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.