Back again. More on the general state of play later, but for now, it’s shed time.
The garage is too dang small. We always knew it was too small: too small when we spec’d it out when I drove a Grand Voyager and now too small for the Tesla. Still too small for all the gardening, camping, sporting and building equipment, and definitely no swinging of cats at all. So,…. shed it is.
We’ve hired George and Olly to build a shed and plant some trees in the garden. Us being us, it’s not just any old store bought shed… We’re using some of the materials left over from the build for this and other parts in the back part of the garden, and because we’ll see the shed from every angle of the house, it’s got to look pretty nice. They’ll be here for a couple of weeks.
The walls will be red cedar and the fun part will be a green living roof.
built as a stand-alone structure on the patio to be moved when the concrete is poured
Surprising how many moving pieces there are to a simple shed: composite beams on a concrete base, pent roof at < 10 degrees pitch for the living bit, windows of uPVC and small and high enough so no one can wriggle in and positioned in full view of the cctv camera, old water butt (that the builders put the hole in too high so is now redundant–I recall all those discussions with Tim: Don’t worry about the infill being too high, the water butt will fill anyway because not all the water would flow downhill into the pipe…..) placed under the roof using the house’s aluminum piping. It will be a pretty posh lawn-mower garage in the end.
concrete poured and shed moved to its new homered cedar exterior
Three of the specialist trees arrived a few weeks ago: two acer sango kaku for the front by the cars, and a huge almighty great big acer griseum for the back by the seating area. Our friends Paul and Kim have one in their garden bang centre of their garden, and it’s a beautiful beastie. This one will be quirky and weird with low hanging branches for hanging loads of neat things from. A quartet of silver birch along the back fence will see the heavy work done. Then I can get on with the fiddly flowery bits.
acer delivered in the snowit will be nice when its around the backpair of acers kept safe in the back until they’re planted
Chris and Chris work for George and Olly, they’re the guys on the tools, and they’re awesome. Communication between all of us is really good which makes the job go really smoothly. One of the Chris’s has a fitness company that he bookends around his landscaping work. He’s at http://yellowbrickfitness.co.uk/, if you’re in the Redhill area check him out! Both Chris’s have recently transplanted themselves to London and we’re glad to have them.
Now that the initial chin-scratching phase is over in setting up the framework, next week will see all the nice bits the sides of the shed all zipped up, the lovely green roof installed and the trees going in. Right in time for the beginning of Spring which Punxsutawney Phil says is due six weeks early this year–yay!
The contractors are back this week to sort out immediate Stuff. These include things like painting the garage floor and filling large gaps in blockwork in the walls out there, fixing the rainwater diverters, sorting my neighbour’s drive, and changing the loft boards. What’s been lacking on our side is any kind of oversight or ensuring that the work is carried out to the expected standard. So, …drumroll, please… we welcome Phillip to the role of Contract Administrator III. He’s the new Alyson/Ben, and so far he’s a total rock star. He’s come in, assessed the build, found 65 items to put on the rectification list, and written a comprehensive report, with photographic evidence!, to circulate. Why oh why didn’t we hire him earlier?? He’s a cyclist as well which makes his appointment even more jammy.
While Tim has been dicking me around on timing by deliberately not letting me know what the plan is or what he’ll be doing during his Week of Fixing Stuff, I’ve been biding some time for Phillip to get up to speed and take the reins. Brave man is Phillip, jumping on board this moving train. Meanwhile: patience, patience, patience. I won’t be rushing to contact Tim through his lawyers as per recent arrangements to get stuff like rainwater pipework and the insulation complete, I’ll wait it out, try to chillax about the When, and leave it all to Phillip.
Although he’s employed by us, it will be Phillip’s job to impartially enforce the contract as CA. That means that he makes Tim do the stuff he said he’d do, and he makes us pay the stuff we said we’d pay. Our spanner in these works is that thanks to previous management’s weird ideas about signing off everything willy-nilly without checking properly, we’ve paid…
e v e r y t h i n g
…in full. Usually, in a normal world, that would put us in an unenviable position leaving us exposed for overpaying for an incomplete job. But in the Weird World of Building, this is entirely normal; lots of contractors won’t even talk to you unless you’ve paid them first, never mind actually show up and do anything. Three years in and there is so so so much I still don’t understand about all this.
So, returning to the day-to-day….. Mike’s been back with his paint brush to paint the garage floor. You may remember that this was the solution given when it was discovered that a 1 cubic metre hole had to be butchered out of the pristine garage slab (and rebar) to re-route the water pipe that somehow was seen fit to be installed too close to ground level. The reinstatement of the concrete floor left a great big square of different concrete which isn’t cool. The rectifying painting never happened, so they’ve come back to do it now. Over last weekend just gone, in preparation, we, and the now-very-grumpy children, had set up the scouts’ mess tent (thank you 1st Oxshott) in the garden to temporarily house all our Stuff.
temporary garageleaning tower of tent
Dave recommended Watco products as the fix, and Mike got set to work on the first day cleaning out the dust, cutting back the plastic around the perimeter and using their Etch and Clean product to provide a good base. That took overnight to dry, so painting started the following day. First coat down and Mike was off to his next job while it dried before the second coat scheduled for our third day of fun and games. Luck would have it that we’d had a storm blowing through the last few days, and you’ll recall that we live right near the heath. This combination is a bit toxic for painting garage floors as loads of beech and oak leaves swirled around in the breeze and blew directly through the door that Mike had left open and onto the newly laid paint.
brilliant
I couldn’t get in there to remove them because the paint was wet. So I left it. Not my usual vibe as 9 times out of 10 I’m a get-stuck-in-and-sort-it-out kind of girl. Although this was frustrating to see, in actual fact I think the leaves didn’t stick too badly, and the second coat hopefully would have erased whatever slight marks the pesky leaves would have left anyway. I haven’t been in to check because it takes a few days to get seriously un-wet. But,… reminds me of Michael Roux. It will be nice we can repeat our Grand Move of Stuff back into the garage in reverse and return the mess tent to the scouts.
