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After some early-morning negotiations, the electric company agreed to turn the juice back on. Unfortunately this was on condition that building work cease until the supply source and meter are moved to a location more to their liking. No, I've no idea how long that'll take. Expect fewer posts.

So there wasn't much done today, just some more work on the landing-bedroom doorway:


And from the bedroom side (with space cat):


Most of the rubbish from the window installation was thrown in the skip, and you've never seen such a tidy building site.

Wood and glass (part 3)

This is yesterday's entry, composed offline for the reason given here.

I forgot to mention on Thursday that the interal doors did arrive, and we found space for them. Here they are stacked on the floor of the large front bedroom:


Today [Friday], saints be praised, the windows were finished. And so the front now looks like this:


The back looks like this:


And the side entrance from the patio into the dining room is thus:


As you can see from the back, block cutting went ahead on the living room wall for the patio doors.


I said previously I had been expecting the breakthrough from the landing to the master bedroom to happen today, but instead they just removed the glass from the landing window. You can see the pencil lines on the wall where the cutting will be happening:


On the other side, it's apparent that they did make a start on the cutting, but then abandoned it:


In the bathroom, we have our satinised window with a clear border (though our cistern lid was a casualty of the installation):


However, the window where the en suite will be is not satinised. We may get that replaced, but we will definitely complain about it.


The yellow paint on the wall is from the electrician, who appears to have been surveying the place today, marking locations of sockets and switches. He must have been frustrated by the furniture and piles of stuff stacked next to the walls around the house, but without due notice there's not much we can do about that.

So, siege mode continues, and is likely to become even more siege-like. Since the phasing of works is tending to fall by the wayside we are going to have to pack up our worldly possessions and make them unobtrusive, starting now.

Good job we still have the boxes from when we moved in.

Powerless

I did write a post yesterday. I wrote it offline, on battery power, in semi darkness. Because when I arrived home yesterday evening there was no electricity in the house.

From what we could piece together, a delivery of blocks to the house severed an external overhead powerline on the road running past our house. A team from the power company came out to repair it and, while they were there, decided our house was not safe to have an electricity supply and cut it off, where the supply comes off the grid at the corner of the house next door. They also neglected to tell anyone they had done this.

So when I discovered the power was off, and having checked the fuse board, checked with the builders (who said there had been a problem with external overhead cables nearby, but nothing to do with the house) and that next door had power, I reported a fault to the electricity company. They sent a crew out and checked the cabling, finding no trace of a current at our house. They followed the dead wiring to next door's gable where they found our mains connection deliberately cut. So they phoned it in to the depot and learned that the early crew had deemed the supply unsafe and cut it. With a status of "unsafe" declared they could not reconnect. We made arrangements for the builder to have an electrician on site for Saturday morning, and we went to bed.

The builder arrived at 10 this morning and we rang the power company so they could send a reconnection crew to supervise the making safe of our wiring. They refused. Reconnection of an unsafe supply has to go through management and mangement don't work weekends. So we have decamped for the weekend to a neighbour, where I'm writing this.

It would appear that electricity company crews are free to roam the streets, cutting off power supplies as they see fit without reporting or answering to any authority, least of all the customer left in darkness.

The post on yesterday's work will follow shortly.

Wood and glass (part 2)

And so the glazing began, starting with the big back window:


From the inside:

Impressive, eh?

A couple of other windows have gone in too, like the little kitchen:


As well as the library:


More of the same tomorrow, with luck.

Meanwhile, the meeting with the electricians, scheduled for Monday, had to be pushed forward to 8am today. So I did some frantic scribbling on the drawings and passed them over to them this morning. It all appears to be in hand, though they won't be phasing the works, which means disruption and plaster dust is going to be a major factor from now until finishing up time. Whenever that is.

Finally, I think I've solved yesterday's oddity de jour. As part of the window-fitting project, the builders will need access to the upstairs area through the original house. Cutting out the upstairs opening into the extension on the landing is imminient, and the temporary door will be separating the new landing.

