Spending Regrets

[Grosey]

Just saw a post where somebody mentioned that they were happy at the end of the build with the extra expense of an item they specified, but that wasn't the case for all their specifications. 

 

Thought this his might be a good topic idea, what have you spent money on or upped the spec on etc that you have later regretted and feel was not worth the extra money?

[ProDave]

On the present house, we regret the silly money we paid for an "American style" stainless steel big fridge / freezer with water and ice dispenser.  Apart from the silly cost (and you can't even re claim the VAT) the actual space in the freezer was a huge disappointment meaning we also run a separate old under worktop freezer.

 

It also broke down just out of guarantee. thankfully I managed to repair it but the replacement part (a fan motor) was expensive.

 

In contrast the Rangemaster range cooker we were very pleased with.
 

[Grosey]

Haha a big American fridge is quite high up on my fridge, mainly for the ice/water dispenser!

 

Good to hear your opinion though. 

 

Im a nightmare of getting buyers remorse so hopefully this thread my make me think twice!

 

P.S does anyone else know of any ice/water dispensers that aren't part of a fridge freezer?

[ProDave]

Personally I see nothing wrong with old fashioned ice cube moulds that you put in a tray in a freezer. If you look at the "works" of an automated one, that's all it does, is freeze a tray full at a time them tip them out into a bucket.

 

We rarely use the cold water dispenser (the mains water from a mountain loch is plenty cold enough) but again, what's wrong with a bottle of water in the fridge?
 

[jack]

Brick slips.  Wish I'd never seen the bloody things.  They cost us thousands and thousands extra over render and I think the render would have looked better.

 

Touch and go on some of the external blinds.  They were quite expensive, and annoyingly they don't actually act that well to block out light due to various holes and gaps.  They work brilliantly on our western elevation though, and actually make the house look better in my opinion (we don't bring them all the way up, just feather them open when they aren't being used to block the sun).

 

I believe we overspent on the MVHR.  We went for a Passivhaus Certified Brink unit.  I suspect I could easily have saved £2-3k on a cheaper unit and ducting and had as good a result.

 

I wish we'd spent the money installing something for sparkling water.  My wife and I both love it, and always said we'd find a way to have it on tap in the new place, but between one thing and another it ended up looking like an extravagance that would require yet another tap (didn't find any all-in-ones we liked, so we have an ordinary mixer tap and a separate boiling water tap).  Hard to justify the cost anyway when Sainsburys does 2L bottles for 13p, but I hate throwing out PET bottles so we end up doing without.

 

We had my mother in law, a friend of ours and the kitchen supplier saying that once we had a steam oven we'd never be without it.  I think we've used it less than once a month!

 

We chose a shade of carpet for our snug/TV room which frankly looks ridiculous.  We both hate it.  Should have just concreted throughout and used a rug in there.

Re: ice, I just keep three or four trays full in the freezer.  If I know we have a big do coming up, I freeze some huge tupperware containers full of water a few days beforehand then smash it up the night we need it.  

 

I'm sure other things will come to mind... I have so many regrets it isn't even funny! 

[Ferdinand]

If I need ice in quantity these days it comes from Aldi at £1 for 2kg. I haven't tried to calculate the cost of icemaking bags or the specific latent heat of freezing I am saving.

 

One bag lasts a couple of months and the payback period for a Yankee fridge would be more than my lifetime.

 

My ice hammer for construction cocktails is a rubber mallet.

 

Ferdinand

Edited August 18, 2016 by Ferdinand

[Onoff]

Marriage license.....

[Declan52]

I bought a woman a drink near 20 years ago and so far its cost me a complete fortune and only seems to be getting worse.

My shed is a big regret. Bought an 18ft * 10ft but its not big enough. Put the door on the wrong side and only one window. Should have put a bit more effort into picking it.

[Onoff]

Just now, Declan52 said:

1) I bought a woman a drink near 20 years ago and so far its cost me a complete fortune and only seems to be getting worse.

