Almost six months ago we received an official letter that completely turned our lives upside-down. If we fast forward to today it’s safe to say that it was a roller coaster. Managing work with all this has been stressful because we had to decide so much stuff in such a relativity short period of time. Most people plan such a life changing event a year in advance.

Our starting point

We bought the house when plans were already drawn and when the masonry and roof was already in place. We skipped a big part of the building process like foundations, choosing bricks etc. Luckily for us it was a modern design and really what we both would have envisioned ourselves. We wanted a modern looking building with lots of big windows. Light is such an important factor in your daily life, it affects your mood etc. Most old houses in Belgium consists of small rooms and not enough light. So when you buy something like that you have to knock everything out except the outside walls to get what you want. With the right architect you can turn that into something gorgeous.

Insulation

Living in an old house all these years have thought us it's wise to invest a big part of your budget in insulation. It's called "durable building" if you translate it literally from Dutch. In an average home, one quarter of the heat is lost through the walls, and as much as 40% through the windows. That's why we opted for Low-emissivity (low-e) glass. Its secret is the virtually invisible coating applied to one of the two sheets of glass. This coating lets the sun’s rays through (translating into free heat) while reflecting heat in the room back inside so that it does not escape – forming a shield against the cold. As a result, low-e glass provides twice as much insulation as ordinary double glazing. This allows you to install larger windows without having to worry about the impact on your fuel bill - plus you'll feel comfortable everywhere in the room, even right next to the windows. The roof and walls are another important factor if you want to keep the heat escaping down to a minimum. The government has tax deductions in place for a lot of initiatives that are good for the environment. But from what I saw so far it's a pain to find out if you apply, a lot of "if's" are involved ;)

Think ahead...

We learned that most decisions already have to be known when the architect is setting up a proposal. Take lighting for example: it's very wise to already have a vague idea of what you want because you have to know where the connections have to be cut into the walls so that you don't see any cables. Once the walls are plastered it's too late to do such destructive work. Most modern lighting requires a wall connection or is built into the wall or floor. If you have the money you can order a light study, but I have no idea how much that would cost. They can render a room or space equipped with light-fixtures in virtual reality so that you get an idea how it will be in real life.

The same goes for your computer network, even if it's for personal use. You don't want telephone cables or ethernet cables laying around in your new house. So either you work with cable gutters or you build a box into the floor in the office like we did. All other rooms just have wall connections. Better to have too many connections than too little. Put an ethernet connection next to your TV too for your game console or the the Apple's iTV :D

Broadband internet

Make sure you have your internet connection in place before you move. Even before we had our electricity up and running the necessary preparations were taken. Find out if DSL is still possible, so you know your options. In our case any DSL wasn't possible, so we had to switch to cable instead. Our internet broadband connection was in place pretty soon, one big concern less to worry about.

Deciding on the kitchen

After some extensive research we came to the conclusion that design kitchens cost a fortune. Brands like Butlhaup and Siematic have prices that are above 25,000 euro "cough". I'm no 'Chef de Cuisine' so that's a way over budget. So we opted for the next best thing "Ikea" :) Be sure to bring your plan to the shop, or be prepared to hang around all day and plan your kitchen there like we did. It is something you don't decide lightly and you need to come up with your design before you talk to a representative. But they are very helpful and supply some solid advice. Also don't believe all the measurements on the plan of the architect. Most of the time there will be some difference in reality.

They have a great follow up system in place that calls you when things will be delivered and how much you'll need to pay etc. I even called to ask about the number of the grey color used on the doors and the lady had to do extra research for this because there wasn't any info in their system about it. She called me yesterday with the number. Both Evelyne and Ann V. from Ikea Ternat were very friendly and helpful any time I needed them. You also get a 10 year warranty which is great at their price point. Another tip is don't build it yourself unless you are extremely skilled. You can't believe how many parts a full blown kitchen has, it's a gigantic puzzle. My guess is that it would have taken a month to install ourselves :) Afterwards we were called again with the question if we were satisfied on how everything progressed.

