That claim sums up much of what I dislike about frameworks.

In the marketing brochure, it’s your perfect dream home with everything you could ever need in a single, neatly integrated package. You get someone to do a survey to check for major structural flaws, you spend a couple of hours checking that all the essential utilities are connected up, and before you know it, you’ve made the biggest purchase of your project’s life. A week later, you’re sitting out on the deck, enjoying a cocktail with your glamorous friends on a warm summer evening as your baby sleeps soundly in the room upstairs, just like the models in the photo.

A fortnight after they hand over the keys and you move in, you often realise that what you really bought was a place that had 80% of what you needed. Unfortunately, to reach 100% you would have to knock down a few walls and rewire the whole building, costing at least half as much again as you already paid, so instead you start running extension cables from sockets in one room to appliances in the next, resort to flaky WiFi networking, and install a sofabed in the lounge because you couldn’t quite fit a double in what was supposed to be the spare room.

Over the next few months, you realise that it’s also really inefficient to run the place, because the guys who built it went for all the attention-grabbing features that would push up the price they could get, but what you really needed was energy-efficient appliances and a good HVAC system based on renewables. Also, the soundproofing between downstairs and upstairs sucks, and that baby who was supposed to be asleep during your summer party wakes up every time someone opens a new bottle.

Three years later, when you’re surprised to find you also had twins, there is nowhere to put the extra bedroom you need. A little after that, you have to move to a completely new place, because there’s nowhere to install a lift for your elderly parents, and even if there were you don’t have the three-phase power supply to run it.

Except you can’t, because in the few years since you moved in the area has become run down, the value of your place has sunk like a rock, and there is so little interest in buying it for anything but the land it’s on that you’re in negative equity and can’t afford to move.