Four months on

and what do we have to show for it?

Some plusses:

1. we now have new carpet everywhere and it's great, thanks. Particularly loving our hand-woven Brintons designer stuff in the hallway. We went for something a bit different there, expecting people to say "eek" and wonder what to make of it, but so far, everyone has loved it. Clearly our tastes are less unpalatable than we thought.
2. we love the big kitchen and everyone who sees it gets an instant "wow" factor from it. It's also helping us burn off the calories gained from all the cooking going on, walking backwards and forwards across the room to get things from all the cupboards
3. the house is starting to get a rhythm to it, in terms of how we use it. OK, so there are still some spots to finish off; a few things that are more "down" than "away" and we always seem to have one box more clutter than we have cupboards to hide it in (the garage is now too full!), for the main part things are starting to find their place.
4. we're slowly kitting out the utility, putting up cupboards and shelves - just a matter of putting in some new units to replace the knackered ones that used to be in the kitchen
5. we now have a funky cupboard hiding our electricity meter, meaning I don't keep looking over my shoulder in the study to see how fast it's whizzing round, each time I turn something on.
6. this cupboard also has lots of shelving around it, so it feels like a proper study (although it begs the question why did we paint it if we were just going to hide the walls with books)

Things have also sufficiently settled that we've got down to doing other things around the house. Progress so far includes

1. putting loads more insulation in the loft over the "old" part of the house, where there wasn't much (just the 4 inches or so, rather than the currently recommended 8 feet, or whatever). I can thoroughly recommend Eco-Wool to you. It's made from recycled plastic bottles, so plenty of bonus eco-points and it is genuinely nice to use - it feels like the filling from synthetic duvets, rather than horrid glass fibre
2. properly boarding part of the loft so it can really be used for storage (necessary now that we have extra insulation in a lot of the areas where we were previously dumping things). Boarding was complicated somewhat by our rafters. They don't seem to be at the same spacing as all the loft boarding materials expect them to be. Hence I've had to double board (it was just easier than cutting the boards to size) to ensure there aren't any dodgy overlaps of board. I put some Knauf Space Board between the layers of boards to provide some extra insulation over that part of the loft because you can't get enough regular insulating material in the areas you want to board. Four inches of old glass fibre between the rafters and 52mm of this in between the layers of board should help.
3. building a raised veg patch in the garden. We decided that the gravelled area at the end of the garden was not really doing a useful job as a sitting/eating area, so we got rid of the gravel, dug over the soil and built a raised bed. It's about 10ft x 8ft and 12in tall, sawn and screwed together with my own fair hands (and power tools). It contains just about 3 tons of soil, carted around by me and it had better grow us bucket loads of exceedingly tasty vegetables or I will be decidedly miffed.

We have our plan for reclaiming the rest of the garden. It involves yet more shovelling, this time putting the bark chippings from the old play area, er, elsewhere (probably into a big sack at first), then rotovating all the muddy area, levelling it out with a ton or so extra soil and then turfing it. We'll probably have to leave the turfing until Spring, to make sure it doesn't get frosted, but as soon as I've finished the loft, I'll get on to the digging and rotovating. The only (presently obvious) complication there is going to be rotovating the soil since we discovered that the drainage pipe for the soakaway is only a couple of inches below the surface of the mud, rather than the 12 inches or so that it should be (well done Paul the Builder). So we're going to have to work around that VERY carefully.

Back in the world of outstanding problems with the house, Paul the Builder never came back to us to fix any of his mistakes. After taking some legal advice, we gave him a "reasonable" amount of time to come and fix it and got on with employing other people to come and fix it. We now have an invoice of all the things he needs to pay us back for, it's up to about £1200.

All we have to do now is decide whether we take him to court over it (and risk him counter-suing for his £5,000 or so of surprising - to the point of punitive - new costs) or just forget about it all and write off the £1200 as a reasonable fee to get the house working AND see the back of the useless clown. Still, I'd rather have had the money to fritter away on Christmas presents (or more bits of hifi or a camera or... well anything other than fixing a badly fitted shower).

The coup de gras in that particular saga recently was the denoument of the shower episode. You'll remember the background from this blog update. Anyway, we had the engineer fix it for us and eventually got the bill from the manufacturer that we were warned would come if it proved to be an installation defect. We, reasonably, thought this bill should go to Paul the Builder, since he solemnly promised it was installed correctly and must be a manufacturing fault and got the manufacturer to redirect the invoice to him. Surprise, surprise, we get another letter from the manufacturer saying that Paul the Builder denied all knowledge of the problem and that he had no involvement in the process. Well, I assume it was Paul the Builder, he decided to be a real man about it and get his wife to write and sign the letter. Presumably if we keep pestering him about his liability, he'll get his dad onto us.

