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 had a minor surgical procedure a good few years ago which went all a bit pear-shaped in recovery. On speaking to the surgeon, who was a really nice chap despite my setback, it turned out that this particular complication was a one in a bijillion type of thing to happen. Really rare, definitely unexpected. He said then that in all his work, this sort of thing happened less than 1% of the time. But he also understood that despite the odds, it was still 100% of my experience. That’s a lot of responsibility to carry around as a person and a doctor. To his credit, he saw the whole thing through really well, all the while being proactive and keeping positive in analysing the problem, firmly believing that a good solution would gradually emerge. His attitude turned out to be pretty infectious (no pun intended) and a good learning experience in retrospect.
So, here we are in the midst of another less-than-1% experience. At least, I hope for the building industry it is! No one is happy about it, but onward we go, getting past the worst part which is seeing the nest we’ve built our family upended once again. Demolition was bad enough. I’m upset, but curiously not devastated at the damage done by the flood. It’s not seeing the tangible building wrecked that is gutting, it can and will be mended, it will just take about four more months. It’s more the emotional side that’s galling and the general disappointment that can’t be repaired in any speed but has to be ignored now and eventually left to percolate and dissipate over time.
We started this project with the family in mind, and the goal was to get this house to work effectively for all of us. Rather than have the nice shiny efficient home we’ve worked so hard for, the family is now shoe-horned into our third rental that the kids don’t feel a part of. It’s just like camping, kids, just with better plumbing!, says their ditzy mum. It must be very unnerving as a teenager to have your space dismantled and your parents all distracted 24/7. It seems like this project has taken ages to me (it has by anybody’s standards), but for a bit of perspective, we’ve been at this for a sixth of my youngest’s life, so it must seem horribly normal to her, and that’s not right. I suppose it will make them resilient in the end, but inwardly, I look to my surgeon from before for inspiration and try to be proactive and positive for the kids.
Keeping a smile on is taxing, but we’re quite upfront with the kids about what’s going on–there are no secrets or glossing-over of facts. We’re probably a little too free and easy with opinions around the dinner table, but as this project has eclipsed most of our social life, the build is kind of all we talk about now. It’s easy to be glib and remind them to appreciate that we’re fortunate to have the capacity to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. But this level of subsistence isn’t what we signed up for, in fact what we signed up for is completely the opposite. We tried to ensure that by having loads of tiers of management in place and work cross-checked by a host of professionals, that this sort of disaster would be avoided. In years to come, will I appreciate the house more because the journey has been more arduous? Will we chuckle ruefully as we look back on today’s drama? Or we will feel like just another couple of middle class ya-hoos getting too big for their boots and wading into seas where they shouldn’t be swimming in the first place? Whatever it is, there is no point having a moan, but it’s bloody hard to look at the lovely ruined walls and ceilings and not feel a little robbed that we were so close to living in it.
As a rule, I haven’t shouted anyone out in either a positive or negative way, just because I feel that this blog should be more a story where the House is the central character, and no one wants to read about my dirty laundry. But I feel compelled to give Andy Bald of Removals In Action five virtual stars for being completely awesome. Kevin, Kesta, Shaun, Simon and everyone on his team were total gentlemen and will have moved us five times when all this is said and done. This week the gang worked solidly for days moving us back and forth from rental to storage to another rental with stops to our friend’s house and to the new house to leave some logs in the garden. They’ve put up with me being emotional, 35° temperatures, and a constantly changing gameplan. Thanks, guys…. you’re incredible.
Equally as steady is Warren the Milky 07889 141395. Having milk delivered is a special treat and a cultural phenomenon that I’ve had the pleasure of supporting since I moved to the UK in ’91. Despite our recent vagabond existence, Warren has worked hard to keep the supply consistent for no benefit to himself. When we moved outside his patch into the first rental he found a colleague to continue our delivery seamlessly. It was a pleasure to move back near the house in the second rental and have him resume the service himself. Now, with this short term rental, he’s not only gone and found another colleague to deliver, but he’s given us his good wishes and looks forward to seeing us back in our old neighbourhood soon. Seems a completely unrelated thing to the house-build this whole milk thing, but he’s been delivering to the house for over 15 years plus the two we’ve been out, so it’s kind of a long-term relationship, and one that’s slightly odd because it’s all so ninja–I hardly ever see him! Thanks, Warren.
