How to change a house

The Extension's Finished!! So what's next?...

2008-04-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

After months of waiting for the plaster to go off, its finally done and painted:

The bike shed, sorry, utility room has its clothes drier, but still needs a bike-storage solution

The dining room is furnished, but a bit excessively so as we've moved onto the lounge.

Today, the firplace was changed:

Next its the wallpaper and possibly the carpet.

We might even do something about the nursery too...

Still not finished..

2008-02-25T14:19:00.000-08:00

Its always the little jobs isn't it? And now we're using the room again, its even harder to carry on with the work.

The plaster still isn't dry....

And I thought the point of paying professionals, was so you didn't have to patch up their bad jobs yourself :-(

Now you see it...

2008-02-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

...now you don't.

Although the plasterer did disturb Fi's day off. Grrr....

Whats that smell?

2008-02-02T03:01:00.000-08:00

That smell turned out to be gas :-(

So we had our house-insurance appointed plumbers out to have a look (after Transco had confirmed we had a leak and cut the gas supply) and they said it looked like dodgy, non-corgi plumbing. Kevin.......

As soon as Kevin heard his corgi-registration was threatened, he was round like a shot. He worked his way round the pipes and discovered the leak was due to a dodgy connection to the boiler, which was nothing to do with him! So he's fixed it, we have heating and hot water again. And a rather ugly hole in the wall....

And Finally....

2008-01-27T11:03:00.000-08:00

....we're in!!!!

After Fi spent a large proportion of the week scrubbing floors (helped by her mum) we finished off on Saturday. Built the shelves for the larder and spent the day finding new homes for the contents of our kitchen.

Today, the utility room window and the front door got their first coats of gloss.

Its so nice to have a proper kitchen again!!!

And just to prove it wasn't just Fi cleaning the floor:

The "new" plumber is here on tuesday to fit the toilet and sink, then thats it for tradesmen.
Lick of gloss on the internal doors and one more coat outside (next time the weather's good on a weekend) and we're just about done.

And relax.....

Shiny shiny

2008-01-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

Its been a while, but once again, we're nearly there....

Paid off the builder, so he's gone now.

Tilers have been and put up our shiny wall tiles. It needs grouting, but it should look something like this when its done:

I made the most of a dry saturday and got 2 coats of undercoat on all the exterior woodwork, so just need a dry sunny day to finish it. Hmmm, could be waiting a while...

Plumber comes next tuesday to fit the toilet and sink in the downstairs loo. And then we're done!!!!!!!

Looking all-white

2008-01-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

Painting has happened!
Not much, but the utilty room, cloakroom and "lobby" (architect's naming convention) now have their walls and ceilings painted in glorious white eggshell paint.

Joiners were here today tidying up the skirting boards, which they really should have done properly the first time. Oh well, not much more to go now...

For now, how'd you like the bike shed? :-)

Looking in:

And looking back out:

Kitchen

2008-01-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

Go on then, this is what it looked like, just before Christmas:

We were very fortunate to have an army of Christmas Cleaning fairies descend on Hexham, so we're now able to (and have) start painting. Utility Room first, while we wait for the builders to finish off all the little snags we keep finding...

Happy Christmas!!!!!

2007-12-24T02:45:00.000-08:00

For tomorrow.

Our Christmas present to ourselves is a completed extension!!!!!!!

Kitchen fitter finished on frdiay morning, as did the plasterer. Kevin the plumber actually turned up on friday afternoon and did everything he was supposed to. John the electrician came round on saturday. He didn't finish then, so he's back today. Only a few hours of tradesmen to go....

We've got a washing machine again! And a downstairs water-supply!

We've got a small snaglist of things to sort out: leaky gutter; wonky lead-flashing, missing door-handle, but its nothing to stop us getting it all cleaned up, ready to decorate. I might get a few more pics up, or I might wait, in a Grand Designs style, and give you a grand finale in the New Year. But that partly depends on how much painting we get done next week.

And relax.......

A thousand years errosion in one weekend

2007-12-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

Remember this?

A needle gun has got to be one of the best power-tools I've used in a while :-)
Not bad eh?

All we want is a kitchen sink...

