Kits and Mortar

Whenever I travel, I always try to make sure there’s time to pop into a newsagent before I get on the plane, train or coach. For some reason, travel interchange newsagents normally carry a good selection of self-build magazines, so I can usually pick up some light reading for the journey. Last week, Kevin and I went to Prague for a conference - a great opportunity to read August’s issue of Homebuilding & Renovating.

Together we leafed through, point out things we liked and things we found hideous to each other. Eventually, we reached page 42 and the beautiful Border Oak house that Stephen and Elizabeth Roberts built in Pembridge, Herefordshire, which is “well known for its heavily timbered mediaeval ‘black and white’ houses”.

I think you’ll agree that it’s a beautiful house, quintessentially English, and full of character.

The Roberts said that they saw an article in H&R about a Border Oak house and immediately wanted one. They ordered a three bedroom cottage, with “brick and block ground floor, an oak framed first floor and reclaimed clay roof tiles which give the building an authentic aged appearance.” It’s one-and-a-half storeys high, with dormer windows, which give sloping ceilings in the bedrooms.

H&R says:

Laying underfloor heating throughout the building avoided the need for awkward radiators, which Elizabeth and Stephen felt would spoil the authenticity of the interiors, and also greatly pleased the couple’s pet tortoise, Darwin, who adores the warm floors.

I can imagine that underfloor heating, which I definitely want, will please our FutureMoggies too!

The ground floor has flagstones and the first floor has oak floorboards. They have a brick inglenook fireplace in the lounge, with an oak lintel, woodburning stove, and flagstone hearth. The kitchen is gorgeous, with oiled hardword work surfaces and all modern appliances hidden from view.

I have to say that Kevin and I both love this style of house - it’s so warm, friendly and inviting. If we end up building in a British village, then I will definitely look at this as an option. I expressed concern to Kev that if we move to the US, this wouldn’t exactly fit the local vernacular, to which he replied that the nice thing about the US is that you can ignore the local vernacular and do whatever the hell you like!

And if you want a bit of oak-frame porn, you can do no better than visiting the Border Oak website - click on ‘portfolio’ and knock yourself out. There are some beautiful houses there to really get the juices flowing.

Ah, one day.

Filed under : case studies, design, magazines

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I’ve been voraciously devouring every self-build magazine I can lay my hands on since starting Kits and Mortar and have gathered quite a little collection. I thought that it’d be a good idea to review the magazines that I’ve got, and to do issue summaries too. The latter will allow me to keep a track of the articles that I think were interesting or useful, rather than to provide a full summary of what that issue contains. Anyway, on with the first magazine review, Homebuilding & Renovating.

Homebuilding & Renovation is a monthly title costing £3.99, with subscriptions of £38.75 for 12 issues and £18 for six issues. It has a strong focus on case studies, typically including five or six houses, ranging from million pound homes through to budget builds, covering a wide variety of styles. It also has a lot of practical advice, with six or seven articles in the Project Advice section, and several more useful columns and articles in the Building Talk section. It looks at materials, techniques, design issues, technology, legal issues, landscaping, regulations, and planning - and that’s just in the three issues I have!

This comprehensive remit focused on the practical really does make H&R a useful magazine for me, as I’m learning a lot. These are magazines that I’ll keep and refer back to in the future, when the information becomes more directly relevant to my own project. H&R also has a Beginner’s Guide, which is very useful for people like me who are just at the very start of their self-build journey.

The nice thing about H&R is that it is enthusiastic and informative without being pretentious or condescending. Sometimes I get a bit lost with the jargon, but that happens very rarely. I like the tone of voice the writers use - H&R is an approachable, readable magazine - however I’d like to see much more attention paid to green issues and sustainability. They do cover environmental issues occasionally, but they need to embed awareness in every article. I’d particularly like to see them rate the houses they feature for environmental responsibility, not just in terms of energy use but also the sustainability and environmental impact of materials used.

H&R’s online presence is currently quite poor due to “acute technical difficulties”, however they do provide a look inside their current issue, which provides you with access to the magazine’s contents pages, and the first two pages of a number of articles. That’s just enough to give you a feel for what’s on offer, but you can’t actually read anything useful. I’ll be interested to see what H&R do with their new website, and will report back then.

Sadly, there is almost no integration between online and the magazine, except a quarter page “Webtalk” section which reprints comments made in their discussion forum, and a few URLs. Other than that, you would imagine that the internet didn’t exist. That’s a shame, but entirely unsurprising. Maybe I should pitch them an article or two!

Overall, though, I highly recommend H&R. Thumbs up!