So, there we go. This time, last year, we'd just got planning permission and were getting building regs sorted out and thinking about choosing builders. Now, we're basically finished and - for the main part - everything we can't deal with is our own problem.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have flown by. Although at the time, parts of it during the building work seemed to be going backwards, not just Glacially slowly forward.

Next time, we buy somewhere that does everything we need from the start.

Fatally Flawed

16 hours after my last post and we have made precisely NO progress with the whole "laying the carpets" thing.

Ok, that's not quite true. We've got our old fridge out of the kitchen in readiness and done some other bits of tidying up. But that's about it.

The fitter eventually turned up at about 9.45. Just 45 minutes late, then. We first suspected there was a problem from the discouraging way he said "oh" when he saw that there was still furniture in the room. He didn't realise that we'd paid good money for him and his trained monkey to shift the furniture and started tutting at us about this. So we shifted some stuff, they shifted other stuff.

Then the real fun began. The whole walking-around-shaking-his-head bit started just after that and he got really worried as it dawned on him that he'd have to lay a floor, rather than stand around drinking tea all day.

So the excuses started rolling in. The floor was too uneven. It had too many lumps. And hollow bits. And ridges too. In fact it was generally lacking in flat bits. And the planks of laminate were too big to fit in the cloakroom. And he didn't have enough sugar in his tea.

Apparently, laying a plywood subfloor on some parts of it and a concrete screed to level the other areas somehow wouldn't work and we'd end up with a floor that moved around more than a plate of spaghetti and bounced more than a springboard and he just wasn't prepared to do it. Instead, he recommended we have a completely different, and much more expensive, type of floor.

I was getting a bit stressed by this. I already knew that Paul the Builder had left the floor in a bit of a mess, but we'd been promised that this could be sorted, now it seems it could not. "Ugh!" I joked to the fitter, "I think I need a valium." He shot back with "I've got some in the van, if you like" and the room fell silent. After another awkward minute, he felt compelled to clarify "It's not because I'm mad or nothing, I've just got a bad back."

OK, thanks for that.

So, he put us in such a downer that he decided to go back to the warehouse and talk to his boss to see what could be done for us.

A while later, we get a phonecall from the boss. We talk through the problem. He can't understand what the fitter is talking about; he and I agree what we're expecting and can't see why the fitter had a problem. I ask him to talk to the fitter some more and let us know what our options are.

He calls back saying that he's found the problem. Apparently the fitter has turned into a workshy prima donna and has been sacked. He'll get the other guy to fit the kitchen and then do our carpets later in the week.

Bloody typical.

Poop poop, said Thomas!

Well, the carpet fitting process is now merely hours away from commencement. I should be in bed, really. But no, instead I thought I'd post a few more harrowing details of life to keep you all occupied. It's partly a communications tool, partly a communications avoidance mechanism. I post it here once and that means I need to have 5 fewer conversations with friends about the whole subject. Actually, I'm not so sure this will stop me ranting in person, but at least I get to sort out where to put the pauses for breath.

As you may have gathered, the carpet bloke recovered from his bout of whatever-it-was. He arrives in 8.5 hours to start on the kitchen, by evening out the lumpy floor, before actually laying our floor of choice. Then - apparently - the rest of the house gets carpeted in the blink of an eye, almost. Believe it when it's done, frankly, but either way, I have to help getting all the bookshelves emptied into boxes before I can start on the really tedious job of dismantling the entire hifi / TV system and my computer network. Again. Wireless networks were meant to make the whole process easier, but tell that to the people who make USB devices. One day they'll actually make their cables long enough.

But enough digression, time's a wastin' and I need sleep.

Anyway, we wrote to Paul the Builder advising of the few little, shall we say, lapses in concentration of which he was guilty and respectfully asking him to come fix them (Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 and all that, eh). Instead of the contrite and friendly response, we get some shirty letter from him blaming us for everything that's gone wrong. Well, I can see his point, he clearly has no control over most of his workforce, so maybe it is our fault that his carpenter (turned window fitter, it seems) tightened the screws on one window so tightly that he cracked the glass. Not entirely sure from where he got the idea that we supplied the kitchen, given that he did it himself, *ahem* from his preferred supplier *ahem*, but apparently it's our fault that the sink is poor quality. Yes, I remember the day I made it well. It was quite sunny outside and I wanted to go and sit in the park so I hurried the job. Riiiight.