I apologise for leaving last week off the blog; in the midst of finding new digs and moving into them and it all feeling a bit chaotic. This week is better and we’ve found a path to tread again. The insurers have taken over the Drying Out Process which they say could take anywhere from 0 to 28 days. There are damp reports, forensic assessments, dehumidifiers, environmental teams and all sorts of experts introduced to this project and taking a look this week. Some damage is making itself evident a couple of weeks post-deluge as the underlying structure starts to dry, and even I can see these bits.
To catalogue a few of the areas as they’ve changed in the past fortnight….
kitchen nibs are looking damp and the coving is ropey and split but the units are probably ok
ground floor ceiling looking damaged–how much of the staircase was affected?bowed skirting was removed in placesbowing before removing in the family room; is there water under the marble?skirting lights will need replacing tootenting and dehumidifying sodden areas
But work continues, and although we were planning on moving in, I can’t really say that it was to a complete house anyway. We’d agreed with Tim that work would continue once we were in, and some important bits remained outstanding. Like the 1.25″ diameter water supply which was installed this week. The old pipes were lead, and the water company has a scheme for replacement (which is a little known fact), and they came to replace the house’s supply for free–hooray!
water company searching for pipes in the road
It turns out the supply runs alongside the road between it and the ditch, so there was no kango-ing of tarmac and far less fuss than expected. Phew
The Swedish-sauna oak soffits on the first-floor overhang went in all along the front and west side of the building. It’s all bright and sparkly now with Clive’s double coats of Osmo oil, which looks a little jarring next to the structural oak that’s been there for months, but it should grey out like the rest of building in time. Spencer will be back to install a lead strip around the west overhang so it’s completely watertight.
pretty porchalong the underside of the overhang
boys’ shower room is looking smartmirrors have gone up
Shower screens went in and niche lighting is on. We’ve had a little trouble with the screen for the girls’ bathroom–it’s got a dippy kink in the wall which prevents fitting the screen flush with the edge of the tray, and it’s just plain too long leaving a slim 560 mm gap to get into the shower. We can’t do anything about the placement of the glass, but we can adjust it’s length. The catch is that the screen is made of special safety glass so it can’t simply be trimmed onsite. These things are jolly expensive, so it takes some nerve to say it’s not right. We’ve asked for a price on replacing it at this stage, and we’ll make a decision whether to change it or not depending on how astronomical it is.
girls’ shower is narrowutility room lighting and tiling fits perfectlythe view out of the building is still beautiful …… and so is the back against the shiny tiles.the guys have done a huge clear-up in the front garden
Lots has happened on the outside of the house in the past few weeks.
the protective aprons on the brick plinths have come off, and the brick panels are almost completetwo vents for the fireplace, top is for cavity venting and bottom is for convectionrainwater pipework at ground level, although it looks a bit high compared to next door’s fence
The electricians will re-attend after the driveway is complete. There’s a day or so of work to put the car charging point in, wire up the coach light and run all the garden spots out to their respective beds. But for now, the wires will be left all coiled up on the side of the garage. Some will be on timers in the garage and others will be switched from the front door which is exactly like we had it in the old house.
cabling for the coach light, garden spots and porch down lighters all coiled up and ready to go
The oak support for the garage overhang was mortared in with the rest of paving slabs. This post replaced the very large brick pier that was built first and then demolished when we discovered it left no room to move around it. The edges of the post are really square, and we’ve got to decide whether to chamfer off the corners–what do you think?
oak postJamie tilled the back garden on first passground lights will fit in the cuts to paving slabs in the giant back door step
This kind of finishing work would have carried on regardless of the flood, and would have been happening even if we had moved in. The builders have been part of our lives for 65 weeks, and the house is pretty dang big compared to what we’ve been living in the past two years, so I’m sure we could have fit in the odd chippie or electrician during the move. But fortunately for them, they’ve had a chance to work unencumbered, and they’ll soon be clearing off to hand over to the environmental guys as part of the insurer’s package until it’s dry.