The environmental guys visited this week to inspect the mould in the loft. They tested all the boards with their whizzy little water meter and found the really mouldy ones to be around 30%. They should be around 15%. To our horror, they suggested that the problem wasn’t left-over damp from the flood, but instead, that the flat roof between Gillian’s room and the main structural oak frame is leaking or allowing condensation to build. They think that either it’s a seal that’s properly gone, or that a thermal barrier is missing and making water condense on the boards, causing them to grow their fuzzy mouldy surface. And the growth on the floor is due to spores flying around and settling onto it. Ew.
one of the mouldy boardsa row of mouldy boards
This means that the whole problem shifts its Sauron-like focus from the insurers re the leak, to Tim re general building and warranty. But he doesn’t know this yet. The environmental report is due out soon and will go first to the loss adjusters and maybe then on to the insurers. I’ve just got to make sure that Tim gets a copy of it so that we can start the ball rolling and get it fixed. I spent most of my day yesterday wandering around in a disbelieving daze wondering how things could get any worse than they already were.
In a fit of wisdom and unusual allocation of resources, Tim sent Josh the young chippy, his finance guy and Dulux to tear up the horrible bit of destroyed rear drive and replace with a 6″ deep concrete float. Nothing like having experts do the job they’re trained to do. All nice guys, but I’d expected Lee and the groundwork guys to do, er, groundworks. James reckoned there were a couple of metres square that needed replacing, but he’d forgotten about the temporary tarmac and barrowfuls of hardcore shoring up the drive they’d put down during last year’s rains. He marked his assumption in yellow.
that’s not quite all the horrible-ness, James
All in all, there’s about 12 square metres to replace from corner to corner, and to his credit, they re-marked the larger area before they set to work. And the leftover bit from the demolition needs a clean line cut into concrete as well. Luckily, Mark and his landscaping team put us off for another week, so they won’t have to face setting their fence up and having dead slabs in the way.
digging out the broken bitsear defenders are for wimps “I’m deaf anyway!” shouts Dulux
Concrete was poured by the afternoon, and it was looking great until they said that they’d be back next week to remove the kango-ed out spoil. Whoa! Brakes on! No, they’re supposed to FINISH THE JOB and take it all away TODAY. Full truck, I’m afraid, madam. What about my landscapers who are coming next week to put up my fence right through the middle of your pile of shite? Sorry, we only do what we’re told, and we’re clearing another site tomorrow, so that leaves us next week.
Sigh.
concreteshite
Oh yeah, and it rained this week. So that means despite Ricky’s magic touch with a silicone gun, the outdoor lights tripped.
Flicking through my Waitrose Magazine searching in vain for interesting Christmas recipes this week (and only coming up with increasing feelings of inadequacy looking at saucy Nigella in page after posed page of perfection), I saw this quote by Michael Roux. You gotta hand it to Trevor and Sid for getting onsite double quick when things go wrong. We must be on their quick-dial list which is great for service, but I think they should have listened to Michael.
After much inspecting and head-scratching, Sid realised that last week’s tepid-water situation was down to the lack of a non-return valve in the pipework feeding the tank. It looked like the cold was getting pumped round the pipes when required, but kept filling things until turned off. One of those things was the big hot water tank in the loft which kept getting topped with cold as we used the hot. Sid said he’d seen it before on a dog-washing station (really?!) where a blending valve had been added. The more hot water we used, the more it got cooled down by the cold water. Not great. So one valve installed later, and now we’ve got bags of hot from every tap and shower. Hooray!
He doesn’t usually carry a non-return valve around with him, so he cribbed one off the setup in the girls’ bathroom that he was due to check anyway. We’d bought one of those fancy ExoFill taps where the waste doubles as a fill, so it eliminates the need for a separate spout. Very whizzy and not that expensive. Our problem was that it never filled with any speed. It was always just a dribble. It was odd, because the pipes were 25 mm diameter, the same as the sink which flowed like fury. Sid thought the slowth might be the thermostatic valve plumbed in upstream, so he gradually took it apart over the course of the morning. The valve was ok, and the cartridge worked, but what he found was that there was a massive wodge of silicone gunk in the pipework blocking the flow. Wodge removed, and now the ExoFill is a torrent. Fabulous.
torrential bath
Dave came to site midweek to check that the mould growing in the loft required the loft boards to be changed. You may recall from previous posts about June’s flood that the contractor was working from a Scope Document that set out what work was required to fix the house. This document became the kind of bible for the remedial works, and is the one the insurers approved. One of the items on it was to replace stained loft floorboards. That’s a large job and one that Tim’s been avoiding even though it’s in black and white on the snagging list and the scope document. I’m not quite sure why this one has been left and left and left. It’s even more curious because another item in the document is to cover the ceiling lights that poke up through the floor of the loft with little hoods to protect them from frying the insulation that they get covered with. At the moment, the solution was to leave the lights completely bare of insulation in the whole area which leaves great big cold spots–not great from a thermal efficiency point of view.