However, I have a suspicion that I'm going to have to start being a little careful about what I say about this now, because it has the whiff of a situation which is going to end up in court.

The coup de grace of his shirty letter was a demand for £5K to be paid before he fixed anything, for a bunch of extras that he was apparently too busy to include in his previous "final invoice". Or maybe he's just forgotten that he has no contract to support the idea that the work would cost more, and has completely forgotten the basis of a fixed price contract.

Methinks he's trying to do it to frighten us off.

Methinks he has chosen the wrong people with whom to mess.

Methinks he can turn up and fix it all and pay us for all the stuff he's broken.

Time will tell.

Hang on, what's that chuffing noise, then?

Well, life at Whitzend is starting to resemble something that could pass for normality. Increasingly the things with which we cannot deal are our own problems...

There are, of course, honourable exceptions to this rule.

Remember we mentioned that the shower was a bit flakey, in terms of finding the thermostatically balanced temperature? Paul the Builder was adamant that he'd fitted it correctly and it must be "dodgy parts, mate". Well, convinced by his eloquent argument, we called the manufacturer who sent out an engineer.

The engineer almost screamed when he saw the installation. The first thing he said was that the shower was fitted completely wrongly. He even showed us the big, red warning all over the instruction manual saying why one should never do exactly what Paul the Builder had done.

So, we need both showers to have their cold water supplies connected properly and have their valves replaced with the ones supplied, rather than the cheap pieces of jointing copper that Paul the Builder chose to use.

Whilst that engineer was here, I happened to mention the leaky sinks, which Paul had also ascribed to duff materials. Again, it turns out to be bad workmanship - the wastes have simply not been sealed to the sinks properly in either bathrooms (or the kitchen)

According to Trading Standards, we are obliged to give Paul the Builder an opportunity to come and fix his mistakes. To be honest, we'd really rather this was not the case, given the mess he made first time around (and second time around in the case of the kitchen sink) and the lies he's told in the process of it. But rules are rules, so we wrote him an official sounding letter, quoting all the consumer legislation that Trading Standards reminded us to quote, and gave him 7 days to fix it.

Before we even posted the letter, we were left hopeful by a text message from Paul, saying he'd come and fix things last Monday. In (not quite eager) anticipation, we waited until the end of Monday to see him and didn't post the letter. He returned the compliment by not turning up. So we posted the letter and he's still not come by.

On the one hand this means that we're almost certainly going to get the repair work done by someone reliable and qualified. On the downside, it means we'll have to pay for it all and then try to reclaim the money from him. This has the whiff of small claims court all over it already, to be honest. Ho hum.

Irritatingly, the day after we sent the letter outlining the things we wanted fixing, we found another thing - a bit of guttering they'd fitted which just isn't properly connected to the rest of the gutter, causing water to pour out through it, right past the bedroom window of Little Miss. I suspect the rules are that we have to send another letter and wait another seven days.

We've finally chosen carpets and booked fitting in. Happily, the fitters will also lay the laminate in our kitchen, so we get the whole house done at once. I'm sure it'll be hell on earth for a couple of days, but it's reassuring to know that the whole thing's almost done. Plenty of mottled, neutral colours which will help to brighten the place up a lot. Except for the hallway where we've branched out a little and planned a little "surprise". So, mind the mantrap and bear pit, visitors!

Carpets were meant to be fitted later this week but apparently our fitter collapsed on the job last Thursday (at least it was on someone else's floor). He's got something viral that looks like flu and a damaged coccyx so things have been postponed by a week. Still, that's more time to get all the other little jobs finished. A weekend of putting up towel rails and curtain track without fear of sullying the new carpet. Great.

Just the garden to go, then. Off to the turf accountants it is!

Light at end of tunnel in "not oncoming train" shocker

Well, cripes, blink and you miss it, there goes August.

So, we stayed at the in-laws a while longer and the weeks of "overrun" mounted . Then we went on holiday. Then we came back and... it was almost finished.

Eventually all the plastering got done. We admitted defeat on the painting but by a stroke of utter (if deserved) luck we found a helpful and amenable decorator who lived just round the corner and was able to drop everything and paint almost the entire house in about a week, whilst we were shivering away on the North Norfolk coast (fast becoming a family tradition).

