A taste of steel

This morning's meeting was brief and to the point. Three main issues were addressed:

The doors
We will be handing over pictures of the internal doors to the builders tomorrow. They will then order them from the joiner. After hinting at it last week, we have finally decided to drop the sliding doors in the utility room and put standard doors in instead. This will not only save us from having to sacrifice wall space to an access panel for the sliding mechanism, it will narrow the openings and increase the wall space, most vitally, in the kitchen where the units will be.



The kitchen
In the next few days we will revisit our kitchen people with the final real-life measurements of our kitchen space and finalise the layout and dimensions. We'll then give this back to the builders to arrange for plumbing to be installed in the appropriate places.

The plumber
Our house appears to be situated on some sort of Bermuda Triangle of plumbers. The original one retained by the builders disappeared, only to return with an outlandish quote. Efforts by us, the project manager and the builders to secure the services of other plumbers have all drawn blanks, through a combination of disappearing e-mails, unreturned voicemails and other communications breakdowns. The next step is to try and lure a plumber off the street and hold him captive until the central heating is operational.

So that's the plans for the future. Today the steel arrived:


My spatial reasoning tells me that these two angled pieces will form the frame for the glazed gable, once they're rotated backwards from how they're lying here, and turned to face each other, with the apex where that cardboard box is sitting.


I hope this will be soon, as someone with a flatbed truck and a big magnet could make an easy profit from the site at the moment.

The other big piece of work today was the pouring of hardcore on the patio area:


(Yes, that fridge is still there.)

They still need to do the side passage and then flatten and compact it, but once done, that'll be the end of the groundworks outside. For now.

With the site secured for another day, the night watchman takes up his post:

Pin-ups

Today these struts were installed, presumably to hold up the wall while the blocks come out and the steel goes in.


They've certainly embedded them well into the wall:


The drainage work looks to be nearing completion. The waste water from our house now goes somewhere...


And our open sewer has been built up and covered.


All mod cons here.

We have another three-way meeting tomorrow morning. I need to go now and make some decisions about doors.

The Wall

The phone rang just after three. The project manager had received a call from the foreman saying there was a problem with one of the boundary walls around the site. It was in imminent danger of collapse. The wall next to the extension is over three metres tall. It looks like it has had new courses of blocks added to it on several occasions and it has no structural reinforcements -- pillars or struts -- along forty or so metres of length.


On coming home we discussed how to approach it: offer the apartment building's owner half the repair costs straight off? What if he said it was all our fault? Did the builders have structural photos from before the demolition started? We thought they did, but what if they didn't show anything useful?

The project manager arrived at six and we walked the length of the wall as he cast his engineer's eye over it. The mortar looks ropy in places but there's nowhere it looks actually unstable. Where was the problem?

Then the project manager pointed across the site to the opposite wall, which separates our garden from next door's:


"Oh, that one!"

The lower course of blocks on the first two sections of this much lower wall (click for bigger) have developed cracks, most likely when the area was cleared and a row of supporting blocks was removed. The neighbours were out, but this should be just a matter of getting their permission and having the builders knock it down and replace it.

Phew. Bullet dodged.

Anyway, nothing really dramatic happened on site today, just more drainage. This new pipe running along the back of the kitchen looks like it will collect rainwater from the guttering at the far end.


We're due some excitement soon. Good excitement.

Awaiting the angle grinder

On the other side of the kitchen partition the side door was removed today, but none of the kitchen wall was. The steel has yet to arrive, which is presumably why nothing more adventurous happened. I guess, with no steelwork done, that puts us exactly a week behind schedule.


Meanwhile, the remains of the patio area was cleared:


I'd say they'll make short work of flattening that out, but I reckon they'll be too busy with steel and blockwork next week to do it. Here's hoping.

Builder's logic

One of the things that continually amazes me about this project is the way the builders sequence the works and solve the problems that arise. While I'm sure it's all well-practised and very much born of economic necessity, there must be unique situations in every job. Yet any that ours has thrown up have been dealt with carefully yet effortlessly.

Today, for instance, I arrived home to find the key of the back door missing. I searched the floor for anywhere it might have fallen and then checked the drawer where all the keys are kept. No sign of it. What had the builders done with it? We had given them a key to the side door, but it was occasionally necessary for them to use the back door and they always left the key in its place afterwards. What was going on?

At this point I had a look at what happened in the kitchen today and realised the key would be near the front doormat.