Pain is a funny thing. It gradually fades, and the weird bit is that you don’t notice it’s gone. I hardly think about my surgeon any more, but all sorts of thoughts have come to the fore recently. One day, this trauma won’t burn so bright, the technicolour will dim, and things will calm down. Looking forward to it.
Post redirected, banks informed, car insurance changed, schools notified, meters read, cleaners booked, checkout from rental organised, and… off we go at long last. After two years of being away from St Anne’s, we’re finally moving in to the New House. What an adventure!
What could possibly go wrong? We’ve moved twice already, so we’re a dab hand at packing up with all the incidentals and hiatus in broadband (for the four teenagers this is the biggest hiccup in the process) that go along with it. What do you suppose is the worst thing that could happen at this stage? Problem with the removals? Kids getting ill? Car breaking down? I’m sure there are a few potential perils that could befall us now. But, Monday rolled around, and Andy and his removal team were top notch as usual (we’ve had the pleasure of them moving us four times now including once for the office). The kids remained amazingly buoyant and kept calm despite their five A-level exams this week and two the next between them. So even though Mum was going a little nuts, it was all looking great.
Until Tuesday.
We let the removals guys in to the pack up the rental in the morning and rushed over to site for an early meeting to find Tim’s car parked up in the lane and much activity onsite. Apparently, the main valve that regulates the water pressure from the mains leaked overnight. This valve is in the loft and is the first piece of apparatus besides pipework that the plumbing sees after it enters the building from the mains. It’s placed just upstream from the hot water tank up there above Gemma’s room. Somehow a bunch of water came out of it, and I won’t say any more because the loss assessors and legal teams are involved. But it must have been on a long time looking at all the damage.
the join in question is the one with the white silicon tape to the left of the regulatorall the wood floor is coming up to let the floor underneath dry outdrying out the saturated electricswetlots of skirting started bowing immediately as water cascaded down the wallslight fittings were removed and put in a pile in the kitchenwet walls and water line drawn on floor
The rest of the week has been spent getting our stuff into storage and trying to find an immediate short term rental. We’ve got some great friends who have kindly put us up for as long as it takes which is incredibly generous, and we are very grateful that everyone has a bed, cups of tea can be made, and that we can use their place as a base. They’ve even let us use a part of their garden for all my potted plants. But somehow we’ve got to get cracking back into real life next week what with school, work, and exams, and coordinating what’s in and what’s not in the storage pod. Somewhere, buried within the solid mass of boxes, we’ve got to retrieve gear for a D of E Gold expedition, school shoes, and outfits for two proms before Friday. The contracts for the legal team are also buried along with all our warm clothes as it’s just gone from sizzling heat wave to soggy cold snap. My little Toyota would be bursting to the gunnels with all this stuff, so I think we’ll have to acquire other forms of transport to schlep stuff around town. So that’s another thing to organise.
And after that it’s picking up the pieces to find our third rental during this project.
There is no time to wallow in what this all means or how much it’s going to cost, we’ve just got to get on with it.
Welcome to Week 62 in our 36 Week project…. It’s all about finishing now.
bathroom niches have their lightstiled flooring is down in the bathrooms, but no shower screens yetfiddly short tiles cut to finish the floor, but no mirrormaster vanity unit has been moved, but no lightsRich tiled the utility splashback .... and started the tiling in the kitchen
looks much more kitchen-like; requests for moral support go unheeded…
Lots of pressure to Buy Things like… doorbells. Have you ever given much thought to them? The button bit can be a nice design piece, and there are many many different types to choose from. But the ringer, chime, sounder, whatever you call it, has three flavours: school bell, electric programmable with a bijillion different “songs”, or an antique from eBay. We went for a chrome schoolbell in the end. Boring, but necessary.
doorbell: brick mounted or doorframe mounted?garden getting cleared graduallytiling and water buttthinking herb garden thoughtsmore herbs: got a recommendation or favourite to share in comments below?horrible scary crack filledsecurity lights installedoak beam in lieu of bricks to support garage installed
There was an area on the back porch where the supports under the structural oak were slightly shy of the windows leaving a 20 mm gap. There was 10 mm tolerance generally for windows abutting to structure in the specification, and the guys managed to put it all on one side, making the 20 mm of air. The windows were installed just after Christmas, and this gap had been glaring at us ever since. One transgression for the Quirky House Police, but it’s filled now and looks much better.
