Week 74

The final bills are rolling in, the site is gradually becoming clearer and clearer of rubbish each day, and we can just about make out the horizon. It’s still a long way off, but we passed another milestone this week and I actually got in touch with Andy again about sorting out dates for the final moving-in. It will be our fourth move, not counting the move into and out of storage

The drive groundsmen left site on Friday having cut blocks into slivers all week to fill gaps and fiddled with man-hole covers to set the patterns without interruption. They look great, but the neighbours weren’t enormously impressed with the noise and dust of the table saw.

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main sewer manhole cover
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cuts for groundlights
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rainwater surround
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granite setts bordering garage door
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porch mid-flow
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pre-pointed porch
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freshly pointed porch
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back fence pre-slabs

The car-charging post is A Big Deal, mainly because it’s a bit esoteric and involves Neil to make the thing, the chippies, the grounds guys and the electricians none of whom had done this sort of thing before. We wanted to site it at the corner of the parking bay by the fence, so, in theory, if we ever had two electric cars, the chargers could share the single post. But although Pat had dug a lovely trench for it all along the line of setts, the conduit wasn’t long enough, so we ended up choosing a spot right in the centre for it.

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where to put the post?
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here
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back of the post

The three-phase conduit is running inside a large ribbed duct which houses the wires wrapped in armoured shielding. It needs two bends to get to the charing unit: one from underground to start running up the groove in the back of the post, and another to run through a hole from the back of the post to the charging unit in the front. The armoured sheath causes bends to happen at a really wide diameter which makes it sit proud of the groove. Not cool. So Steve had a brainwave to terminate the sheath inside a recessed box and run the wires through the post freely where’d they be safe anyway. The photo shows the conduit without the box, and you can see the box being chipped into the post in the time lapse.

Another piece of electrical good news was overcoming wiring up the lamppost.  Steve was sure that the thing was set in concrete and that we’d have to dig up the whole thing to get a wire through. Luckily, a little scrabbling on hands and knees revealed a hole at the base of the lamp undergorund to run the cable through and up to the top. The sparkies quickly ran some rods up the post to check it was clear, and they wired it all up in half an hour.

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coast is clear for wires

And just to ensure that a good test was given to the ditch before the guys finished, it hammered down.

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a river runs through it

Deeks is getting a clear run at snagging this week, as I’m getting preoccupied with fireplace, steel cladding and landscape gardening. Alyson recommended I stay out of their hair for a bit in any case. The cleaners come on Wednesday as do the electricians and the Rako commissioning guy. Thursday must be for tidying up and doing outside work. Friday is Practical Completion which is amazing. Next Monday I walk round with Alyson, and next Tuesday is a day for settling final accounts with Tim.

I feel quite emotional about finishing. Gregory will be going off to uni before we move in, and the moving in itself, the budget and all the work it’s going to take to get the house sorted is daunting. We won’t have curtains despite Rachel’s excellent help in getting us there. No money.  No wardrobe in our bedroom either. No money. No hanging lights, no furniture, no garage storage. It’s a little depressing because we had budgeted for all this at the outset. It wasn’t an enormous budget–nothing grand or gold-plated–but enough to sort these last few bits out. Instead, we’ve spent it on rent and management for 10 excruciating months. I know that I’ve bought a T-shirt and a book of tickets to my very own pity party, and that doesn’t feel right either. I think it’s more of setting myself a goal that isn’t turning out right. It’s the OCD part of me that is upset, not the Surrey-housewife part (that part is pretty small anyway). I’m not very good at changing gears. The most emotional part is that I’ve let the family down. But they’ve been awesome during this whole thing, and afterwards, I’ll be stronger and they’ll just keep on being awesome. Clinton is already planning the next build. (omg)

The loss adjuster is proving painstaking about invoices and their wording too. I know it’s his job to be responsible for extracting cash out of the insurers, but he’s rejected my invoices from architects and contract management because they don’t refer directly to Water Damage. I would have thought that everything happening after the original PC of 20 June was a result of Water Damage otherwise we wouldn’t have had to do it. But no, I’ve got to get the extra info onto the paperwork, and it will be difficult to get it from Ben whom we haven’t heard from in a fortnight.

So, we’re almost there. Fingers crossed for no big issues at the end. Again.

 

 

Week 73

As we lurch into another week of very little happening on remedial works compared with masses accomplished on the driveway, I’ll start this post with a bit of a change in tone. The blog has gone from Public to Private to keep the project’s chronological recordings from being used by lawyers, and since you’ve suffered through the rigamarole of answering invitations and creating log-ins and passwords to get access here, let me reward you by gently leading you towards the edge of the rabbit hole to peer down at what’s really been going down behind my previously sugar-coated versions of my eleventy bloody billion previous posts.

The post-flood remedial works are supposed to be complete by 16 September. This would be funny if we hadn’t been here before; now it’s just business as usual. It includes both a builders clean and a sparkle clean as well as the handover of The O&M Manual. Just that alone should take about two weeks! O is for Operations, but I’m a little hazy on M if it’s not Manual, as it would then be an Operations and Manual Manual. ?? Tim’s plan such as it is, has the electricians in Tuesdau (HA!–still hadn’t had confirmation of their arrival by last Friday), decorating and groundworks complete, joinery assembled and snagging finished by Friday, leaving room for the cleaners to be in early next week. Clearly, pigs are aloft in Oxshott, and there’s nothing we can do but watch this oncoming train wreck. For the third time.