Filed under : in print, magazines

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I have spent a fair amount of time over the last few days searching for expertise online about cat psychology and behaviour, and have been frustrated by the lack of decent blogs on the subject. Many of the sites I saw were ’splogs’, or spam blogs, that have taken content from other people and chucked it up on their own blog so that they can make money out of ads. I deplore that sort of behaviour. Other sites were very badly written by anonymous authors. And yet others stated the obvious, such as “cats like to be stroked” or “don’t feed your cat human food”. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

There are a few good cat rescue blogs, but that’s not quite what I’m after. And the two blogs I found that do show an inkling of promise are either irregularly updated or not quite quality enough. I really am rather disappointed. I have searched on more than one occasion, hoping to perhaps find blogs written by cat vets, or maybe even a cat behaviourist/psychologist, but it seems that there’s very little out there worth reading. Lots of mad cat people, mind you, who have owned 17 cats their entire life, believe that their psychic link to Tiddles gives them a unique insight to the feline psyche, and want to proclaim that fact on garish pink websites that display a distressingly cavalier attitude towards grammar and punctuation.

So I turned my attention to books. Turns out that there are a lot of books about cat behaviour and psychology on Amazon, so I spent a happy hour or two reading through descriptions and adding the ones I liked to my Kits and Mortar wishlist. These are the ones I’ve liked the look of so far, in no particular order:

• Psycho Kitty?: Understanding Your Cat’s Behaviour, by Pam Johnson
• Is Your Cat Crazy?: Behaviour Problems and Solutions from the Casebook of a Cat Therapist, by John C. Wright
• Twisted Whiskers: Solving Your Cat’s Behavior Problems, by Pam Johnson
• The Cat Whisperer, by Claire Bessant
• Why Does My Cat…?, by Sarah Heath
• Cat Confidential: The Book Your Cat Would Want You to Read, by Vicky Halls
• Treatment of Behaviour Problems in Dogs and Cats: A Guide for the Small Animal Veterinarian, by Henry R Askew

I don’t just have a problem deciding where to start (and given the number of unread books I already have stacked up, whether I should start at all!), I also have a problem deciding where to buy these titles.

Yesterday I discovered that Amazon has been abusing its market position in the UK to punish small publishers who don’t do as it says. The New York Times says:

In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the “buy now with 1 click” icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by the British unit of Hachette Livre, from back-list Stephen King novels to, naturally, “The Hachette Guide to French Wine.”

The button allows registered users to purchase titles instantly, with free shipping. Customers can still buy the affected books, but they have to navigate to an open marketplace that links them to third-party sellers of new or used books. And they have to pay for shipping.

And it’s not the first time Amazon has bullied small publishers:

“The buy button is their weapon of choice and that’s how they impose market discipline,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, an American trade group that also briefly lost the buy icon, for titles sold from BackinPrint.com, a print-on-demand service for infrequently purchased works. “This is such a clear indication that once they have the clout they are willing to use it to the full extent that they can. It’s ugly with Amazon and will probably get uglier.”

[...]

The dispute with Hachette is not the first in which Amazon has resorted to removing the “buy now” buttons for certain books. In the spring it started disabling the icons for some small publishers in the United States that resisted Amazon’s demand that they use an Amazon-owned company, BookSurge, for print-on-demand services. Amazon is the dominant seller of such titles.

As a result, some smaller publishers in the United States have signed service agreements with Amazon. But a few refused Amazon’s demand to shift the instant printing of their books to BookSurge, which they say has been demanding a discount of as much as 52 percent on the retail price.

I have taken the Amazon wishlist widget out of the Kits and Mortar sidebar, and am seriously considering organising a boycott. Amazon control 16% of the British book selling market, and they use that to beat down small publishers who don’t have very strong bargaining positions. I appreciate that Amazon has a business to run, but putting pressure on small publishers and competing print on demand services is anti-competitive. And frankly, it’s just not cricket.

So I had a look for other UK-based places to buy Why Does My Cat…? by Sarah Heath, and compared prices to Amazon’s £6.99 with variable despatch and delivery options.:

• BookRabbit: Sells Why Does My Cat…? for £9.99 and offers free UK shipping, despatched within 2 days. Is also a bit Web 2.0-y with space for written and video reviews, discussions etc.
• Borders: £8.99, shipping is £2.29, despatched within 24 hours.
• WHSmith: £8.99, shipping seems to be free, delivery unclear without signing in.

And I’m sure there are other online booksellers that I could use, too.

When I have a bit more time, I am going to dig into this a bit more, and will probably blog about it over on Chocolate and Vodka. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any good cat blogs, please let me know in the comments!

Filed under : books, cats

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