Sunday, March 22, 2009

Homebuilding and Renovating Show

This weekend saw the Homebuilding and Renovating Show at the NEC. It was far from our first, and seemed much quieter than it has been before and somewhat smaller. It's hard to tell though as we've been through four distinct phases when it comes to house building shows. This time round we knew who we wanted to see, what we wanted to talk about and what was irrelevant to our build which shrank the whole event down to a manageable size. The first time we ever went to the show, we were still just thinking "Wouldn't it be nice to build our own house", and the array of stands offering different ways to make a home seemed to go on forever.

Between then and now, we also went through the vital phase where we actually decided that we would build our own home and had to begin to research our options properly. Somewhere in a filing cabinet is a heavy stack of brochures from those research missions. Then there was the phase where we had made our basic choices and needed to find the people who could make it all happen.

 

That said, the credit crisis seemed to have had an impact. There were fewer gizmos and 'bling' house features on display. Only a handful of stands were giving away freebies - and jute bags with your company logo are apparently so last year. Some well known faces from the self build scene were absent. If not subdued, the whole event seemed to be a very calm affair.

More depressingly, the Eco-village showed that you can make anything environmentally friendly (apparently) by adding 'Eco' to the name and painting your stand a nice shade of green. The show itself led the way in that respect, but it's hard to view (amongst other things) a swimming pool as a means to make your house kinder to the planet. At least some of the stalwarts who used to sell slightly suspect whole house vacuum systems have moved on to selling heat recovery ventilation kit instead which has a more convincing benefit to the self builder.
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