2007-12-16T02:29:00.000-08:00

Somewhat annoyingly, we've got 2 and neither are in place.
So on friday we had the joiners in, hanging the worlds tackiest internal doors (more on that later) and the kitchen fitters made a good start:

I picked up a needle gun from our local tool-hire shop and made a start on the dining room mantel-piece. Its very satisfying, blasting the whatsit out of a piece of stone :-) Hopefully IO'll be finishing it today.

Yesterday (saturday, the electrician came and wired in the mains sockets, some of the lights and the underfloor heating - its very odd walking on a warm flor. But nice too.
And the kitchen fitters came back and got a fair-way on.

We spent the morning hunting out toilets and basins for the cloakroom and choosing nicer internal doors. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find semi-glazed 4-panel doors! It seems that if you want clear glass, you have to pay through the nose for oak or similar wood, but if you want a cheaper, pine, door, you have to have frosted glass with a pattern etched in, and the really cheap moulded doors come with frosted glass with a really nasty pattern. Yuck.
So we're not having 4-panel glazed doors after all. We've got solid (moulded) doors for the cloakroom and utility room, and these glazed doors for the kitchen, dining room and lounge (which needed replacing anyway)

Driving me crazy!

2007-12-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

Although it does look quite good:

And this is our future kitchen:

Note the plaster drying out.

All good. Except Kevin stil hasn't been to fit the gutters....

Plastered like Paris

2007-12-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

The plastering was finished yesterday, so you can get a better idea of the shape and size of the rooms.
They'll look bigger once the plaster is dry (which will take forever with no heating in there) and more so with the walls painted white.
Floor-tiles get grouted today, driveway gets block-paved today and the kitchen gets fitted friday & saturday. :-)

Dining Room, Kitchen and Utility Room:

Kevin strikes again!

2007-12-11T15:52:00.000-08:00

The notorious plumber is up to his old tricks.

He turned up several hours late on monday afternoon, so only had time to move the soil stack in preperation to fit the gutters. He did move it, but made a right mess of our recently re-pointed wall in the process:

What a weekend!!!!!

2007-12-09T23:51:00.000-08:00

It all started on friday morning. At 6:45am, when the floor-tilers arrived.
Follwed at 8am when Freedom Electric arrived to move the meter and power supply (cutting the power to the house for the day. We also had the joiners, putting up the rest of the woodork for the plasterers, the roofer and the electrician, who ened up being here until 8:30pm! And he still didn't finish.

On saturday, John the sparky was back at 7:30am to nearly complete the wiring. He didn't quite finish as he had to go to the Newcastle Utd match. The plasters turned up at 8:30 and made a cracking start. It was definitely cracking as they pout a hole in a hot water pipe, soaking the underfloor heating insulating board. I think I've saved the rest of the floor though.

They also cut the phoneline (again!) because the wires were "in the way"

But they came back on sunday with a mate who could fix both, to avoid a costly visit from BT

I spent until 11:15pm stripping the rest of the wallpaper yesterday, so now the room looks something like this:

Hopefully the plasterers will finish today. If John turns up on time.....

You floor me.

2007-12-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Not as much progress as we'd hoped due to a small amount of miscommunication at the builders merchants, but progress nevertheless.

Its getting hot in here....

2007-12-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

Well it could do, now the underfloor heating is in place!

This is how we looked last friday:

After a busy couple of weekends with assistance from very helpful friends, the kitchen and dining room is now gutted to a shell, so the floor-tilers have been able to start work. First tiles should be laid tomorrow....

And if you're wondering what we're doing for a kitchen (microwave, kettle and toaster) in the meantime, here it is:

Lead

2007-11-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

Some progress on the roof today: lead flashing along the ridge and joining the glass to the tiles (or where the tiles are supposed to be). It doesn't look too bad from inside, but we might have to do something to cover it up eventually.

Everything's slowing down now. Its looking nigh on impossible to be finished for Christmas. Everything apart from the plumbing is waiting for the wiring to be done on 7th of December. And as the plumber is a law unto himself, who knows how it will go...

No more stone-throwing...