The question is: why would Tim hesitate to have the insurance company pay to replace the loft boards when he’s got to go up there anyway and take them up to add the hoods and insulation? A bit of mould would work in his favour here. I just don’t get it, and I don’t like to think he’s being contrary for the sake of it. The Loss Adjuster wants proof that the work hasn’t been carried out if he’s to chase Tim, and Tim needed proof that there is mould to carry out the work. So Dave’s visit was all about recording these things, taking some snaps, and writing a report (and corresponding invoice) to say the bleeding obvious and get the whole thing in motion. A big thanks to Dave; he’s always welcome and always good for a very measured and balanced view on how to manage the situation. And another week goes by…..
mouldy loft and lights ready for their hoods
Ricky the New Sparky was in on Friday to sort out some of the light sockets too. We’ve got dippy things occurring like inconsistent multi-gang switches (the main lights are always the switch nearest a doorway) a fancy skirting light missing its innards, and fiddling with the outdoor lights sunk into the ground to stop the circuits tripping every time it rains. That was an easy one–the seals had been installed upside down. There are six of these, and now they’re bomb-proofed, sunk in the right way round and all siliconed up.
Hopefully we’re getting to the very end of Bits And Pieces.
The garden is almost done. Mark and Sam have finished off the back path and porch by pointing it all together. Amazing how much of a difference closing in those lines makes. The Contractor is due to return next week and fix the drive in the back amongst other things, so there’s no point in risking putting up a fence while they’re taking up concrete etc. I need to go back there and set a line for this fence over the weekend so everyone knows where they are.
the benches are to keep people from wander in freely
Just a bit of tamping down at the front, some hedging at the back, and voila!
The yellow pipe remains, and hopefully will disappear shortly. I’ve been in touch with Trevor the plumber again whom we’ve asked to cut it to length for the fire pit.
plan
This fire pit is becoming a little like the fireplace: too long to decide on the design, and the installation is now all out of sequence. And Clinton is truly sick of talking about it with me. I had no idea the natural gas option was so dang expensive. My favourite are these cast concrete things, and they’re special because if you make them out of normal concrete, the relatively high water content within the material expands in the heat of the fire, and they tend to go bang in a catastrophic kind of way. So, really nice fire pits are made of a mix of stuff to get the water levels right down….and the price goes right up. Time to investigate options. I’ve thought about making one from the bits of leftover oak and a large bit of stone on top, so I’ve been talking to a guy in Southampton that makes the burners (one of the only UK guys to do this–they’re super popular in the States, why not here??). He’s got me to refine my design with a few important tweaks. Luckily the position of the pipe, which was a complete guess, vaguely works in the plan once we’ve populated it with a likely combination of furniture and safe distances from the raging inferno. Time to spend the cash? Don’t know, jury is still out.
fire pit idea
Trevor is due to send Sid to us back onsite anyway because there are a few plumbing hiccups occurring. You’d think that checking and re-checking before they carry out any checks at all would be the way forward after all the drama in the summer, but sadly, no. Maybe these things just pop spontaneously? Anyway, today’s issue is that the hot water is irregularly tepid sometimes which is most unpleasant after an early run in the -1 ºC. Added to the list are the already noted issues of the throne of a toilet in the master ensuite not flushing with any verve, and the heating controls in the hallway (always off = brr) and kitchen (always on = lava) don’t work at all bearing no resemblance to the temperature on the control panel.
Is this normal to have so many things go wrong, or at least, not quite right?
It’s much more fun to see changes in the landscaping side. We spent this weekend moving Stuff from the front to the back corner to get it off the drive. I’m pretty desperate to get this house looking less like a building site and more like the home we intended to build. This Stuff consists of: lovely old pieces of oak ready to be turned into something fun, lots of unused bricks of various shapes and sizes, tiles, tiles and more tiles, and the extra paving slabs shipped from deepest Yorkshire. We’re still got 9 old (“vintage” right?) railway sleepers and a bunch of aluminium downpipe offcuts out the front too. But Mark and his gang are due to finish this week, so their Stuff will disappear too.
The next job outside is the planting. Structure first. There’s a bit of box blight going around in Surrey at the moment, so I’ve been warned off planting any. Ilex crenata is a good solution, grows about the same pace and will look good, dense and verdant. It’s even called “dark green” which bodes well in an optimistic way. Trees are on the menu too and it’s getting round time to make some orders.
Back to the house, today’s list included phoning:
Steve the electrician–the lights outside are still tripping OMG, and I need yet another date for when he’s going to fit the replacement broken stuff from last week
Trevor–see above
Alyson–where is the building control certificate? trade warranties?
Peter–will he be the next CA?
Toby–has he received Clive’s fireplace drawings?
Graham–a furniture restorer for the kitchen table that is looking a little tired
Luke–when is Envirovent coming to fix the SpaceX-soundalike of our ventilation system
My last post turned into a bit of a rant, so with this one I’ll do a complete 180 and focus on the really good changes in the build.
One of my pieces of advice for anyone starting a project like this is to plan the kitchen and the fireplace first. There are soooo many decisions that need to be made from soooo many trades that it’s best to coordinate a single plan before anyone arrives onsite with their spanners. The kitchen is a no-brainer for planning; with half a bijillion kitchen shops on the high street it’s one of Those Fun Things to do with a huge project like this.
chimney plan
But the fireplace has just as many trades involved if not more. We made the decision early on to have the face sit flush with the wall and the chimney sit proud of the house.
