Another week passes

During the week, we received a cc'd letter from the builders to the project manager asking, basically, what's going on, where are the documents and when can we start? A subsequent conversation with the project manager revealed that the drawings are still being revised and the contracts are still being drawn up. There's a chance that it be all in place early next week, but who knows? As I mentioned before, once the contracts are approved and signed, the builders must give two weeks' notice to the Council before starting work.

Meanwhile, we were back on the tile trail today. We went to a couple of places and discovered that pre-sealed polished porcelain tiles, in a pale-but-warm shade, are very rare indeed. We ended up back at the place we were in this past two weeks, looking afresh at their selection, all of which are pre-sealed porcelain. Knowing that we'd have to compromise, we finally settled on a tile and bought 80-something square metres of it. It's a little bit more marbled than I'd like ideally, but it's warm without being too yellow, while still being neutral enough to go virtually unnoticed on every tiled surface in the house. While in the shop I also took the opportunity to photograph the bathroom suite we bought last week, and I've added it to the previous post.

Next week could well be crunch week in getting this project off the drawing board. Alternatively, nothing at all might happen.

Setting sale

Last weekend we made our first trip to the January sales and found tiles we like on special offer. We didn't have our measurements with us so, having established that the prices were good for another week we went home. Our plan is to use the same, large (30cm x 60cm) tiles throughout the house, for the floors of the kitchen, bathroom, en suite and utility room, as well as for the walls of several of those, and the kitchen splashback. We were looking for polished porcelain in a cream sort of colour.

Yesterday, armed with the numbers we headed off to suburban hardware land once more. Our first call was at a different builders' providers as it was due to close early. Here they had a superb offer on solid oak flooring, with just enough of it left in stock to meet our needs. So we bought all 72 sq. metres of it, taking home the sample pictured. We had previously intended to go for engineered wood because of the structural nature of our floors, but it turns out this stuff just needs a foam underlay and not wooden battens as we had thought. The deal has saved us just over a grand on what was estimated for flooring.

Floors bought, we went next to the tile place where we decided that we didn't like the tiles we had chosen after all, so we left them. In the sale there we did purchase the sinks and toilets for the bathroom and en suite, so that's another bit taken care of.

Our last port of call was the fireplace and chimney shop near the house. We were looking for a small stove for the living room, and found one easily enough, though we haven't bought it yet. Hopefully all our future shopping will be as easy as this. Meanwhile, the tile hunt continues.

Not the best laid, as plans go

Yesterday evening our project manager called round with what should have been the final contract drawings. Unfortunately, they featured a variety of things which were notified to the draughtsperson but either not done, not done correctly, not done on the correct drawing, or done once but not carried through onto other drawings of the same part of the house. The en suite was correct, however. Hooray.

So, I trawled through the ten A1 drawings again last night and wrote a list of everything I saw that needed changing. This will be going to the engineer's office for inclusion in the contract drawings ASAP. Oh for my own copy of AutoCAD.

Meanwhile, the engineer's office is working on the contract. When this bundle of documents is ready to go to the builder's remains to be seen at this point. If it's more than a week I'll be miffed. More miffed, I mean.

The Devil's in the en suite

Details details. Way back when I posted the final plans (as they were then) the ensuite had no door of its own, but was accessed via two sliding doors, one from the bedroom and one from the dressing room (see picture on right). It was never intended that the room wouldn't have its own door (it's a bathroom!), but when we thought about putting one in, the three door arrangement looked a bit excessive. There would still need to be a separation of the dressing room and bedroom, mainly to keep the light out, so when the plans were next redrawn we quietly dropped the sliding door on the bedroom side.

This week we came to look at the whole thing again as part of the revising and tidying up of the plans before they get turned into construction drawings. We questioned the notion of having a sliding door there at all, but replacing it with an ordinary door raised new issues about the overall dimensions of the room. The two fundamental problems are that the corridor space outside the en suite is wider than a normal hinged door, while the entranceway into the en suite is narrower. So what do we do?

My first suggestion (left) was to lengthen the wall at the back of the hot press to make the gap in the corridor narrow enough for a door. I also deepened the en suite slightly in order to fit a standard door to its entrance. To do this I sacrificed some of the space in the dressing room.

Dara's preference is for the door in the corridor to be closer to the bedroom. The big problem here is that we'd need a spur sticking out of the wall to make the gap narrower. When I drew this (right) it looked unwieldy so this isn't going to be a runner.

Neither of these options is especially space-efficient, and the deepening of the en suite at the expense of the dressing room seemed a bit excessive for the sake of a door.

So today we settled on the final option (left). It still involves enlarging the en suite, but width-ways, taking space out of the corridor where it isn't needed anyway. In the entrance to the en suite the solution is just a slightly smaller-than-standard door. Really, the amount of space required here depends on the dimensions of the shower tray. Research indicates that 800mm is the norm for one of these, and the minimum width of a door is 610mm, so that should leave us plenty of space to play with, though some bespoke carpentry might be involved.

This has gone off to the project manager in the last few minutes and, in conjunction with the things we discussed yesterday, should allow for a new and finaller set of drawings to be produced. I'll post them here when they arrive.

Another visitor

The project manager appointed by our engineer to do the actual legwork for our renovation paid his first visit to the house today. We discussed the current state of the plans and notified him of some minor amendments. We're still unsure about the layout of the doors between the main bedroom, the en suite and the dressing room. There's probably a whole separate post in that (with obligatory tedious illustrations).

But the main point for the moment is that we are aiming to stick to the builders' suggestion that they can be on site at the end of this month. The Council requires two weeks' notice from the builders prior to commencement of any work, so that will have to go in this day week. Which gives us a week to place a formal order with the builders and work with the project manager to finalise the drawings to contract and construction specification.

Sorting out those upstairs doors is the most urgent part of that. If we can draw things up to our satisfaction this evening, the project manager should have the plans ready for submission to the builders by the beginning of next week.

Still, if we edge into February before the trucks arrive it won't be the end of the world.