I do hope we'll have wall-cutting tommorrow. We're due.

Wood and glass (intermission)

At 8.30 this morning, during our site meeting, the windows arrived. The window supplier then refused to open the doors of the truck until they had been handed a bank draft for the full cost.

It later transpired that the window people weren't there to fit the windows. No, just place them in the general vicinity of where they are to be installed.


Likewise the rear doors.

Lovely.

Needless to say, neither us nor our builders were entirely happy with this. Installing the windows, it turns out, is a two-day job. We've asked that they start with the old house. We've also asked that they start tomorrow and finish Friday.

And yet, that wasn't the most galling part of the window story today. Oh no. For the worst bit you'll need to cast your mind back to March and our first trip to the windows showroom. Instead of ironmongery, the display windows had horrible grey plastic handles. "It says 'chrome' in the specification" we pointed out, "that's not chrome". "Oh, we call it chrome" said the window salesman. So we went off to a separate third-party supplier and, at considerable expense, purchased actual metal handles for our windows. Today the windows arrived from the supplier fitted with perfectly adequate chrome handles (pictured right). They're not as nice as the ones we bought, granted, but they would have saved us quite a bit of money if the window salesman had made us aware of their existence in the first place.

No, the window people won't be getting a whole lot of recommendations from us.

The meeting, then, was short and to the point. The schedule is still two weeks behind, but doing the windows as one phase instead of dividing them into two phases as previously planned will go some way toward speeding that up. Talk of working through the holiday was mentioned again by the builders.

The kitchen has become a priority, and attached to that is the final electrical specification. We have a meeting with the electrician at 8am on Monday and everything has to be finalised from our side by then.

And so to the crack. Yesterday, the project manager received the graph and figures of the vibration monitoring from the piling company. It shows that on the 11th of March, for 90 minutes, there were massive vibrations on the site. We're talking off-the-scale structure-damaging numbers. If they are accurate, the project manager can't believe more damage wasn't caused. He is now going to follow up with the piling company to find out if they have an explanation for it. Meanwhile, the builders have been asked to aquire and attach monitoring devices to the crack.

Finally, oddity de jour is these two temporary-looking doors sitting on the front lawn.


What they're for I've no idea. Right now I'm just hoping for windows.

Wood and glass (part 1)

It was predominantly a carpentry day again, with strips added to the utility room and kitchen ceilings:


The rear windowsill was put back on, mortared back together, with what looks like a couple of new courses of blocks underneath it:


Spied in the site office this morning were the Velux windows for the kitchen roof:

I've no idea when that roofing is being done or what's holding it up.

Also today I went to see a man about a front door. We're a bit further behind than we should be with this, but hopefully the chain I set in motion today will bring us back on track.

With the windows arriving tomorrow, we managed to push back the arrival of the internal doors until Thursday. Once the window chaos is over there'll be more space to store them. Meanwhile, this evening, 265 is in siege mode, with every room's furniture stacked as far from the window as possible. I've a feeling there won't be much point restoring the rooms to full livable condition until the end of the project, since the disruptions will be coming thick and fast from here on in.

Raising the roof

High winds at the weekend dislodged a few loose tiles from the unfinished roof:


No sign of any roofers today, despite dry weather until lunchtime, and I had to look carefully to see what work had actually been done:


The timber latticework in the apex of the one-storey extension is new, as are the two-panelled frame thingies in the back window frame.

More woodwork inside, mainly lintels for the new doors:


This view is from the kitchen, through the utility space into the TV room at the front. In the upper left you can also see a section of the timber frieze they've put around the kitchen.

A couple of weeks ago, you may have noticed, they removed the newly-installed windowsill from the back window. Today they saw fit to slice it in half:


For a very good reason I'm sure.

Wednesday is shaping up to be a big day. Not only are the windows going in, and there's the regular fortnightly site meeting, but the new internal doors are arriving on site as well. This evening I've been clearing stuff out of the house into the shed as I've a feeling it's about to get even more cramped in here.