The biggest problem is that there’s no stipulation of timing with the insurance works–the loss adjuster is only interested in cost. Our rent and associated Liquidated Ascertained Damages are considered uninsured losses and aren’t covered in the remedial works, but a small teensy portion of them is covered in the JCT, the main contract of the build. And the kicker with that is that when we took advice from Ben at the beginning, we set the LADs to be £500 a week which just about only covered our rent and not a lot else. Clearly this is no where near enough and doesn’t cover things like numerous removals, setting up services at a rental property, storage costs, postal redirection, estate agents fees or wear and tear on one’s soul. We’ve got a discussion to have with Ben, but….

Anyway, as there’s never been a dull moment on this project, er, apart from the bricklayers’ one-week strike…. or maybe the plasterers’ scheduled three week/actual six week stint (unbelievable),…. the biggest hiccup this week is that Ben has left. He has suffered a bit of a breakdown and if he told me that half the problem was bullying by our contractor, I wouldn’t be surprised. His girlfriend wrote to us on Friday effectively resigning him, and his out-of-office email says the office is closed until Autumn 2017. It’s a huge blow to him personally, and it’s horrible for him I’m sure. But professionally, it leaves us right up the creek without our paddles.

The contract requires a Contract Administrator, and because Tim is Tim, and he is entitled to do so in the contract, he won’t do any work at all without one. So we’ve hired Alyson (welcome, Alyson) from Aspire, the driveway crowd (who’s doing an awesome job), to pick up the pieces and see us across the finish line. It’s the logical solution as their values as a company are exemplary, the work they’re doing on the drive will actually be done early (Shocking.  I know.), and they know the landscape (sorry) of developing houses in the area. Tim’s already objected that us hiring her is a conflict of interest, and to object to her appointment is another one of his entitlements under contract, but I’m not sure if it’s in his interest or if an adjudicator would agree with him, because we all simply want this wrapped up. Perhaps Tim will relax into this new appointment, and I hope he does for everyone’s sake. Alyson is meeting with Tim this week, and hopefully they can get started without drama.

The JCT says that the contractor has to make “regular and diligent progress.” Diligence is a little suspect because as you can see on the time-lapse, although Mike is armed with paints and brushes, he’s spent an awful lot of that time talking to the Aspire guys outside. Everyone’s really waiting for the flooring guys to finish laying the wood upstairs before any real work can start. They’d done a lot of the joinery work before the flooring went down: some of the doors needed replacing and lots of warped architrave was reinstated. You’d think that after Tuesday when the flooring was finished, that they’d be onsite in force. But, sadly, no. Still no site manager, still no programme. Tiles and skirting hadn’t been ordered, groundworkers were nowhere to be seen, and, surprise, no sparkies had attended for weeks. I would like to be pleasantly surprised to have these things in place and all mapped out. But I’m still waiting even now.  It’s a big ask for Alyson to wade in at this eleventh hour, she seems up for the challenge, and we’re putting a lot of faith in her.

Dave completed the snagging list over the weekend ready to give to Tim today. Everyone loves a list because you can simply tick things off which gives an enormous sense of progress. The challenge is to put some perspective on the individual items. Some, like reinstating the driveways for our long-suffering neighbour round the back are huge. Others, like picking up a single bolt off a windowsill, are insignificant. It’s great that the list is done and distributed, but I can’t honestly see the more than 200 items being scheduled and done by next Friday.  Do you?

Take a look at the electrical cupboard for instance. It needed to be completely reinstalled because it sat right in the path of the waterfall back in June. The sequence of works to fix it involves the electricians, our appointed security guy doing the alarm, the plumbers doing the heating manifold, the joiners and the decorators to each do their thing. You’d obviously think, “oooo this requires careful sequencing of trades.” What we’ve ended up with is everyone doing a little bit when they can, nothing getting completely done, and a shocking puzzle pieces arrangement of build-out joinery to cover it all: wires sticking out, bare blockwork behind pipes, unintelligible arrangements of wires….. What we want, and what’s on the snagging list to be done, is a quality finished cupboard. This isn’t it.

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don’t get me started

Enough griping. I haven’t put any time-lapses on the blog for a while so I’ve put a bunch showing progress made on the drive at the bottom of this post. In the meantime, here’s a lovely tiny video of some hawk action one day when visiting site (Allison, can you tell what these creatures are?) and a few photos front and back.

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it will get less stripe-y when they tamp it down and add sand to the joints
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digger’s last week coming up
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rear garden still to be sieved

Next week we’re supposed to see tilers, joiners, grounds-guys, electricians and decorators. And the kitchen company because someone has dinged one of the doors and it needs replacing. I’m sure much of this will happen, but the problem with having a load of trades in all at once is that it gets crowded and work actually slows down. We’ll check the snagging list against how much progress was made on Friday.

In the meantime, the drive will be finished a few days early. Go figure.

https://youtu.be/7aKZsG2Eka4https://youtu.be/kQzLZa1ol2w