And we decided that the fuel would be gas. Neither of these stuck, and we now have a false chimney breast with a wood burning stove. Marvellous. The design process has taken literally months, and I have managed to piss off my whole team, including my darling husband, so much with indecision and general questions that we removed it from the build and made it be a client direct package. Again, marvellous, but at least I’ve now got just me to please with no deadlines apart from those I set myself. The next deadline is Christmas, three months since moving in, and even that looks dicey.
We wanted a grand statement, more like a piece of art than just a hole-in-the-wall modern fire. Clinton has always liked CorTen steel, so Steve from Bradley Stoves ,who is doing the installation, recommended a guy called Toby to fabricate the steel cladding. Toby is doing another steel cladding job for Steve, and he runs Arc Fab Sussex in Lewes. Toby’s specialties lie in Big Things like narrow boats, railings, and bridges. He is also a trained artist so likes doing “little” jobs like ours. This “small” piece of steel will be 3 mm thick, 2.6 m high and 2.1 wide with cuts, curves, and supports to house the stove and the TV. Anyway, it was a pleasure meeting him and seeing the site, and now we’ve welcomed Clive the draughtsman on board to measure up so we can have it made.
the goalpart of Toby’s narrow boat project at the yard
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The stove has sat forlorn, half-installed by Steve’s gang for months while I got my act together coordinating the cladding. The family and I did some final measurements to make sure we were set on the dimensions before Steve’s crowd came up to build out the final interior of the chimney breast.
think twice, cut oncefirst bit of the metal carcassmore carcassthe carcass is filled with rock woolthe whole thing is covered in 50 mm fireproof board
As well as building the skeleton for the chimney breast and cladding it in fibreboar, the guys also brought up the lovely piece of 30 mm thick Autumn Brown granite that we chose in the summer, now cut to size and all ready to fit. And because it’s St Anne’s and nothing ever goes quite to plan, they gingerly lifted it out of the van, and it broke into two pieces in their hands. Back in the van it went. Of course, the yard they got it from doesn’t have another piece big enough, so I spent a couple of harried days racing round Surrey finding a replacement match. Luckily, I found one in Hazelemere, and I’m waiting on confirmation of the final dims before committing to a size in the order.
Next up is drafting the final dimensions for the steel, fabricating it, weathering it, and installing. Clive is the draughtsman and does the drawings for Toby, so he drove up early one morning to Measure. This is no small undertaking as he takes on board all the risk if the beast arrives onsite and doesn’t fit (actually, if this happens we’ll probably end up rebuilding the innards). He’s a lovely chap who used to be a blacksmith in nearby Bookham. He’s got more involved in the drawing side of things recently but he still keeps his hand in the Making Process by silversmithing. Not so great for his wife who doesn’t wear jewellery he says, but fabulous for his daughter. Anyway, lasers at the ready, and he’s gone away to draw plans and liaise with Toby. If Steve can give us an install date by the time it’s built, the whole thing should be done by Christmas with any luck!
can you find Clive’s laser line?
Other things brewing are fitting out the study with its desk and cupboards. We’ve got Barry onboard, and he’s been very patient with us while we work out the finances. We’ve got a simple idea, and it’s just a matter of pressing the go button.
Barry’s plan for the study .... is an improvement on this!
Nisi installed the CCTV cameras a couple of weeks ago. After the wire-debacle, we’ve got some natty little grey cameras in three places all linked up to a DVR in the data cabinet.
eye spy
They’re IR too, so we can track foxes scuttling around at night as well as any miscreants lurking in the shadows.
I’m watching you, Wazowski
The garden has totally taken over in the three years we’ve been out. All those lovely plants I tended for all those years, and all that awful lawn that turned to moss and we cursed over, are all no more. I have only ever once hired a professional to help out with any garden, during one spring when I was vastly pregnant with one kid or other and couldn’t get near the ground much less have any stamina to actually do anything horticulturally useful. But Nicola’s plan required the A-Team of landscape gardeners, so we’ve invited Mark and his gang on board to do the job. A few months back I put out a request for recommendations on Facebook, and almost everyone I know wholeheartedly recommended Mark. So we’re lucky to have him on board with Max, Duncan, Sam, and sometimes Wes & others, and they’re really cracking right on.
clearing the front of the house including the cherry we planted in 2001pile of stuff and protecting the drive
After clearing the site, they brought in 60 tonnes of soil in stages. Robbie the driver got to know the lane really well.
Duncan laying the soilready for plantingwe’re going to have to watch the street-side for people doing some creative drivingcleared and ready for setting out
It’s not quite accurate to call the front a “knot garden” as it’s more like a few squares with some defined borders. We’re using steel edges to delineate the beds from the path, and the path will be laid in National Trust-esque Breedon Stone. This is a self-binding aggregate that’s more like a path and less like pea single.
the plan for the not-knot front garden
the beds line up with the windows
We originally wanted a standard plant like a bay or a holly in each box, all lit up with fancy spots. But since Nicola has drawn this up, I’ve discovered Anthony Paul Landscapes on Max’s recommendation, and he does some lovely things including a hydrangea set in clipped box. So we’ve decided to blatantly copy that instead. Fewer lights = less cash required = fabulous.
those rainwater sumps are still too high
One of the reasons we did the whole build in the first place was to re-site the garage in to a more normal part of the house, i.e. the front, and have the sunniest spot as a patio, i.e. the back. It is so lovely to finally see it come to fruition as a space where we can hang out rather than use as a parking space to bake a car or two in the summer sun.
