The results are in

Were you holding your breath? Did I scare you?

The engineer/project manager came back this afternoon with word of his researches. With minimal downgrading of the structure, we can have deep-piled foundations for the extension for just an extra 17k.

It's not cheap by any means, but it is within our contingency for the project and it's a hell of a lot less than we were afraid it would be.

We expect work to recommence early next week, and we will also be raising a glass to our project manager who really earned his money on this one.

Sadly, it probably means that we'll have to go shopping for radiators tomorrow...

Specification speculation

As I suspected, nobody showed up on site today, which most likely means that nobody will be showing up for the rest of the week.

Some more details on what the engineer is up to: his best guess is that the extension as envisaged will require nine steel-reinforced concrete piles to a depth of eight metres -- into the bedrock. Changing the structure to make it lighter will likely only reduce the number of piles to eight.

The biggest cost in doing this will be the cement. Precisely what that cost will be, remains to be confirmed.

More news when I get it.

The hole story

Superficial stuff first: the new living room window went in.


Meanwhile, the digger cleared the site and cleared off, and three holes were dug under the original house to find out what's holding the thing up.


Unfortunately this appears to be reinforced concrete piling the whole way. The engineer doesn't reckon there's any alternative method that's guaranteed to keep the new extension afloat. He's done up a couple of options and sent them to the builders for pricing. We won't know for sure until Friday, probably. It's not looking good and definitely not looking cheap.

I've no idea if we'll see any builders until this decision is made. I can't think what they'll do.


Take their stuff home, maybe...

Tear us a new one

As promised, today the new back door went in and the living room went from looking like this (as pictured in this post):

to this:


At the bottom right of the door that's the TV cable, by the way, not a worrying crack in the wall. No sign of a window yet: I'm hoping we'll be getting that soon.

The back of the house now looks like this:


I think it'll be a bit nicer when this arrangement is replaced with patio doors.

On a less cosmetic note, the extension rubble was mostly taken away today and we're down to soil, ready to be properly investigated tomorrow.


The foundations have started to give up some of their secrets already. I'm no structural engineer but this looks to me like a concrete pile holding up the corner of the original house:


I really hope we don't have to start looking at that sort of specification. We'll know for sure by the end of the week.

The Blitz

Today I opened the back door to reveal this:


Gouge marks in the tarmac suggest that some serious heavy machinery was in today breaking up the slab. The dancefloor of Club 265 is ruined.


Carting away will happen on Monday, and then on Tuesday the serious investigative holes will be dug in the presence of the engineer. And then we'll work out how much fixing this is going to cost us.

The first hitch

Not a whole lot happened on the surface today other than the appearance of some enigmatic woodwork:

Instead, the builders and the project manager have been investigating the foundations via some holes they've dug around the edge. We had suspected that the foundation under the extension would be poor, but it's unfortunately quite decent: normal strip foundations, similar to the sort we had hoped to get away with on the replacement -- bigger, heavier, two storey -- extension. It looks like that's not going to work.

We think the original house has raft foundations: a solid, thick slab of concrete going all the way down from ground level, and this is bearing up perfectly. Putting something like this under the extension will likely add in the region of 15k to the project cost. Another option, ground conditions allowing, would be to stick with the strip foundations and lighten the weight of the extension: making the upstairs walls thinner and downgrading the concrete floor we proposed to soundproof the bedroom from the kitchen.

A worse case scenario would be discovering that even a raft won't do and having to drive piles in to hold the new section up. That will be more like 60k on top.

However, it's all still speculation and investigative work will be continuing. We'll discuss all the options with the engineer next week and make a decision on how to proceed. Until then, what goes under the ground is all up in the air.

There it was gone

The last of the extension walls came down today. They've also cut down some of the shrubbery at the back. It makes the space seem very large indeed.

That's our all-important site safety notice by the front door.

From the rear one can just about make out the skip du jour -- a smaller affair than yesterday's.


The next phase is the grubbing up of the building area, and I understand they'll be starting at the back. The knocking out of the living room wall to make a new back door is slated for Monday.

Skippy, skippy

The skip arrived today:


We also now have a site manager's office on the front lawn:


Demolition work continued and there's just bits of wall left now, at the back and side:


The house is starting to look like it did when first built:


You may notice that a large fridge has featured prominently in photos of late (see above left, for instance). This was left in the house by the previous occupants and we didn't throw it out with the rest of their junk in the skip we made them pay for because a someone we knew said they would have a use for it. It turns out, over a year later, that they don't. They have, however, offered to help us get rid of it. I don't know how that's going to work, or when. Expect to see more photos of the back featuring the fridge.

Greetings from the Cage

When I arrived home this evening my first impression was that the builders had left the light on in the extension, noticing it was brighter than the other rooms in the house.

I was wrong, though. They had, in fact, knocked down the partitioning wall in the extension and taken most of the roof off.

From inside it now looks like this:

Here it is from above:

And here is where it joins the house:

The whole place is a bit of a cage at the moment, with the fencing up. The rubble was piled up in the front yard today: something they can't do for much longer.

At the back, the building zone covers roughly the footprint of the extension:

I'm dying to see what tomorrow brings.

New drawings arrived today. They're wrong.

