Update 07/06/07

Progress has been a little slower this week, but we have moved on. We now have almost all the blockwork for the foundations in and they have started excavating the floor and the corner of the house for the main pier. This pier effectively holds up the house! It will support beams in 3 directions, one of which carries 2 other beams - basically all the beams holding the outside walls of the first floor! Geoff realised that unless he put the pier in now, he would have trouble getting to it later as it has a 1.6m square padstone underneath the pier itself which is 440mm x 440mm engineering bricks. So....

We have moved the piano and sideboard out of the lounge into storage and Geoff will be shuttering off the corner and taking out the corner of the house to build the pier.


Concrete and a bit of blockwork:
This is the corner for the pier... Note the existing foundations - a couple of wider courses of brick - and that;s it!!! and we're down nearly 3ft for the extension.

The remainder of the drive coming up ready for the new floor. We need to go down a little deeper as we have 100mm of insulation and 75mm of screed on top of the slab for the UFH. We have doubled the required 50mm insulation to maximise the efficiency of the UFH.
One of those little things you forget - our washing line used to go between the house and the doghouse - no doghouse, so a new 'high-tech' line goes up!

Now we have blockwork all the way round the main extension excluding the bay:

Footings

The builder is hoping to get the building inspector in tomorrow to check the footings. His Polish lads have been digging for england through about 1 foot of top soil and 2 of clay. We have been shifting the soil to the other end of the garden to use and that was hard work - how they hump binfuls of clay into the skip all day long I don't know.

We are away for the weekend, so we may well come back to concrete instead of holes - what a relief after all the hassle of getting this far.

Ordered the boiler and tank yesterday so we get the installation information ready in plenty of time.

We also ordered the sofa and the bed! A bit keen but we didn't want to miss out if they changed model ranges... The bed is scheduled for september and and the sofa for 1st december - some targets for Geoff to go for!

Dust!

As promised, a third labourer and a new skip arrived this morning, and by the end of the day we had a deep, hand dug, clay lined trench....

As a hint for anyone else, if they bring a circular cutter to get through tarmac or concrete, close or block all the windows - the dust gets EVERYWHERE.....

The house now looks very different. We can see how much space there is available - and how much of it the extension is taking up!

Off and Running

Well, we spoke to the builder last week to tell him we had got the money. He phoned us on friday to say he was going to come saturday if he could get a skip. It then went quiet....

Until 10am this sunday morning when he arrived with 2 labourers and informed us a skip was on the way in an hour...

Before:





10 minutes later the skip arrived - and by 12 noon, it was full and we no longer had a garage.
By 6 pm they had filled another, almost cleared the shed, emptied the woodshed and started on the dog kennel.....

After:



Tomorrow, (yes, bank holiday monday!) he's bringing 3 labourers and expects to have started excavating the foundation trenches....

We'll be signing the contract and agreeing terms very soon, but the schedule has started in earnest - and I'm nervous, there's no turning back now (well, there is but it will be hard and expensive). I will be posting before and after photos as we go and I'm hoping to use a web cam to do a timelapse film.

Here we go!

Well, we finally got the money today! (well the first batch). After months of chasing the bank and them doing nothing they said, how they said and when they said, we have just picked up a cheque for the first installment from the solicitor and contacted the builder.

The bank managed to almost scupper things at the last minute by insisting we needed an independent solicitor and a local search - another week! - but we persisted and here we are....

Next steps are to sign the contract with the builder and agree a start date and schedule.