Type 1 scalpings were next, and lovely new soil to the beds. The manhole covers were changed to ones that will have Breedon in them so they’ll disappear more.
taking shapelighting cables under the Type 1incoming Breendon on the truck
the plan for the back gardenthe geotextile membrane goes down firstthe side garden is broken up for fun planting
Max laid the paving so quick that I missed taking photos of it. The yellow Tracpipe is the gas for the fire-pit. Now that we know how long to cut it, we’ve got to get the plumbers back to do the gas work. I’ll try to book them in at the same time to cut the pipe install the whole fire pit thing all at once–saves two call-out charges.
wooden edging in the back, rather than steel to save some cashone day this will be a fencebuilding the stepthe side border along the drawing room windowsa lawn!so lucky with the weather today–shorts in NOVEMBER
Pointing and bed prep will finish next week, then we can concentrate on planting. I’m due to go with Mark to choose a paperbark maple as a feature tree, and Nicola had Himalayan birch, coral bark maples and fruit trees in the mix too. There’s also a big hedge to plant. There will be a lot going on in the coming months, and this will happen in dribs and drabs when Mark’s got some time. We’re in no rush, especially since we’re not allowed to walk on the new turf until the Spring!
Practical completion kind of happened on its own between Tim and Alyson behind the scenes which was weird. I would have thought this momentous event certainly warranted a fanfare or fireworks, or at least a pause for thought. Instead, the only communication I had from Tim on Moving In Day was an email with an invoice for half the retention. Lovely.
The move went really well, as predicted because each of the other 4 1/2 times we’ve had the pleasure of working with Removals In Action, they’ve been completely ace, and the whole process was calm, cool and collected. The kids were brilliant. We’ve lived in three rental houses and one friend’s, having moved all our clobber in the 77 weeks of the build from handover to PC. Andy, Kevin, Simon, Paul, Kesta and the gang are now like old friends. Having the driveway complete before Moving In Day made life a heck of a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Lots of space for the trucks, cars and boxes.
all packed up and ready to vacate the Tiny Houseempty drive waiting for Andy’s vansback of the house on a rainy moving dayand now to unpack…
I managed to fix a few things the week before Moving In, like completing the installation of the ensuite lights. These are the ones that hang on either side of the mirror-we-haven’t-bought-yet. I’d bought two from Mr Resistor, and they managed to send along an incomplete order (missing out one lamp entirely!), so we sent that back in a fit of meh. We re-ordered from Ocean who were actually cheaper and simply brilliant. When they arrived, the electricians got semi-stuck in and installed the bases to the wall, but not the glass covers. The covers then floated around from room to room in their respective boxes for weeks, so rather than risk having them squished by or lost in all our stuff, I got my spanners together a few days before Moving In, delved into the sea of Styrofoam packing, and sorted it.
ta-da!… lights
Downstairs, I had been looking at the coats cupboard with interest for some time. My vision was to have a very long rail for all of our coats, paired with a comprehensive shoe rack underneath. After much research on the internet for heavy duty brackets (6 people have many many coats….), I copied a design from a one-man-band in Poland and managed to have my own set made by Pete in Sussex from bobsbrackets.com (brilliant), and powder coated (by KG Sprayers in Guildford–again, brilliant). In another fit of DIY, I even bought a drill and some bomb-proof adhesive and enlisted a child to help put it all up. Finally, and with huge relief (for me because I could unpack yet more boxes, and for Child because it meant she could resume fiddling on her phone again),–it turned from a Coats Cupboard into an Electrical Cupboard. The only thing left is to buy and varnish a lovely piece of oak planking for a shelf on top.
a blatant copy–plans for Petemy brackets!gratuitous pic of rail with brackets
Now that we’re in, we’ve had a few worrying moments as we’ve got used to the place. Were we going to be happy with our decisions? Would everything work? One issue was that the room thermostats kept going off. There are five downstairs and eight upstairs, so having to reset each one, on a daily basis, was rather a pain in the seat. Here’s a quick review of how these things work to set the scene: with underfloor heating, each room or zone has it’s own control unit. The main controller in the garage is set to go on in the morning and again in the evening, so it looked like the electricity serving the thermostats was going off with the main controller. Dave the plumber was suspicious that this wasn’t meant to be wired this way, so referred it to his boss Trevor and Steve the electrician to figure out. After two days of emails back and forth, it turns out the system is wired perfectly; we were meant to rely on the individual room controls rather than the main control. Crisis averted, but would have been avoided completely if we’d had any remotely adequate handover from any of the trades who installed any of the systems. But that’s another story….
Another weird thing was when I woke up on one of the first really cool mornings to find ALL the windows fogged up. Naturally, panic ensued, so I hit Google to find the reason and see if there was an easy fix or something more sinister. Usually condensation happens because something in the window system isn’t working correctly: there’s a breach the double glazing seal, or a gap between the window and the frame. Both these scenarios give water beading up on the INSIDE of the glass. Ours was OUTSIDE.
