A 'grand' design

Yeah, so I sneaked an email out to Grand Designs ages ago, before we even got planning. I really didn’t think our plans were ‘grand’ enough! They replied saying they were interested, but we’d have to have planning permission before we could do anything.

But during that time, Kate said she really didn’t want to do it. It made her feel so nervous, and why would you want the whole nation in your living room? I thought it would be a laugh, but I agreed with her that we would speak no more of it.

Then we got planning permission, and I thought about it more, and during this time, we’d watched pretty much EVERY grand design episode, just to give us confidence, learn from other people’s mistakes etc. So I slipped them another email saying we’d got planning and were about to start demolition.

I got a phone call, so I had to broach the idea with Kate again. Jeez! But we sat down and talked about all the good and bad things. I couldn’t think of anything bad, only good things, like it would be great for Thorne, we could help our friends get publicity, maybe we could pull off some deals etc, but for me, there are a couple of really important things.

One is I really believe in the reflective process (obviously, I’m blogging!), and being filmed would powerfully focus this. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does this affect our decisions? And this surely must make everyone working on our home want to do this best job they can.

And two, we’d have an AMAZING documentation of the process, for us and the kids, it would be great! I mean, if someone came up to you and said, I’ll make a film of you building your house for free, so your kids can watch it when they grow up, you’d snap their hands off, wouldn’t you?

So I got permission from Kate to ‘explore the possibility’ and then we got the contracts and stuff. We met the producers, and they explained the process. One thing I’d say, all the crew were really nice and seemed genuinely friendly and excited and interested in what we’re doing, and we’re both really pleased we’ve taken this opportunity. The kids are stoked!

Another thing I’d say is, maybe we wouldn’t ever have taken on this project if programmes like Grand Designs didn’t exist? Would we ever have felt like we could take on a project like this if we’d not seen other people doing it?

Would it have even crossed our minds?