Paul filled the gap with surgical precisionplinth splits for guttering downpipes restored
The bricklayers elevate their work to an artform. I hope that they’ve enjoyed working on this place, because they’ve had a lot to think about. Mind you, this week’s daily quizzes were mostly about war films which really tested my memory of dates, battles and geography. Oh yeah, ….. and what is the only airport in the States with an actual airplane in it? And whom is it named after? But check out the symmetry around every wall and detail as you look at any photo with bricks in. Genius.
study is finished with flooring and electricsmassive patch panel in the utility room to centralise all the data pointsfireplace with temporary buildout, but the room looks miles better with a coat of paintcolours look alright in the kitchen into family room — Dulux Trade is A-OKmaster bedroom detailwardrobe rails inelectrics are getting there one socket at a time, but not sure about the labelling…
We’re moving in on the Thursday of week 63. In theory. Kitchen commissioning on Monday morning, air permeability test in the afternoon. Tuesday is the contractor’s last formal day on the interior. Wednesday is cleaning, and Thursday we’re in.
When we first started this project I had visions of the finished product being presented in a more defined way. I kinda expected a ta-da! moment. I thought we’d have some time to think about the job, to go around with the contractor in a logical way to see if anything was overlooked, to snag it, to rectify the snags, and to move in with a huge smile. As it is, it’s rushed, the project manager is on holiday, the electricians are still (incredibly shockingly and disappointingly) not finished, snagging hasn’t started, the air-test is going on unsupervised and might fail our SAP calcs for us, and there is still a ton of work to do outside both within and outside the contract. Like, there is no drive and no lawn, but these will be done by others. There are no curtains, yet. And, strangely, there is no TV aerial which somehow counts as AV equipment which was conveniently client-specified but not highlighted until now.
There have been many parts of this project when we’ve seen our naive decisions come to fruition, and some have worked out just fab and the product is marvellous. But mostly, I really just haven’t wanted to look at bits and pieces in case we’d made a poor stab at something. I feel far more fear than excitement or pleasure at moving in just now. Maybe it’s just the fact we’re coming to the end of a period of exam hell with the kids and staffing challenges with the business all at once conveniently coordinated with the week we’re moving in. Maybe it’s because it’s the hottest week of the year. Maybe it’s that the budget is starting to burst at the seams. Maybe in five years’ time this feeling of unease and self-doubt will have morphed imperceptibly into something more comfortable, settled and positive. I hope my future self laughs heartily on reading today’s momentary dip in my attempt to retain a consistently high level of relentless positivity throughout this long journey. This future self will be enormously grateful and very happy in our family home that we’ve had built the way we wanted and was intended to provide the centre of gravity for the six of us at least for many many years to come.
Clinton celebrated a penultimately significant birthday on the weekend by going back to school: blacksmithing school. He’s always happiest when he’s making and building and doing. So with some stout shoes and safety glasses, off he went to the Quinnells’ at Fire and Iron to get stuck in to Make Stuff. The course was about blacksmithing technique but with an artist kind of vibe; the goal was to take home a few cool pieces at the end of the two days. With a little guidance from the instructors, he’s gone and made something quite amazing, unique and special. You’ll have to wait for the great unveiling in a future post, but I will hint that it’s for the house.
Iron Man
The long-awaited visit from British Telecom to attach the house to the rest of the planet was scheduled for Monday. Matt the Engineer arrived promptly first thing to rig up the line. Jamie got stuck in to finish off the trench, and James and I deciphered where the electricians had cunningly hidden the location for the BT box (spoiler: in the garage). So Matt got busy connecting, and Jamie filled in the trench afterwards. Apparently there’s a dial tone and everything!
we love a good trench
Other outdoor work included laying more paving slabs and turning on the outdoor lights.