This is actually an example of the windows working perfectly, and also highly efficiently to boot. Warm air inside is kept well away from the cold air outside because the windows are double glazed and separate the two. The outside window gets as cold as the air, and water condenses on the surface into little beads. This happens for the same reason you get dew on grass: the outside temperature fell below the dew point; we essentially had dewey windows. It only occurs when the humidity is very high, and as it happened, it was a couple of days before hurricane Ophelia wandered over northern England making the humidity a stodgy 94%. Kinda neat from a nerdy physics point of view, but annoying for watching the encroaching storm from inside the cozy house, until the windows warmed up and went clear again.
physics lesson
One of the reasons I haven’t kept up the blog is because we’ve been trying to come to a completion arrangement with Tim the contractor. Sticklers that we are, neither Clinton nor I have any capacity whatsoever to tolerate a lacklustre job, so to move in and to STILL have things incomplete or broken is really unsatisfyingly, amazingly, shit. Despite having been issued individual certificates for plumbing, electrics, and other systems, some bits still don’t work. Parts of the electrics are completely off plan, and unbelievably, there is still a leak IN THE EXACT SAME FITTING that failed in June and caused the flood.
oh. my. gawd.
Needless to say, Trevor got Dave and Sid out within the hour to tighten and refit the valve.
A few big things on the snagging list remain outstanding, but all “diligent” work by the contractor has stopped since PC. Nice to not be overrun with guys working onsite all the time, but nothing is being done to finish the contract. It’s a Mexican standoff in Oxshott: Tim is waiting for us to pay and sign a Completion Agreement, and we’re waiting for him to finish the work before we pay. Alyson has waded in as Contract Administrator with many shrugs of shoulders, and says now that she can’t comment on Tim’s work, meaning that we’d have to pay Dave the Architect instead to oversee the snagging completion. Dave says he has attended as much as he feels is necessary, and isn’t keen to come up to check lack of progress for us. It’s all incredibly disappointing, and the finish line still seems some distance away. .
What stuff am I talking about?, you might ask. Well here are some examples:
My poor neighbour has suffered through 3 years of our build, and the drive that she now has sole use over has been truly mutilated by the builders. She’s been so awesomely generous about letting them park in her section of the drive, but now as she drives out (and the newspaper delivery guy drives in at 6:00 am every day), the mashed-up concrete slabs pivot on a non-mud section and go ka-dunk ka-dunk announcing the arrival of anyone driving up to her door. It’s a big job to make it good, and we’re not asking for pretty here, just good. Fixing it as a gracious Thank You from the contractor would be nice.
We have two water butts to contribute to our Part L regulations for environmental impact. They’re fed by a diverter in the rainwater downpipes that is supposed to allow the butts to be filled until they can’t be filled any more, leaving the leftover water to go down into the rainwater drains in the ground. The guys who installed the aluminium guttering and drain pipes cunningly fit the diverters lower than the holes in the water butts THAT THEY DRILLED THEMSELVES. Duh. One is ridiculously off and near the ground, the other is just a little low, but enough to make the whole apparatus completely ineffective. This wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s something that I can’t run around with a spanner and fix; it requires the guys to come back and do it properly, replacing pieces, and that means that Tim has to instruct them.
The electrics are an absolute nightmare. We never had an agreed physical plan on paper or pixels that we can all refer to, so it’s a matter of going back through three electrical foremans’ emails to figure out what the spec was. How Alyson ever agreed to the final figures I’ve got no clue. Even now as we’re having electricians in to check circuits and move cables that were cut too short, it’s still a hot mess with no plan to reference, and there is not one iota of joined-up thinking. Here’s an example: we were advised back around Christmas time last year to get a Rako control system thing in the kitchen and the drawing room, and Paul (Electrical Foreman until Feb 2017) was super keen to get this on board. Lovely, we thought! One switch and lots of flexibility. Then Paul left unannounced to start his own business, and he was replaced by Mark in mid-March. Mark never really got to grips with anything at all, and despite huge promises of sorting everything out that Paul had left hanging, we still had no plan, lots of variations, an accumulating catalog of errors in wiring, and a deteriorating relationship between the contractor and his subbie. Mark didn’t hit it off with Tim and was eventually fired in the Summer for telling James he wanted to knock Tim’s block off. Nice! Mark was replaced by Steve whom we’re dealing with at the moment to get things fixed. He’d doing his merry best and keeping a cool head, but there is still no plan so switches are inconsistent, wires are too taught, sockets don’t work, and the whole outdoor circuit including the coach lamp, trips into oblivion. Completely frustrating. Especially since we’ve paid out for the job to be finished and functioning.
Today we found that the reason why the 5A circuit in the family room doesn’t work. One of the sockets was omitted but the electricians wired it in anyway, and everyone had forgotten about it. Even the plasterers who’d plastered right over it, leaving the wires unconnected and the circuit open. No wonder the remaining sockets in the loop didn’t work.
Getting back to the Rako system, one of the blue units is a bridge that allows access via a remote device like a phone. Kinda bling for us, I know, but really cool. It needs hard wiring to a data point, but lo-and-behold, Steve’s company didn’t spec one in because HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE SYSTEM HE WAS FITTING. Honest to God you couldn’t make it up. As an afterthought the fix was a loose cable in the cupboard. Like it?
See? It works. Quit making such a fuss.
Clearly this wasn’t the solution we’re looking for, so the best they can do now is run the cable back into the Horrible Boxing and have it eek out by the Rako Bridge. A normal system would have hidden the data point or wired it directly. Poor Poor Poor.
