It seems as an industry we have more work to do to get all the British public on our side. The following text forms part of a blog post from a lady living in the Brighton area. The headline for this post is taken from the tag she uses on her post.
Enjoy:
Don’t get me started on the subject of conservatories. I loathe them. Not real ones obv. Real ones that were made by real people with the real purpose of growing plants are lovely. No. It is the pretend ones I cannot stand. The ones that estate agents try to sell me as a winsome feature of a house and which are supposed to denote class, style and taste. Bollocks to it. I shout, waving my fist with bits of spit flecking off my fledgling beard hair. They are expensive, invariably faulty, incredibly ugly (sticking out like UPVC buboes on a plaguey armpit), and always end up as a space where you:
stick the dog when visitors come round, which means that it smells of dog all year round, rendering it totally uninhabitable by everyone else but the dog.
stick the children’s toys because there is nowhere else to put them and you are sick of falling over them in the lounge. Now they are wedged in the conservatory, which is basically a giant, see through toy box and you pass it every day wondering what on earth possessed you to pay out shedloads of money for such a monumental waste of plastic tat (and the toys)
stick the garden furniture to stop it disintegrating in the rain until the summer. Then it rains all summer, so it becomes a giant, see through garden shed instead.
pretend that it is ‘your’ space, so you fill it with things like easels, and exercise bikes and ski equipment and yoga mats for when you finally get around to pampering yourself and having some ‘me’ time. Then you pass it every day as you run backwards and forwards smothering chicken nuggets in tomato sauce, and wiping arses, and singing the third verse to ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ in descant, and elucidating ten facts about the Egyptian afterlife, and it just taunts you as the cobwebs festoon the bars of the exercise bike and you guiltily wipe sauce off your face.
pretend that it is going to look like Andy McDowell’s conservatory in Green Card, by buying four hundred lobelias from B&Q in those small black plastic pots and putting them in there to overwinter before you bed them out in the spring, promising yourself a ‘riot of colour’. What happens is that they freeze all night and roast all day and after three days in the conservatory you appear to have re-enacted on bedding plants, the scorched earth policy of the US government when faced with the dilemma of the lush, Vietnamese jungle, only without having to resort to Agent Orange. You buy a rubber plant, just like the ones in the doctor’s surgery. Failsafe. It sits in a wicker plant holder, covered in dust and for some inexplicable reason smelling of cat wee. After several weeks you realise that you have failed to water it. It does not matter. It will not die. It sits there leering at you. You start to get paranoid about it. It is thinking about how horrible you have been to it. No amount of Baby Bio and leaf shine will rectify things. You know that it is secretly shuffling about the conservatory at nights, spawning and hatching plots. Eventually you know that it will rise up and kill you in your bed. Just like the triffids. You should destroy it. On the other hand, it is quiet now, probably best not to disturb it. You can no longer go into the conservatory. It is a war zone.
That is why I don’t like conservatories. And more proof that we English are rubbish at building things to live in.
When the Romans introduced underfloor heating, interior decor and baths with hot running water, what did we do? We waited until they went home and turned their villas into pig sties while we sat, freezing our bollocks off in a house that even the two most stupid of the three little pigs would have been mortally ashamed of, that were basically made of cow shit and straw. We are idiots.
I am thinking of moving to Scandinavia. I can have a lovely warm house and run about all day long wearing mink bikinis and throwing the children into pools of scalding water heated by volcanos, paying 2p per year for my fuel bills and spending the rest on Amazon orders and Ikea furniture. The downside would be learning to love rollmop herrings, but I could adapt.
I’m wondering whether she might be interested in one of our UPVC orangeries instead. I’ll happily go give her a quote, especially if she puts one of those mink bikinis on for me.
Tags: Conservatories, conservatory rooms, conservatory use, mink bikinis, Orangeries, upvc conservatories, upvc orangeries
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on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under Conservatories, Renegade Conservatory Guy.
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Good job everyone don’t think like that, I’d have a little problem there. I have a ‘pretend’ conservatory and I hardly use any other room, it’s great. Guess I’m not posh though
I agree – a lot of people don’t think like that. However, there is no doubt the conservatory industry is in decline, and I wonder whether more needs to be done to change perceptions like this.
I don’t suppose we can stop people choosing to store their garden furniture and stuff in a conservatory should they choose to. But, my experience is that most of our conservatory customers use theirs as a valuable extra room, and use it all year around.
We need to spend more time selling the advantages, so views like this are a small minority.
I think views like that are a very tiny minority. I’ve sold basic conservatories to lots of friends and they love them and have them furnished beautifully. Personally, I wouldn’t like to be without a conservatory and I guess I’m not alome. I do tend to get good deals on them though.
I’m not sure the conservatory industry is in decline but if it is, we must be getting more of our market share. We manufactured and supplied around 800 conservatories this year (230 of which, we installed), slightly more than in 2008.
The way I see it, is that people will always want to add extra space to their homes and many will want to take the cheapest and easiest route.
I agree that less consumers are searching for the term ‘conservatories’ but that’s partly because more internet users are getting better at searching and specifying longer-tail search terms to find more relevant results. ‘Conservatories’ still the big one though, I need to to do a little work on our position.
All the research suggests the market has declined 25-30% in the last year or two. And, the market is probably half the size it was in 2003.
So, if you’ve sold more conservatories this year than last year, then it’s more down to your hard work and taking market share than the market not declining.
You just need to look at the amount of roofs Ultraframe, Synseal are making compared to previous years. And then look at the other fabricators of roofs – not many of them are making anything like the volumes they were.
Regarding the term ‘conservatories’. If I was you I’d take a break over the Christmas period as no one is searching anyway, and get stuck in again in the New Year (maybe February).
PS. I agree what you say about long tail searches by the way. This site is now P1 and P2 for the search term ’shit conservatories’.
Wow, yeah I just checked it. Well done, and in such a short space of time. Respect!
Are you aware of the recent google search changes (a couple of weeks ago) regarding ‘customisations based on search activity’ ? This is enabled by default and needs disabling when checking your search positions.
No, I wasn’t Dave. How do you disable this?
Just click on ‘Web History’ top left of google search page and then you’ll see the option to disable it.
When enabled, anyone searching for something for the first time will get the correctly ranked results but when they have clicked anything, google messes around with the order of results. Also, wether enabled or disabled, you don’t always get the correct results if you’re logged in to your google account.
To conclude, when checking results, make sure web history is disabled and you’re not logged in to your google account.
Sorry, ‘web history’ link is top-right
Quote
“Bollocks to it. I shout, waving my fist with bits of spit flecking off my fledgling beard hair”
I think the last of this lady’s problems is a conservatory
We haven’t done many conservatories this year , but have had a fair few enquiries to put right older (other companies) ones right .
Thanks Dave. When I click on my web history, I get the option to enable it, so I assume I leave it as it is.
Kevin, ye, I noticed the beard on the woman as well but thought I was being thick so didn’t mention it.
RCG, yep it stays set as you leave it. All the time and money we put in to google rankings then they **** around with it