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.