The woodwork is being snagged, and after the flood, many skirting boards have shifted. Slipping slivers in the gaps was a nice try, but didn’t win any prizes for great workmanship so the short section was replaced.
problemsolution?….. why even try this on?
Tim agreed to carry out an extension to the wood floor around the fireplace in the drawing room as our very last Variation. But now the skirting is too high. Despite Alyson saying that she couldn’t comment on Tim’s work, she went ahead and blindly certified it, leaving us exposed to the entire charge even though there is now a massive gap between the skirting and the floor. Rather than complete the job and THEN get paid like any normal trade, Tim has done half the job and now can treat it as a snag that he can do whenever he feels like within the year-long rectification period. Brilliant.
that’s better
Our final Variation that Tim agreed to carry out was an extension to the wood floor around the fireplace in the drawing room. But now the skirting is too high. Despite Alyson saying that she couldn’t comment on Tim’s work, she went ahead and blindly certified it, leaving us exposed to the entire charge even though there is now a massive gap between the skirting and the floor. Rather than complete the job and THEN get paid like any normal trade, Tim has done half the job and now can treat it as a snag that he can do whenever he feels like within the year-long rectification period. Brilliant.
We’ve got an ongoing argument about whether the work has been completed fully in the loft where the flood occurred. It smells damp even now. I’m not above asking friends who come round to see the house to follow me up to the loft to see how it smells. (I have patient friends). The scope of the remedial works includes replacing the stained loft boarding to the standard as if were new. And they’ve done none of it. Predictably, in the first couple weeks of November, mould started growing in the loft. After sending these exact same photos to Tim, he STILL disputed the existence of mould, damp, incomplete work,…. you name it, and has referred me to the Loss Adjuster. The Loss Adjuster referred me to the Architect, who needs to come onsite and take MORE pictures for the Loss Adjuster who will then refer to the Insurers who will tell the Contractor to do his job. Lovely.
only a little mould
The electricians know that our job has sucked from start to finish, so last Spring (before he left) Mark had offered to install the cabling for a CCTV system, gratis. We thought that finally we were getting a little bit of an acknowledgement that the service on offer had been less than perfect. So we were on a roll until we had our cameras fitted and found that the muppets had installed old-fashioned coaxial cable rather than the Cat5 they’ve got throughout the rest of the house. It was probably a contractors pack of wires supplied by someone who isn’t quite up to date with the current CCTV gear. It all means that this choice puts a cap on the quality of the cameras and prevents us from installing a true IP system that talks to the rest of the house. In future years it will be like having an old iPhone that struggles with the latest update as technology passes you by and renders your beloved phone into a brick.
it’s coax for sure, sigh
None of these things are critical, but the quantity of fuck-up, Tim’s poor attention to them and this gruesome chess-playing approach has soured the whole journey. People ask me if I’m happy now that I’ve finally moved in. Yes I am, of course I am. It’s a beautiful house. The heating works and it’s great to be back Home. But it’s painful to feel had over. To have paid the bill in full and to STILL feel had over. And it’s disappointing to watch Tim’s perspective change from keen as mustard in 2015 to build a striking building, to 2017’s version of swearing at us down the phone, communicating through lawyers, and actively avoiding doing the work he signed up to do. Charming.
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.
main sewer manhole covercuts for groundlightsrainwater surroundgranite setts bordering garage doorporch mid-flowpre-pointed porchfreshly pointed porchback 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.
where to put the post?hereback 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it will get less stripe-y when they tamp it down and add sand to the jointsdigger’s last week coming uprear 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.
I’ve lost track of time a little. In the three weeks of radio silence since I’ve last posted, we’ve hired an additional contractor, work has begun on the post-flood remedial works, and we’ve hauled the family off to Turkey for a couple of weeks of sailing R&R. To make matters more unnerving this summer, three kids got exam results (two of these for university, so en famille might be minus a couple very shortly which severely affects my sense of being mum, but that’s another blog-worth of drama), and we’re still in Rental II with only about half our stuff. So everything feels a little un-grounded. Ben has run through the history of where we are for timing and legals, so I’ve been comparing his dates with the blog, and the two don’t match. We’re all a little exhausted from this 36 week job morphing into more of a commitment than any of us reckoned it would be.
But it will get finished.
mind on other things
The Official Drying Out was completed the week we went away. This was a great moment for Mike which meant that he could start getting on with some serious decorating.
last little box of tricks: is it on or off though?more damp testingoh dear, there is still a lot of remedial work to be done
A big welcome aboard to Shaun and his team. They’ve been tasked with building two bridges and a drive. Shaun works with Gary who is a neighbour on the estate and runs a high-end development firm. He was kind enough to fit us in this summer, so his job dovetails nicely with the timing set out by the insurers for remedial work to be finished in time for us move in mid-September. So far, their team includes Dimitru who runs the groundworks team, Pat the Foreman, and John who runs the paving-laying squad.
It’s a little weird to have two separate firms on board simultaneously, but it’s working out pretty well so far. There hasn’t been much overlap between the two as the house has dried out, and if Tim’s crew operates from the back of the house, Shaun’s gang can work at the front.