2007-11-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

Its a glass roof!! Albeit leaky round the edges until the roofers come back (hopefully tomorrow) to finish off. It lets an amzing amount of light in, even with a grey November sky

Now for a rant.
Uusually, its a nightmare trying to find a plumber, let alone get one to actually turn up. Ours has turned up unannounced (AGAIN!) and fitted the pipes for the central heating system.
If he'd told us he was coming we'd have been able to tell him that we're not having radiators, we've decided to install electric underfloor heating instead. Grrr....

And the wall came tumbling down. Again

2007-11-17T14:16:00.001-08:00

So we've now got our big kitchen-diner!
There's a lot of floor there, it'll be fun to tile...

Spent today painting the wiondow frame and the barge-boards. The weather forecast doesn't sound promising enough to do any more unfortunatley.

Let's look through the square window

2007-11-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, we've got a window!! But not a door. The made-to-measure door didn't fit. Ooops...

We've also got internal walls, so here's the utility room and the loo:

We've also gained frosted glass in the velux in the loo, so modesty can be retained. Tomorrow, we say goodbye to the wall, and even more sadly, the sailing boat door :-(

Bit of a mess

2007-11-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

No real progress yet this week, other than a glass-less window and door being delivered, but hopefully tomorrow, the joiners wil be here to fit said window and door, build the new stud wall and knock down the existing stud wall between the kitchen and dining room. So I thought I'd kick-start the messy business by trying to get the wallpaper off the chimney breast. Given the amount of plaster that came off at the same time, I think we've a big job on our hands...

There's a slight chance the glass roof may turn up tomorrow too. But I bet it doesn't.

Had an expensive evening of internet shopping. Bought a combi-microwave, a multi-function oven, a 5-burner hob and an extractor hood. You don't want to know how much it hammered the credit card!

Concrete evidence

2007-11-11T11:35:00.000-08:00

We finally had the builders back on site last week. On thursday, we had another skip so they could tidy up (and luckily no-one crashed into it this time - long story)

On friday, we gained a concrete floor.

Should have the joiners in on monday and tuesday to build the internal walls. Exciting, isn't it?

Waste water pipes....

2007-11-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

Thouroughly exciting one today. We've got a pipe.
It connects the bath drain to the hand-basin drain in the bathroom and means we won't have a pipe on the other side of the wall, going through the glass roof. Which is nice.

I am a bit concerened that it might be a little too near the roof line for comfort though...

We should be getting the window and door-frame tomorrow. Its only the door-frame as the joiner forgot to make the door. Good grief....

A Roof!!!

2007-11-03T01:45:00.000-07:00

After a fairly uneventful week on the building front, well, nothing happened at all until yesterday, we've now (nearly) got a roof!

Its all felted and waterproof, including temporary cover where the glass roof will go in a couple of weeks.

One minor point is the lack of flashing at the house end, combined with the lack of drain (care of the roofer) means the bthroom sink empties out onto the roof, then falls down the gap, into the kitchen. Good job we'll be knocking it down then.

On the positive side of things, we've got our washing machine plumbed in again, and it was a lovely sunrise this morning :-)

One day....

2007-10-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

..... this will all be glass

Update

2007-10-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

No pictures today, but we have re-established communication. The builder, the roofer, the joiners and the glass-roof people have all been talking and know what they all want to do. Which is probably run away and leave us, but they're going to get on with it.
So hopefully, the joiners will come and remove the tiny veluxi tomorrow and re-arrange the joists into a sensible fashion, then the roofers will hopefully come on friday and put the slates on. Then the builders might come back next week and get the floor in.

Fingers crossed....

Rooftops and fireplaces

2007-10-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Its been a weekend of deliberation, but we're getting somewhere.
We've chosen our kitchen supplier AND the kitchen to supply. Next job is to choose the floor tiles.

After lots of frantic phone calls, we have a glass-roof ordered. Apparently we can't have a "conservatory-style" roof due to there being valley gutters on both sides. But we didn't want a conservatory-style roof, so thats ok. We're basically going to get 4 large panes of energy-efficient double-glazed glass to sit on the rafters. Which is what we wanted all along. And we don't need planning permission as the general public won't be able to see them.

No major developments outside to show you, only a re-routed gutter and drainpipe.