They had been in to finish boarding up the kitchen. With this done, the side door was obscured but the builders were still inside. The front door is deadlocked and they don't have a key so they went out the back door, taking the key. They locked the back door from the outside and dropped it back in the letterbox. It turns out they also phoned Dara to tell her that they'd done this, but I was left to do the detective work myself. Elementary.

The outside kitchen wall and side door remain intact on the other side of the woodwork, for now. Other than the kitchen partition, the other work today concerned the drains again.


This delightful exposé shows where our yard drain (above right) and soil pipe (above left) join up and are carried away (below left) to meet the neighbours. I'm not sure what they're doing here: it looks like they've poured cement into the hole. Whether they intend to build it back up into yet another manhole, or reroute the pipes to join up with our new drains at one of the new manholes (just to the right of shot) remains to be seen. I am concerned by the sheer number of manholes we'll have in our patio and side passage: two each so far.

Anyone for Tetris?

Today the blocks arrived and the carpentry was removed from around the floor slab:


The first thing I learned at this morning's meeting was that I was reading the schedule wrong. In fact, we're not a couple of days ahead with the slab being poured; we're several days behind having not yet started with the steel. The steel has been ordered, though, and should be on site tomorrow or Friday.

I hadn't really thought about what "structual steel" meant, but of course this includes the joists holding up the openings between the original house and the extension. And this in turn means that the knocking-through of the kitchen is happening sooner rather than later. As a result the builders are putting up a partition in the kitchen beside the soon-to-be-demolished external wall:


An impractically small room is now almost completely unusable. Our temporary back door, which has been doing steadfast duty for over a year, is coming to the end of its life.


We also discussed the layout of the patio this morning, specifically the heights. There will be two steps between floor level and garden level with the patio in between. We've decided to put both of them leading down from the patio so that it's sitting high on a level with the house floors.

The project doesn't include the patio, but the builders will be putting a hard surface down on its footprint. To assist with that, they've broken up the remains of the old slab, except for the area occupied by the anti-development settlers whose temporary accommodation is just visible on the left here:


We'll get a court order to shift them.

Internal doors were high on the agenda as they will be needed in about five weeks' time: the normal lead time for such things. I went along to the custom door supplier this afternoon so we now have pretty much decided on what we're after. Fortunately their lead time is about three weeks at the moment. We'll need a full door survey, giving us the sizes of all the openings, and the builders will be doing this for us. Then we can place the order and let the builders handle it from there.

A sticking point remains on the downstairs sliding doors. The walls into which they'll slide will be built soon. The site manager has pointed out that they'll need some kind of access panel to allow the mechanism to be repaired if anything goes wrong. The problem is that the wall between the kitchen and the utility room is intended to have units on both sides: no space for a removable panel. So we're rethinking the whole sliding doors thing again, having previously got rid of the upstairs ones.

Our project manager is still chasing a plumber, having given up on the Incredible Disappearing one. That will need to be tied down in time for our next meeting next week. As soon as he's on board, we'll need to finalise the kitchen layout, bringing the room's real-life dimensions to the kitchen supplier and finalising the placement of the plumbing. We can probably order the units at the same time. Sweet.

Fantastic floor

Today they poured the floor slab. Voila:


Haven't decided yet what to write in the wet cement.

It looks like this meant more grubbing up of the concrete slab around the original house, and that's lying around for disposal. Our external drains won't be, er, draining for a while:


Nothing else was planned for this week so we probably won't have much more happening over the next couple of days. More drainage, perhaps. Next, the schedule calls for a week of structural steel followed by three weeks of superstructural blockwork, bringing us one storey off the ground, followed by another floor and the second storey blocks.

Things for the immediate future should be clearer tomorrow following our 8am meeting, which will also hopefully shed light on the Incredible Disappearing Plumber.

Spot the difference

Can you tell what they did today?


Doesn't look like much at first glance, but the trench immediately to the rear of the extension, containing the new drainage pipe, has been filled in. The heap of soil excavated from it has been put back and there's now a completely flat surface there for the first time since foundation work began. To celebrate they've put a wheelbarrow on it.



They've also extended the drainage pipe which runs along the back and put in yet another new junction: that's three turns before it joins up with the existing drains.

From the other side it looks like this:


They still have to break though into that old drain and hook the whole thing up, but I'm guessing they might leave that until later.

