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
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.
It will be 2 – 4 weeks to dry the house out, redecorate, and get you in.
… has to rank alongside the similarly famous …
We’ll have the lights on for Christmas.
And more recently…
Put your family in a hotel while the work is done.
It’s not every day that you build a house from scratch, and you would hope that the utterances from the experts could be believed. We’ve learned a lot these last 20 months, the most valuable has been to pick out the genuinely good advice from the masses of optimistic twaddle.
It’s 30 weeks since we had planned to move in, 3 weeks since the flood, and now at least 12 more weeks still to go. The overly-optimistic comments have stopped, and we’re thinking desert-like drying-out thoughts to get us there.
The environmental guys have taken over the site and filled it with dehumidifiers, fans, sensors, and heaters. They’ve tented the master ensuite and part of Gemma’s room where the majority of the water flowed down the walls when the valve failed. The assessors originally said that they would set their gear up and monitor it each week to give a forecast of how much of the 28 days they reckon it will take before the building is dry and any remedial work can begin. Perhaps they’ll start that monitoring next week, because they haven’t been in much since Tuesday. Of course, we’re banking on the warm weather giving the process a boost and are hoping it will be shorter rather than longer than anticipated. However, I’ve spoken to two people who’ve been here before who said that when an insurance company says 0 to 28 days to dry, it usually means 28 days.
It was a comfortable 21° C summer day today with a light breeze and high clouds. But inside it was a dry, hot, deafening furnace well into the mid 30’s. And with this, comes the possibility that what was perfectly dry in other parts of the house now starts to bend and distort.
You can hear the humming of all the machinery going 24/7 as you approach the house. The building sounds alive, and it’s very strange.
trio of fan/heater/dehumidifier downstairs in the hallwayleeched water runs out into the brand new sinkdoors have been removed and left to dryGemma’s room is partially-tentedhallway and master ensuite tents
With all this experience, one of the benefits is being able to pass it on. We probably should have a chat about the acronym seas we’re swimming in: JCTs, EOTs, LADs and General Damages. If you ever entertain the idea of building a house or engaging a builder to do a large amount of work that requires one of the many flavours of Joint Contract Tribunal or JCT contract, you should know a few things. Firstly, Kevin McCloud (For It Is He) subscribes to the phrase “hope for the best and plan for the worst”, and he’s right. But Hope alone isn’t the best strategy really. Planning for the worst involves having a solid contract in place to give impartial clarity to sticky situations should they arise. The hard part is guessing what exactly the “worst” could be from the keen-as-mustard and comfortable position of haven’t-started-yet and not-having-a-clue at the get-go. He also says that “house building has ruined many a good relationship,” so when engaging a builder, you should think less about beginning the marriage of your dreams and more about drawing up a hard-as-nails pre-nup for a possible divorce. Simply put, you will be completely clueless about how much protection you are going to need. This is why we hire professionals instead, and we don’t rely so much on the well-intentioned advice from friends, relatives or anyone else who hasn’t parted with hard-earned cash for a building project.
The second thing you should know is that you are ‘the insurer of last resort’. Any time anything goes wrong on your job, everyone will look to you to pay-up for his or her mistakes. This gets old quickly.
Time is everyone’s enemy on a job like this. The builder can request Extensions of Time, and the client can attempt to claim Liquidated Ascertained Damages, all in an effort to avoid being penalised for indecision or inaction. It all gets a bit messy, but if you’re clever from the outset and document these things properly, you will be able to fall back on the JCT to iron out the creases. If you don’t keep track, you end up scrabbling around in the dark recesses of history trying to figure out who did what when… and who should be up for paying.
Now that the muck has stuck, the insurance process, waiting around for reports, and reading the fine print in the contract is all taking a little too much out of everyone involved at the moment. Ultimately, there is a limited number of cookies in our cookie jar, and we are getting glimpses of the bottom of it these days which is scary. I Told You So is ringing in my ears with everyone saying to me that a self-build project always costs more than you think it will. Yes, you’re right. Everyone’s got a friend that has overreached in an extension, renovation or build. No one ever says, “Wow! And look! We’ve got loads of money leftover for curtains and new sofas!” Just, no. Knowing this, we prepared: we knew (thought) that so we had a robust contract, a sink (sunk) fund just-in-case, and effective (expensive) management in place. Along the way we felt comfortable enough to splash out on a few nice things, and this has been tempered by being more frugal about other things. And unlike the mystery figures and vagaries that are bandied about at the end of every episode of Grand Designs, we’ve kept track of every penny meticulously, so at least we know where we are, even while looking around for our paddle. Eight extra months of rent and professionals’ fees now means that we are making choices that we didn’t think we’d be facing because we’d prepared so well (we thought). After all, we’d waited 15 years to get started on this project so we’d had a LOT of time to think about it. It’s frustrating to see it all withering now, but curling up under the duvet isn’t an option, so onwards we go….
garden from the master bedroom
Downpipes have gone in on the sections where we had the brick pillars removed. They’ve also finally installed the contentious one hanging off the vertical tiles on the front elevation into a newly-cut plinth.
downpipe hugging the building into the plinthparade of double-swan-neck downpipes with oak soffitswater butts ready to go in when the landscaping is finishedsoffit junction in the sun
The joints between the oak and the brick were mortared in last week. I went round to another house built in a similar style, and the owners were super friendly and kind enough to describe some of the problems they’d had with joins between materials. In fact, the lady of the house was so nice that she’d invited me and Elder Daughter in to have a good look at some areas of concern. Their builders had used mastic to seal the structural-oak/brick joins. After a few years of wear and movement in the oak in this other property, some of the mastic has started to come away from the brick exposing the join to the elements. They’d also put clear silicon in the oak joints just like we did. They’re getting it all sorted now, but it’s taken them living through a few floods to see where the problems lie. We’ll put this in the Good Advice bucket.
There are a lot of multi-material junctions throughout our building. Our mortar joints are raked in 3 or 4 mmm in which gives a lovely shadow effect to each course but it makes life a little tricky for making a nice seal. Mastic along the joins between the window frames and the bricks would only splodge into the mortar joints, potentially leaving a messy uneven line. So unlike my new friend with the similar house, we’ve decided to forego the mastic and use just compriband on its own instead. This is a sticky-backed foam that squishes down into nothing and expands to fill gaps in the heat. The trick is to put it in the fridge or freezer right before installing it (especially in summer) to give time for it to be cut to size onsite. They’ve used large sheets of it in some of the larger gaps between the structural oak and bricks, so it will be consistent too. Marvellous.
Despite a little rain in the week coupled with the moisture in the mortar leeching the tannins from the oak onto the plinths and discolouring it a little, having mortared joints are still a damn sight more reassuring than having possible failed future seal.
fresh mortar …… and one week on with tannin leaching out
Despite all the hot mess of problems we’re having at the moment, it’s refreshing to think it’s actually a beautiful building with some architecturally interesting features. And it looks nice in the sun.