2) My shed is a big regret. Bought an 18ft * 10ft but its not big enough. Put the door on the wrong side and only one window. Should have put a bit more effort into picking it.

 

Should have stuck wheels and a tow hitch on 2) then you could have escaped 1)! 

 

Talking of buying women drinks my lucky escape I guess was from the brandy and Babysham drinker! Not good on apprentice's money!

 

My missus is getting back into Pernod & black 30 years after she stopped drinking it. Young barmaid the other night had been working in the pub 18 months and hadn't been asked for it once. Managed to find a dust covered bottle at the back of a shelf. 

 

Missus was complaining Pernod was £19 a bottle in I think Tesco. So I bought her an £12 bottle of Ouzo from Lidl.

[jack]

7 minutes ago, Onoff said:

Missus was complaining Pernod was £19 a bottle in I think Tesco. So I bought her an £12 bottle of Ouzo from Lidl.

 

You hopeless romantic.

Thought of another couple of regrets:

 

No multi-point locking on the steel doors to my work shop (which is as the back of my garage).  I was surprised how flimsy the doors are.  It wouldn't take much to lever the top or bottom open while they're locked.  When I get a moment (ha!) I'm going to look at retrofitting.

 

Our kitchen has too much floor to ceiling glass.  I wish we'd gone with our original design, which had an area with a low wall, where we could at least have put a couple of seats without having them in front of windows.

 

Bound to more to come...

[Onoff]

What ever possessed me to accept a second hand 10'x8' wooden shed off of my brother and then spend a small fortune trying to make it something it'll never be? My only excuse is I hadn't found eBuild then. If I had I'd have done it all so different.

 

Did I learn? I've also got a 2nd hand freebie 10'x12' in need of some repair sitting stacked flat under a tarp. 

 

Should have saved my money and bought a wood burning stove!

Edited August 18, 2016 by Onoff

[Grosey]

Cheers everyone, I think you'd be surprised at how useful early stage self builders will find all this! (Apart from the marriage stuff of course - spoken like a true 1 year newlywed!)

[ProDave]

43 minutes ago, Onoff said:

 

Should have stuck wheels and a tow hitch on 2) then you could have escaped 1)! 

 

 

Should have bought a caravan.


 

[jack]

Might be worth starting a thread about things people have paid a bit more for that turned out as well as (or better than) hoped.

[reddal]

I could fill pages I suspect - but here are some highlights :

• gshp attached to boreholes. Yes its effecient - yes it can help with passive cooling - yes it also gives us our own spring water. But the whole setup was too expensive.
• some contractors that we paid a premium price so we could be sure of a good job - who turned out to be rubbish
• high end mhrv system - cheaper one would have been fine
• lime render system? A bit on the edge with that one - it works quite well and looks nice - but it took ages to put up and was expensive
• nhbc solo warranty - total hassle
• a load of expensive in-floor lighting that we tortured ourselves over but hardly ever use - however if doing it again I would redirect that money to other lighting rather than save it I think

In fact - thinking about it there are more things that I wish I'd spent more on than less. However if I had - they would probably have ended up on the list above :).

 

- reddal

 

[jack]

1 hour ago, reddal said:

• some contractors that we paid a premium price so we could be sure of a good job - who turned out to be rubbish

 

That's a particularly galling situation.  We got stung a couple of times that way.

Another: while I'm happy with the Loxone home automation system we installed, we went for too many dimmers.  It would have been smarter (and cheaper!) to just use undimmed lights in several places, especially where there are several light circuits that can be switched in via scenes to make things brighter.

 

The Photonstar lights we've installed give out really beautiful light.  I sometimes feel we paid too much for those (adds up when you need a separate expensive driver for each), but then the light quality is very good, they look great, and in some areas we were able to use powerful wide beam versions so didn't need to fill the ceiling with them.  Our 6m x 5m kitchen, for example, only has 7 downlights and it's perfectly bright enough at night (and that's without any of the other lights in the room on!)  The recently redeveloped house next door has something like 20 much cheaper lights in similar area!