I took advantage of the new walking space around the extension to take some measurements. It looks to me like they have got the width right, if the walls are going where I thing they're going. We also have plenty of width in the side passage, but we probably wouldn't have been able to add another row of blocks to widen the extension further. All is for the best, then.

What a mesh

Preparations for the extension floor continued today as the builders finished filling in the foundation beams with sand and gravel and laid more steel meshes on top of it.


No new work inside today, but outside they've laid most of the sewer pipe that runs down the side passage...


...then turns a corner at a newly created manhole junction and heads for the existing main collector sewer.

A long boring story about doors

...is something I'll spare you. Suffice it to say we have exhausted every avenue of off-the-shelf internal doors and there is nothing suitable. We have been very close, but of the last two candidates one had poorly proportioned panels and the other could not be supplied unglazed. So we're back to where we were some time ago, looking at expensive custom-made doors. We already had a supplier in mind for this, and the joiner who will probably be doing our front door is also a possibility.

Meanwhile, we finally got our window handles ordered. The shop gave us a bit of a discount, with the understanding that we'll be buying our light switches and sockets from them, which is fair enough as they have nice stuff.

Work on the foundations continues. They seem to be filling in the gaps in the concrete frame at the moment. New shuttering is going on top of it, and that is presumably to hold the floor which is scheduled to be installed next week.


More work is being done on the drainage trench I mentioned yesterday: it's wider than it was.


Inside, the large quantites of dust in the kitchen indicate that they're still hard at it under the stairs.


The orange waste pipe sticking up on the right is new, having been poked in from the extension site.

They've also seen fit to punch a hole in the kitchen ceiling near here. Part of the investigations around removing the walls from around this area, I'm guessing.

Beginning renovations

Not much going on with the foundations at the moment. Now that the concrete has set they are removing the wooden shuttering. At the back they've dug a short narrow trench in the garden to hold the pipe which will connect the extension's plumbing to the main sewer.

Meanwhile, the impact of the work is starting to make itself felt in the original house. The window openings were measured for refitting yesterday. The cupboard under the stairs, accessed via the original kitchen, has been knocked through and the space under the stairs is being examined for conversion into a WC. This will entail the biggest bit of building work in the original house: the moving of the existing wall between hall and kitchen further to the back of the house to create extra space under the stairs.

I think our days of having any sort of kitchen at all are running out fast.

Your actual foundations

I've been away for the last week, so apologies for lack of updates.

In my absence, the cement lorry arrived to pour the concrete for the foundations:


They now look like this:


From ground level it's impossible to know how much trouble lies beneath them. I bet the people who built the original house thought that at this stage too.

Lots of other things going on, more on that later.

All metal and no rock

Another day with not much to show for it.


They've put these reinforcing cage thingies into the trenches. We were hoping for concrete, but what can you do?

Late edition

I missed posting yesterday evening as I wasn't home until after dark. Anyway, we got gravel.


265 is no longer a brownfield site.

This morning the head builder was on-site so I have hopes of some major work happening today.

More later...

They came, they sawed, they shuttered

Not a lot to report today. Lots of signs of carpentry around the place; lots of bits of cut timber lying around the site and some additional shuttering has been done.



No real signs of where this is leading just yet.

We've been framed

Before the meeting this morning I was looking at the extension measurements on the plans and noticed an inconsistency:


The first picture is a view of the extension roof showing it extending 4m back from the building line. In the second, however, we can see that the roof overhangs the back wall, and here the distance is 4m plus that overhang. The shortness of the extension in first illustration ties in with the measurements I took yesterday. I raised it with the foreman and he said he had noticed it too, and that it had been checked against the overall front-to-back measurement of the extended house which showed that the slightly shorter version was correct. So we're not getting the full 4 metres, but the difference is only one row of blocks.

I brought up the side passage as well. He said that we should still have a full metre width at the back. I make the current distance from woodwork to garden wall to be 91cm at the very back. If we do lose width it won't be by much. And, of course, it'll be extra space inside the house.

The main business of the meeting, as I mentioned yesterday, was the windows. We set out our requests and it was all noted down. The site manager said he would need to take this to the window contractors and get the whole job re-quoted. That came through after lunch, and needed further amendment, as the patio doors were opening into the house instead of out, and the built-in vents were still included. One of the dimensions was wrong too. So that went straight back to the supplier, correctios and all.

Meanwhile, back on the site, the angle grinder was out first thing and the extraneous metal at the top of the piles was removed. More shuttering went up as well:


I think this is the end of it, and we now have canals to pour foundations into.