And the back

OK, so the builders aren't the only ones working behind schedule.

Anyway, here is the roofing at the back, put in place yesterday:


The other big news from yesterday is that the windows will be done all in one day, and the day in question is Wednesday next. This will include cutting out the last section of wall around the back door.

Interesting times ahead.

Rainy day activities

Not ideal roofing weather today. The builders stayed inside and added bits to the extension ceiling beams. Nothing interesting enough to go out in the rain and photograph, though.

Instead, have some roof tiles. Delivered today and photographable from inside the front door.

Like nothing ever happened...

... apart from an extra 40% of house, that is.


The tiling is also done at the side:


At the back, however, nothing did actually happen:


I'm not seeing stacks of new tiles anywhere around, so I don't know if this work will actually be done tomorrow.

Inside, meanwhile, the ceiling beams are in place upstairs:


Shaping up nicely, I think.

Totally roofless

The team of roofers arrived en masse very early this morning.

I can see why too. It wasn't just a case of moving tiles around. Almost the whole thing came off and was replaced, timbers and all.


Only the tiles remain to be put back. The rear looks like this:


The eagle-eyed among you may notice that some new blockwork has been done around the downstairs gable window, at the top of the corner pillars, covering some previously-exposed steel.

The most impressive aspect of the roofwork is the new-look attic. With the horizontal timbers gone, the roofspace appears huge.


It'll be great once it's floored and lit, though at the moment the floor doesn't yet go all the way to the edge:

What's the crack?

Yesterday morning, while waiting outside the site office for the start of the meeting, I noticed this crack in the front of the original house:


It runs from the ground all the way up to the upstairs front bedroom window, and goes right through the wall. I'm convinced I would have noticed it before if it predated the building work. We're waiting on the final figures from the vibration monitoring done during the foundations, but we don't expect them to show a level high enough to have caused this. So, the project manager will be affixing a device on the crack to monitor it. If it doesn't move it should be straightforward enough to tie the wall back together. I don't want to think about the alternatives.

On a happier note, roof work began in earnest today:


It's a bit hard to see with the scaffolding in the way, but this is the view from the back:


Inside it looks like this:


Just the front section has been fully beamed as of today.

Finally, yesterday's meeting was attended by our new plumber. Once papers are signed and exchanged he will officially be part of the team.

Poled over

Today we got an extra floor of scaffolding on the extension, and an extension of the scaffolding to include the original house:


It wraps right around the back, giving access to all parts of the roof which will be worked on, as tiles from the back of the existing house are harvested for the front of the extension:


Unfortunately, as a result of all this, the bathroom window no longer opens. So no curries for a while.

Catching a tan?

Despite excellent building weather, there wasn't a whole lot of activity again today. Yet more carpentry has been added to the extension roof:


Inside upstairs, Friday's wooden beam is gone and vertical metal strips have appeared:


I've no idea what's going on. If anything.

Meanwhile, one of our potential plumbers has dropped his offer slightly, so we could have a definite green light some time this week.

Details, details

As I left yesterday morning the crew were taking the supports out of the new front room. I'm glad they're confident that it will stay up by itself.

No major construction happened yesterday. The picture of the back is something of a spot-the-difference:


Two ladder-shaped bits of wood have been added to the gable end to form an eaves, four horizontal wooden supports run across the back section of the roof, and the rear window now has a sill, but that's about it, changewise.

More carpentry work happened upstairs:


I assume this beam affixed to the wall is for attaching the roof to in some way, but I'm not sure. I hope to find out next week.

Boom boom!

We had a guest for breakfast this morning:


He comes for the fine cuisine.

Meanwhile the shell of the first floor was finished:


Work has even begun with the roof, namely hacking bits off it. I'm hoping they didn't discover anything nasty under there.


No internal walls yet, probably because of two sequential rainy afternoons. Instead the upstairs floor has lots of carefully trimmed wood lying on it:


Rafter beams is my guess.