replacing a wobbly slab
Steve’s team came to install the wood burner in the middle of the week. Cue much amusement from the guys wanting to know when the fish will be delivered. Installation went off mostly without a hitch with a little drilling out of the brickwork for ducting and a little bricking up for a base that the thing sits upon. It’s a closed system, so we don’t need air bricks to the room, but there is a need to supply air to the appliance itself, and another need to vent out the chamber so it doesn’t overheat, especially since we’re sticking a great big TV above it (eventually). The extra size of the exterior brickwork plinth at the bottom made it a little challenging for the guys to connect the bottom duct since it was so long, so they had to come back the day after and finish the job. It looks great as it is but we’ll add to it in time: eventually the build-out sections will be built bigger so the TV is set back behind the stove. We’re going to develop this design with Steve now that this portion of the job is complete, but at least it’s safe at the moment and passes all its HETAS requirements for building control. It’s a complicated design, but Dave’s watching over it, and it will be awesome.
Rais 900 all alonewhere it will livewoodburner, mid-installtemporary buildout and ready to go
The mechanical ventilation system failed it’s commission a couple of weeks ago, which was slightly scary. The pipes are all running in the void between the concrete first floor and the ground floor ceiling, and getting to them now would destroy a ton of decorating. The system runs to all the wet areas including the downstairs coats cupboard where all the electrical controls are housed. The problem was that there wasn’t enough suction on the longer runs to the other side of the house and to the kitchen, so it failed its installation tests. We have been waiting on tenterhooks seeing how the company would deal with this, and they came back this week to fix it. Their solution was to fit a second motor in the loft to give it enough oomph. So now we’ve got double-spiders up there, all labelled up nice and pretty, and it sucks like fury. Hooray!
fancy MEV
You may have noticed in one of the photos above that the exterior light was ON! Yes, the lights are on at long last. Lewis was characteristically sanguine about showing me the gleaming little LEDs and lovely warm Edisons outside, but I am pretty sure he’s kinda proud of getting near the end, and I think I even caught a sly smile or two in there somewhere. It’s another threshold of making the house look like a home.
I’ll take you on a tour of some of the mostly-finished rooms….
shoes-off policy upstairs now that the floor protection is upGareth’s roomGregory’s roomfirst floor hallwaythe glorious linen cupboard!Gillian’s roomup close and personal with a newel postboys’ bathroom with burglar PIR in hallway
master vanity needs shifting to the right 100 mm
It was all looking marvellous indeed! But then… the heavens opened. This time last year, you’ll remember that the storm drains on the local roads up the hill failed, and my neighbours got flooded out with the grounds guys altruistically running bricks to them to raise their furniture before the water got to their beds and sofas. Since then, much repair work has been done, and one neighbour was able to move back in just after Christmas; the other is due to move back in at the end of the summer.
This year it was our turn for drama.
The water was either down to the oak frame or the windows, and it was only in a few places. First we phoned Neil who has built a bijillion of oak frames in his career, and he was totally cool about it. Although he’s never seen anything like it, he offered some suggestions and kept a cool head. He was down onsite two days after we called, and he agreed to do some sealing around the edges as a failsafe. He came with Grant and an enormous ladder on the weekend to put the CT1 in some gaps and seal it up, so we won’t be seeing this sort of thing again. The next step is to talk to the window company about the seals around the windows, but that’s a little more complicated because there are so many materials (mastick, sealant, bronze frames) to contend with. Ben’s on it and we should come up with a solution to cover that side as well soon. This belt-and-braces approach should mean we’ve got an air and water tight arrangement, and this is important as we look forward to the all-important Air Test for the SAP calcs in a couple of weeks.
The brick guys returned to repair the damage we did to taking out the piers, and to fill the extra holes the in the bricks made by the electricians in their quest to find good spots for outdoor lights and power. They should finish up next week so they’re only here for a wee bit, but I didn’t get away lightly…. “Who was the last man to walk on the moon?”, asked Paul in the morning. With a completely blank mind, I said Charlie Duke whom I knew was an astronaut, but I also knew was the wrong answer. I’ve even read Andrew Smith’s Moon Dust, and I SHOULD know these things! When I came back onsite in the afternoon to drop off some thing or other, it was “What’s so significant about the River Roe in the States?” Galling, because I’m American, and I’m sure he picks these questions because of it. I will leave you to go and find the answers yourselves!
chipping out the decimated brickworkredoing their own work
And James has got all comfortable in his man-cave in the kitchen.