[AliG]

On the fridge one, we have an American fridge freezer, but it is a Samsung one that cost around £1100, so not too extravagant. I know some of the earlier ones had issues, but our one has been flawless and I believe is a better product than the considerably more expensive Siemens equivalents.

 

I like it, however, I do find the ice and water dispenser annoying. The reason for this is that everyone who comes to the house finds them such a novelty that they constantly mess around with them. I never have the ned for crushed ice, but apparently this is vital to people and I worry they will break it through over use. Further, similar to what Dave said, the tap water is often colder than the dispenser water. To solve this in the next house I am going to have a freezer with ice maker inside that drops into a drawer so there are less moving parts to break and people don't see it so don't play with it. I'm just doing away with the water dispenser entirely, it's pointless.

 

As was mentioned on overpriced but low quality contractors, anything that you pay a premium for but then turns out not to be a premium product will feel a waste, but a good quality product that does the job well and gets a lot of use will give you a lot of satisfaction. We have a Quooker tap and I have noticed almost everyone at work who has had their kitchen redone in the last five years now has one. By any stretch, what is basically a fancy £1000 kettle is an extravagance. Yet as they get used all the time everyone seems to love them. I almost fainted when my wife bought a £400 Vitamix blender, yet it just does the job it is asked of time and time again. Prior to that we had a succession of cheap blenders and food processors that broke after a few months. They feel more like an extravagance. Although I keep telling her I am sure there is a happy medium of a good quality, but not so expensive product.

 

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think I have more often been too cheap and would have been better paying up for better quality items. However, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I will use an item for, I will always pay up for function and quality, but not for brands, aesthetics and bespoke items. That is where I think that you can start to get extravagant.

[Ferdinand]

Currently I don't think I have any expensive regrets, except perhaps when we insufficiently supervised an architect during a renovation at a time of family stress - and these would then be our fault.

 

These would then be such as:

 

- Unnecessary intercom from gate to house.

- Overblown burglar alarms.

 

I think I can identify the converse, which is skimping unnecessarily to save small amounts of money:

 

- Not porcelain tiling throughout because carpet was less expensive and the planned budget was creaking.

- I wonder if for some going 2G rather than 3G will fall onto this list.

- A couple of plots that I regret not buying as the added price on the value of the house/garden left was too high.

 

And I think I would also add things that seemed expensive/unnecessary that I do not regret:

 

- Going for the max size solar array possible - 10kw not 4kw.

- Spending £900 on a pair of nice wrought iron asymmetric drive gates to cap off the "face" of a renovation.

 

I think my main insights are:

 

1 - not to skimp on things you won't be able to change later and could regret for a long time.

2 - that having a model incorporating running expenses over at least 10 years - including maintenance etc - is very important for objectivity.

3 - if there are items to be added later in order to "sell" it, consider adding them now so yuo can enjoy them for more than a month.

 

Ferdinand

 

 

Edited August 19, 2016 by Ferdinand

[SteamyTea]

7 hours ago, AliG said:

On the fridge one, we have an American fridge freezer, but it is a Samsung one that cost around £1100, so not too extravagant

What!!!

A grand more than my fridge from Currys.

 

If I cannot afford the best (and I can't anymore), then I buy the cheapest.

[Crofter]

On fridges, we were very happy with the one in our previous house- Beko side by side American style, but without an ice or water dispenser. Consequently, bags of space inside. £500 well spent.

[Barney12]

10 hours ago, Grosey said:

Cheers everyone, I think you'd be surprised at how useful early stage self builders will find all this! (Apart from the marriage stuff of course - spoken like a true 1 year newlywed!)

 

Dont panic. The novelty soon wears off  

[Triassic]

American side by side whirlpool fridge freezer, the worst thing we every bought. It broke down at least once per year. The ice and water dispensers being nothing more than party novelties. 

 

Our other regret was the main contractor, looked good and came highly recommended.

 

the highlight was the day the main contractor went bust.

[Onoff]

At least Midge Ure's happy.....