Budget

One thing is enormously clear and that is that building a house is a money eating monster. Never in my entire life I have seen money disappearing so rapidly. You can calculate all you want and you will still come up short because of unforeseen obstacles along the way. Don't forget to calculate the notarial costs (twice, once for the deed (akte in Dutch) and also for the mortgage) and registration rights. All the extras in the house that we decided on costed us an extra 30,000 Euro so be warned. Also it doesn't help if you love design ;) Don't feel bad if you can't do it all at once. You'll want to have new furniture, a terrace, a garden etc. This is something that will take a few years and we don't mind.

The big move

The big moment has arrived for us to prepare the moving and to actually move on Thursday. It could be slow here for the next few days. You know why now :) I'll be so glad once the whole 'thing' will be over. I'm looking forward to some less stressful times. I can't count the moments I wished I've could escaped to a sunny beach, a cocktail in my hand, nothing to worry about and some nice chill tunes playing in the background. Fingers crossed that everything will go smoothly.

Today’s topic has been on my mind on several occasions but I always postponed writing about it. Something that happened on Saturday triggered this again. It’s an example out of the real world. One of those things that is on our to-do list is some new office/house furniture. So we visited a design shop and after some looking around we kinda found some great ideas. Before making a final decision we thought it would be a great idea to have some interior advice to see if all fits well in the available space.

Services

The services include a measurement at your place, color advice, ground layout with the furniture placed etc. So if this was similar to the world I work in, in most cases they would be required to do this free of charge. Guess what, they charge you for it. Which is only fair, it takes effort and time. If you buy a certain amount of furniture the amount gets deducted from the total invoice.

Our world has a different set of rules

What is so different between an interior design proposal and a website/cms proposal? It's simple in our world a vision, ideas, advice and even design mockups in most situations are free. These practices are most often used in bidding for a larger project. Almost always it is in black and white mentioned in the RFP that we can't charge one Euro for it unless we get the job. Yeah right that brings bread on the table. Promises, promises...

We get them all the time but recently we had the pleasure to receive an RFP from a city at our coast that spans the crown. That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.

Time to put a stop to it

The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.

So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work. A day that you don't earn anything, how uneconomic is that and not to mention unfair. Bigger agencies even employ someone just to handle those. No wonder that studies prove that it costs agencies approximately 11% of their gross income.

There are other ways

As agencies we need to start to show clients that there is another way too. What about reputation, a credentials presentation and chemistry? Looking at someone's portfolio is how I choose my freelancers. I don't demand free work from them to prove themselves.

Luckily not all clients/brands are like that. Those earn my upmost respect and I can only hope that others will become as wise. I know it's utopia to think this will change something but I want the world to know that I had enough and I hope other colleagues will think in a similar way.

First of all, I’m back! The move went well. However, it’s a bit chaotic here. A lot of boxes still need to be unpacked. I tell ya this takes more then a Spring cleaning :) I’ve gathered too much stuff over the past 12 years. Oh well, at least I am connected already :) I thought this was a good moment to share a small but useful EE tip. Before ExpressionEngine version 1.5 there was this problem when people didn’t enter the full URL of an article page, EE loaded a rather messy page. Since 1.5 it’s easy to make sure all broken URLs don’t get a 404 error page or a messy page.

This problem often occurred when people clicked on a very long link from the e-mail you receive when you are subscribed to the comments of an article. If the URL is very long chances are that the link is broken because it's broken into 2 lines. By adding the require_entry="yes" parameter in all the necessary exp tags of the article template page we can warn the user that the URL is incomplete or that the requested URL can't be found.

How to use of Expression Engine's require_entry parameter

This parameter tells the weblog tag that the URL should contain a valid URL title or ID. If this is not the case and the URL is broken the weblog tag won't show any data. In this situation we can use the "if no_results" conditional to show the user a message to inform what is happening and maybe refer to the archive page.

Make sure you add this parameter in all necessary exp tags of the template. For example also in the "exp:comment:entries" tag. This way no content will be shown. The only exp tag I left out is the "exp:comment:form" tag. It is not needed in this tag.

Hope this short EE tip is a useful one.