Not long to go now. Three weeks until we move in. There hasn’t been a light bulb lit yet which is worrying, but they’re all getting wired in at least.
sorting narrow from wide beam
hooray for lights in the upstairs hallwayfamily room lights/James’ new digsWhere do these go, Jimbo?fancy floor lights under the stairscill lights in the kitchen
But the biggest thing this week was saying goodbye to the old garage. It put James out of a home and his new office is now sitting in pieces in the family room. He doesn’t really sit at his desk very much now that we’re coming up to the close–lots of managing lots of trades all the time. I’m sooooo glad to see the garage go. What a beast! Jamie says the beams were in excellent nick which is surprising given the decrepit state of the rest of the structure: cracks in the floor, leaky roof, cracks in the brickwork. It’s main problem was that it sat right on the sweet spot for the garden. When our future selves are sitting out on the new patio with a cold drink in hand, we’ll shake our heads and remember it fondly, I’m sure!
We had the happiest labourer ever onsite this week. John, I think he was called, and he was a luck-of-the-draw-from-an-agency bloke. I guess he was used to working in London where these guys are normally tasked with horrible jobs like moving supplies up and down 7 flights of stairs a gazillion times on a given day in the middle of summer, so this surely seemed a picnic in comparison. When James and Jamie allowed him to drive the dumper around and get involved in the garage demo, well, he was just over the moon! Like a total kid, smiling all day long, as if he were hiding in a candy store at Christmas, not doing a day’s work around on a building site with big machinery. It’s a pleasure to have him onsite and his enthusiasm was totally contagious.
roof’s off3 lorry loads to remove most of itTa-Da!
by the end of the week, even the concrete base was gone
Inside, some final pieces are coming together. In preparation for the fireplace installation next week, the electricians put the wires through the ceiling towards where the sockets will live for the hi-fi. These wires will get boxed in, and it’s lovely that they’re away from all the scary heat from the stove area. Dave’s done drawings, so everyone knows what the finished product will look like.
wires ready for boxing
Additional boxing will be put on the other side of the room to hide the gas pipe. We put this in to future proof any requirement for gas in the room. Like if we wanted to change our lovely wood-burner to gas if it was too hot for instance. Or if we just wanted a change. Originally this pipe wouldn’t have been in the way because we’d intended to cover this area with a low set of built-in units. But with (more than a few) changes in design, this pipe got a little orphaned. Boxing is not a great position to be in, it smacks of afterthought, but it’s the best solution we’ve got at the moment.
orphaned gas pipe
The plumbers are making their way round the bathrooms. The WC was transformed from Box to Room over the course of the week.
boxroom
Lots more to think about outside. Like clearing,….
earth – (and) – child
We’ve got to decide if we want to spend the extra cash on swapping the porch soffits from painted ply to oak tongue and groove. What do you think?
porch: ply or T&G?more soffit decisions
More work was done on the brick slips, and they’re all finished now–hooray! Thanks Clive. A bit of fancy mortar and we’re done.
front slips are instill getting large deliveries….
Work on the bridges is looming. We’ve got a design through from the engineers, and it looks like we’ll be able to drive the space shuttle across them they’re designed so robustly (is that a word?). I’m not sure we need something so bomb-proof. There’s is a ton of extra hardcore to get rid of, so we can use that to fill, and I’ve still got lots of 450 mm diameter corrugated plastic pipe to use too. I’m sure James and Jamie are sick to death of moving it around site anyway. It’s turned a little Where’s Wally with these dang pipes.
450 mm pipes
It was half term this week, and I must say a big thank you to the kids for being so great and leaving Mummy alone to get on with site visits, curtain choosing, counting pennies on spreadsheets, and generally being preoccupied. They should be getting on with GCSE and A-level revision anyway, right? We did manage to get out and about one day, the highlight being a great big Surrey snail round Ranmore Common (we’re very easy to please). Sadly the ice cream van had scarpered due to impending summer storms which we managed to dodge. I’m very grateful to the kids for being so self-sufficient. I definitely owe them some cakes when this is done!
I’ve put this one in here because Dad might like the digger-as-sundial on a weekend when there’s nothing going on onsite.
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.