Diggers arrived onsite and they got cracking immediately.
le view de digger
Shaun’s team spent a lot of time levelling and setting out at first. Groundworks are a funny business: it always seems to take forever to set out, with earth moving from here to there and back again, but then the finished surface happens all at once. Ben came to site a few times a week while we were away, and he said that these guys were working hard every day. Even when it absolutely chucked it down, they simply put on their yellow macs and kept on at it despite tromping through mud all day.
setting out
The copper beech hedge we’d planted in 2001 was removed and carefully set to one side (thanks, Shaun!). I’ll try to rescue some of them, they’re hardy things, but I have to be prepared for buying new ones to span the two new sections.
holey hedgehedge holding tanktemporary home…. if they survive
Electrical ducting is a Big Deal. It’s expensive as well. We’ve got lines running underground for a car charging point, others for lights in the ground in three separate places, a spur running to future lights in the garden, and one more duct to the lamppost which requires routing under the second bridge that’s not yet laid out. To make it simpler and easier to deal with should a fault occur later, Shaun and Pat-the-foreman set out a central point where they join in a box. Great thinking.
old pipe under old bridge removedducting joint with cover …… and with plastic box surround
The old pipe was excavated, the old single phase electrical supply was removed, the new bridges were built and the overall levels were agreed with Dave while we were away. I don’t have many photos of this period, but Ben and Shaun have helped out, and most of it is on the time lapse.
geotextile membrane in whiteTom at the helmnew pipe and shutter ready for concrete sides and hardcore sandwich
Part of managing the bridge building required pumping one side of the ditch to the other so we didn’t flood our neighbours.
maintaining flow
One of the design items we took advice on and changed slightly was the angle to the drive at the street. The windward side (nearest the main street) has a smaller radius than the leeward side, so cars won’t cut the corner and decimate whatever we plant on the verge. They make an asymmetrical bridge, but it will look nice lined with the granite edging setts. Shaun and the guys guessed that we’d want this so they laid out extra concrete on the bridges to support it.
extra concrete to support cutting the corner in the caredging templates
Although some decorating and replacement of doors and architraves was carried out in the house, most of the remedial work couldn’t be done until the flooring was laid. Only then can the skirting go on, and most of the redecoration could be finished. Predictably, we’re waiting on the electricians again, they’re a week late already, but they have been onsite a few times cutting in lights to the exterior and checking the wiring so we can get the electrics certified for building control.
Terry returned to replace the black ply soffits with oak. This was an expensive decision that I had doubts about, but Clinton called it, and you can plainly see that it is a big improvement and lightens up the porch and walkways.
back porchone plank in on the side
We’ve got to measure the distances between light sockets in the bedroom because we suspect that the switch will now live behind the bed which will be awkward. Eventually, the hanging lights will be longer and adorned with some sort of pendant at some stage when we a) agree on one, and b) can afford it.
get the tape measure out again
At long last, Gavin arrived and got started laying the boards straight away. It will take him into next week to set out the entire upstairs and the study. He will also have a look at some of the boards in the drawing room that need replacing while he’s here. Some boards in the Rustic variety have large filled knots that look incongruous with the rest of the really nice ones. The snagging allows for replacement of a few, and Ben and I spent a little time prioritising which ones to examine. The boards are the big thing that everyone on the remedial team has been waiting for because once they’re laid, the finishing and cleaning can begin.
flooring, round 2, mid-week
The side fence also went up. It needs a little work and we’re discussing how best to improve it.
back of the fence
the path will extend to the front with a planted border on each sideartsy fencing brackets on concrete
It takes a cast of many men to move the sand, edging and pavers to get it all looking nice. Edging went in first, and the haunching it sits on was set out at a consistent 45 degrees. The inside face of the edging stones are completely aligned, ready for the paving stones to sit in the sand on the drive side.
straight edgessand laid out
To get the levels right they lay and level steel poles in the sand on either side, then they drag a board across the poles.
John and team dragging the boards acrosslovely level bed of sand on the west bridgeon to the next section
The first stones were laid brick-bond in line with the middle edge that lies between the bridges. John and Pat suggested this is the longest line across the drive and the one that will draw the eye. I had originally wanted the stones laid in a Random Cluster pattern, but this wouldn’t work well with the falls required from the house to the road. To achieve a fall, each stone needs to sit ever so slightly stepped, but it’s millimetres over metres so you can’t really see it. If we’d laid on a slant, you’d see one single larger gap where the slope stars, and this would look stupid. Overall, laying this drive requires much more skill and forethought than I’d imagined.
first stonesin line with the central edge
Before Shaun’s team took a break over the bank holiday weekend, they managed to get a good chunk of the west bridge completed.
ready for next week
Gavin has done a great job in re-laying the floor throughout almost the entire first floor. Just a few thresholds, Gillian’s room and the study to go.
We’re almost there. There is a bunch of chasing from compriband around the windows to coordinating the electricians and plumbers to finish the underfloor heating, and we’ll be in. Can’t wait.
The garden has totally taken over in the three years we’ve been out. All those lovely plants I tended for all those years, and all that awful lawn that turned to moss and we cursed over, are all no more. I have only ever once hired a professional to help out with any garden, during one spring when I was vastly pregnant with one kid or other and couldn’t get near the ground much less have any stamina to actually do anything horticulturally useful. But Nicola’s plan required the A-Team of landscape gardeners, so we’ve invited Mark and his gang on board to do the job. A few months back I put out a request for recommendations on Facebook, and almost everyone I know wholeheartedly recommended Mark. So we’re lucky to have him on board with Max, Duncan, Sam, and sometimes Wes & others, and they’re really cracking right on.
