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.
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