can often simplify and narrow down choices to a more manageable number.
Pinterest and Houzz are amazing for browsing pictures of things you like and collating them for the architect. A picture tells a thousand words and I found myself using the phrase " can we do that?" and pointing at images rather a lot.
For roof tiles I asked the architect to give me no more than 3 choices of roof tile for example within a price range and pros and cons of each. We went with Bangor slate which is original tile but in keeping with the stone on the house and apparently comes from the Bangor in Wales so thats nice
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intimidated by enormity of it all, and I've probably cocked up a few times, but I have to believe that everything I choose is because I like it. So it can't look that bad!