Monday 23 September 2013

"The House That £100k Built"

Is a new series on BBC2.

Episode 1/6 featured "A young pizza van owner from Leeds [who] has an ambitious plan to build a four-bedroom house." 

In the end, he was really struggling to stick to the budget of course, and ended up cutting corners, making do with second hand materials and so on.

The programme also briefly explained that he'd obtained the land "cheaply" because it was an infill site just big enough for one or two houses and thus of no interest to large developers (it only had a narrow access road between two rows of terraced houses, or through the middle of a longer row).

And even more briefly, it mentioned that he'd managed to acquire the land for "only" £100,000 - as much again as the entire construction cost of the house, which makes a bit of a mockery of the whole concept.

I assume that the programme makers don't even consider the £100,000 which disappeared into the Land Monopoly Black Hole to be a "cost".

4 comments:

Bayard said...

Of course not, he'll get that back and more when he sells the site, won't he?

Pablo said...

Even so, a far better division between actual building and jabber-jabber than Grandiose Designs.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, i.e. yet more money will be tipped into the LMBH.

P, true.

Tim Almond said...

looking at the video, that appears to be quite a cheap bit of Leeds (Leeds is one of the north's recent success stories and is quite pricey in places).