They're he-ere

Bang on 8am this morning the doorbell rang. We signed the contract, which gives the builders until 29th August to finish up before we start charging them on a weekly basis. When I left there were lots of serious-looking men in reflective jackets walking around the garden with tape measures.

Work for today will mostly consist of set-up: hoardings around the site, facilities for the workmen and a great big container to take the demolition waste away. The electrician is also due on site and will be isolating the wiring in the extension.

We don't yet have a detailed running order for the work, but we'll have that in the next day or so after the site manager has had a proper look around.

More soon.

Crunch time

On Thursday the newest drawings arrived, and they're wrong. I'll post them anyway -- click images to enlarge.

Here's the ground floor:

The new-build walls are shaded grey, but don't include the wall at the back of the understairs WC which has to be moved back to create enough space under the stairs to put the toilet there. The library (marked "Lounge") door is also opening the wrong way. Everything else is correct, the only significant change being the sink added to the utility room. With that and the boiler and the washer and drier in between, we won't really have any worktop left in there. Oh well.

Upstairs, then:

Notice the glass brick wall has gone, and the main bedroom door arrangement has been altered to suit us. Everything here is now the way we want it.

The arrangement of the radiators looks like this:

It would have been a bit more obvious to put the living room radiator opposite the patio doors, but we've opted for the wall opposite the fireplace so that a future buyer can open that wall up and join the living room and library without having to wade through loads of plumbing.

The radiators in the two bathrooms are heated towel rails rather than radiators. The drawing should show that but it doesn't.

Notice that the library door has reverted to the front of the house, something we decided not to do some time ago. The bathroom door opens the wrong way and a sliding door has miraculously reappeared in the bedroom. All trivia, and not related to the heating, but it's annoyingly easy to fix, and could potentially cause confusion later on. Expensive confusion.

Along the same lines, this is the electrical layout:


Apart from the mistakes mentioned above, and the reappearance of the glass brick wall, there's a socket missing in the upstairs front bedroom, on the left-hand wall.

I didn't get cross-sectional drawings in this batch, and the remaining ones are foundation and roof diagrams that aren't very interesting, so that's the drawings. Corrected ones are due to issue shortly. I guarantee they will be wrong.

On to the main business, which was yesterday morning's meeting with the project manager, the chief builder and the builder's plumbing expert. The plumbing guy was quite impressed by the way we had things laid out, with the boiler next to the side passage for ease of pipework and the solar panels, hot water tank and boiler all arranged in a vertical column. He will be applying to the gas company on our behalf to get them to hook us up. Applying now means that there's a chance it'll happen by the time work finishes. We discussed the possibility of using the solar panels to heat water for the central heating as well as the hot water supply, which is our preferred option. He wasn't convinced that it would be economical but said he would cost both options for us just to see what the difference would be. We discussed piping materials, and it looks like we'll be going for a combination of copper and qualpex (plastic). With a final warning against fancy taps with narrow intake pipes, and a suggestion that we prioritise the buying of radiators, he was off.

The next issue on the agenda was access. When the extension comes down we will lose our back door, our side passage, and consequently all access to the rear of the house. This isn't acceptable, so we agreed that among the first works done will be the breaking out of the living room window, where the patio doors will eventually go, and the installation of a temporary back door. The site manager wasn't at the meeting, so we didn't discuss the phasing issue further, particularly how we're going to manage when the existing kitchen is ripped out and we have no sink or washing machine. We just got assurances from the chief builder that it would be sorted out. It's in the specification, so it has to be.

And that brought us to the real high level stuff: start date and completion date. The builders are ready to start on Monday at 8am. We still haven't got a completed contract, but we do have a blank proforma one, and we discussed and agreed its content with the chief builder. We'll fill it in over the weekend and have it signed when the guys arrive on Monday.

We were shocked to hear how long they are reckoning to spend on the job: just 20 weeks, plus four weeks for holidays. That gives us a completion date of Friday 1st August. I'd be amazed and delighted if that's what actually happens.

Under starter's orders

So what did happen last week? Well, not much, frankly. On Wednesday the project manager said he would be dropping in the commencement notice to the Council which would mean that work, theoretically, could begin on 13th February. Still no final plans or a contract, however. At the weekend, Dara went to see a man about doors.

Our previous investigations around the usual suppliers yielded no suitable internal doors. We want four panels, and the panels set flat into the door, shaker style, not raised. This has proven to be a big ask and nowhere in the country stocks such a thing. Eventually, Dara found a shop that is willing to customise one of their existing designs (pictured) to suit us. This door has four flat panels, but each one has a raised edge which we want ours not to have. Getting twelve custom-made internal doors, three of which will be glazed in the top two panels, is going to absorb all the savings we've made on the floors, tiles and sanitary ware. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose. We haven't bought or ordered the doors so there's still time to find a better and cheaper alternative.

This week we've been going back over the specification written by the architect to make the last-minute changes, corrections and updates. Still no construction drawings or contract, though.

And that was where things stood until this afternoon when the project manager rang to confirm that he had indeed submitted the commencement order, and that he had been talking to the builder, and that they had arranged to begin work, for real, on Monday 18th February. It's likely that they'll be out next week to begin setting things up.

Our paperwork isn't in order but I can already hear the wrecking ball. Such a beautiful sound.