But, given that I had to come home early today to see the roof designer, I made the most of the afternoon and started in the dining room, from this:

Via an awful lot of soot to this:

Leaving us with this:

Which is possibly going to have a gas real-flame stove type thing.
And in case you're wondering, up the chimney looks like this:

And the walls came tumbling down....

2007-10-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

This is where the door, window and kitchen sink used to be.

So its washing up in the bath from now on....

Its all going a bit mad...

2007-10-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

Our dear builders are charging head-long into the build. Which is good. Or it should be. Unfortunatly, there's been a bit of a breakdown in communication, with them fitting the wrong size veluxes (veluxi?).

The whole point of the extension was to open up the kitchen and get as much light in as possible. But would you look at this:

How small are they?!!! So we're now waiting to hear from the glass-roof company who were the backup plan. Its going to slow the whole roof up...

But that doesn't matter, because they're not going to be able to knock the wall down yet (despite starting) as we didn't know when the electricity meter would need moving, so we'll have to wait a couple of weeks for that I think.

Leaving us sans-cuisine for some time yet...

Nothing obvious...

2007-10-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

But the drainage seems to be complete and the floor sort of replaced. We've also gained a stack of shiny new velux windows sitting in the dining room and have designed the new front door and window. Oh, and we found out that our kitchen sink is being removed tomorrow, so its washing up in the bathroom from now on :-(

A roof an' all

2007-10-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry blog-fans, its been a while. Partly because our dear builders cut the phone line on thursday when taking down the last bit of the garage roof, and partly because there hasn't been a lot of visible progress to show you. But now the pointing is all done, and the front wall looks great for it, and we've got the beginnings of a roof

What's quite interesting now is looking inside at the leftover garage wall which is having the new roof put on top if it. I'm assuming the timber is leverl, which means the wall isn't....

Ooh, doors and windows

2007-10-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Making good progress after yesterday's rain. We've now got stone door and window frames.

And on the inside:

And the still-troublesome stone:

It shouldn't have any smooth surfaces on it, but obviously is a lot of hassle to replace, so it's being "faced". Badly. :-(

The builders are going to concentrate on re-pointing the existing walls now. They needed it anyway, but it should help the new stone blend in with the old. And we've got a man coming to see us to on monday to design our window and door. What do you think of something like this?:

You leave them a week...

2007-10-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

...and look what happens.

We returned home from the sunny south of France (pictures online here) to find not inconsiderable progress has been made. Although there is an issue with some of the stone-choice to be discussed tomorrow morning. And they still haven't connected the bathroom drain to anything....

Woohoo! Progress!

2007-09-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Came home yesterday to find the trench half-full of concrete and today they've started building!

We're off to France on monday for a week, leaving the builders to it, lets hope the progress continues, and there aren't any "issues".

Its a big hole

2007-09-26T13:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday seemed to invovle a lot of digging. Today we've gained a manhole and a network of sewage pipes. Reassuringly, the toilet still flushes and doesn't cause any flooding, so it works!

2007-09-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

Getting beter. Despite the rain, the builders have filled a couple more skips of rubbish and discovered, with the building inspector, that the garage was built on a whopping 1" of concrete. Which means they've got to take down the remaining wall so they can dig it out to put down a sensible amount of concrete.

Notice the open window? thats the front door....

Tidier....

2007-09-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

Looks like they've had a skip in to clear away the rubble and have made a start on digging the new drain.

The more astute amongst you may notice our old front door in the place our old kitchen door was. To aid security, they've been nailed/screwed together and shut. Sadly the postman hasn't established this and is still trying to put the post through. :-(

And....

2007-09-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

You remember that game you used to play, where you looked for hours at a tray of objects to work out what the difference was?

Well, if you look for hours, you might notice a brick or 2 that have been moved.

I'm assuming there's a skip coming tomorrow.

And back to the blog.....

2007-09-19T14:16:00.001-07:00

So we start blogging again.
Just a quickie today. The house extension is starting! And hopefully this blog will record it all.

We're going from this:

To this:

The builders finally turned up yesterday, 6 hours late, unloaded their van, and left.
But today, we have progress!!!