We got back from holiday and all the walls were painted. Most of the woodwork too. The kitchen was fitted and tiled and all the windows had the right glass in them. The collective sigh of relief must have been audible across the Chilterns.

Then we made the mistake of using the kitchen sink. It blocked.

Then we made the mistake of trying to open the back door. It wouldn't because it had been hung badly.

Then we made the mistake of trying to flush the toilet in the family bathroom. It wouldn't.

Then we made the mistake of trying to shut some of the internal doors. They wouldn't latch.

Then we made the mistake of looking in our garage. It was still full of building materials

So, we held our breath again and counted to 10 in a variety of languages, put up with it for the weekend, before calling Paul the Builder. He had a go at us for not calling him over the weekend, which seemed odd. He insisted that his "don't call me until Monday" text message had been a joke. I'd assumed that the only thing about him that was a joke was his project management skills, but apparently not.

Fixing the kitchen sink required a complete replumbing of it, which only served to highlight the rubbish job he'd done in the first place. Apparently there was a trap at the bottom of the tangle of badly fitting pipes which should have been removed to deal with the blockage. However, his dodgy plumbing meant that the trap (which needed to be unscrewed and pulled downwards) was hard up against the base of the unit it was inside, so this was not possible. Although we put some food through the waste disposal, the thing which seemed to cause the blockage was a big lump of silicone sealant that it was wrapped around and which seemed to match the large globs of sealant he'd used to try and connect the mismatching pipes in the waste of the sink.

Still, it was almost entertaining watching all the ways you could make dirty water squirt up out of various plug holes and overflows by blocking up various combinations of outlets. Not entertaining enough to want to do it again, mind.

But now our kitchen sink drains happily (although we did have to call out DynoRod one more time, when the poncey trap he put in the outside drain blocked up too). The main problem with the kitchen plumbing is that the water flow from the hot tap is so slow it's almost impossible to run a bowl of hot water to wash up, because by the time it's full the water has gone cold. Apparently this is down to our choice of tap, rather than his plumbing. This seems mildly ironic because the tap is from his recommended supplier, whereas the utility sink is our naff old B&Q one and that flow is fine. Hardly seems worth starting an argument with him about this, though.

Unfortunately, unblocking the sink ruined the kitchen unit it sits in, so he had to replace that in the process. Still, the complete mess he made of drilling holes in it for the various water pipes is rather artistic, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way. This was only matched by the utter mess he made of our stop tap. During the early building work, Paul the Builder extolled the virtue of using polypipe for the water main and made sure to put a nice run of pipe so we could have our stop tap in a sensible place. Unfortunately, at some point in the project this all went a bit wrong and the pipe got cut off too short so our stop tap is underneath the kitchen base units, only accessible by taking off the kickboard under the units and reaching under the sink, right to the wall. Not great if you have a water leak in the kitchen since you'll be lying face down in water to do this.

Plumbing in general just doesn't seem to be a strong point. The non-flushing toilet was, apparently, down to a duff plastic unit from B&Q. He claims it was like that when he got it out of the packet, but I'm not 100% convinced. He charged us handsomely for a lovely new plastic unit to replace it but it still won't flush reliably. This much it has in common with the other two toilets. Neither of the bathroom sinks actually holds water with the plug in, either. So I can't confess to being entirely happy with this.

Neither am I happy with the fact that we are going to have to spend about £500 getting our kitchen floor sorted out before we can lay our flooring. The chap we had round to quote on the job said that the floor is so uneven we're going to need hardboard bases putting in some areas and a latex leveling screed putting in other areas. Bizarre, I thought I'd already paid to have a level floor put in. My mistake, evidently.

It has to be said now that carpet is just about the only thing left to sort out and, frankly, I can't wait. This sounds daft, I'm sure, but I am still surprised at how dusty the floor is. All the rooms with no floor (which includes the kitchen, my study, our bedroom and Little Miss's bedroom) are a constant source of plaster dust every time you step on them. You do not want to drop clothes on those floors because they get covered in it. We have to get dressed standing in the middle of the bed. And boy do you notice where they've not hammered in the nails into the floorboards properly.

Anyway, I'm happy now because Paul the Builder and his crew of merry men are now out of our lives. They've left the site and I don't expect they'll be coming back. I can't really be bothered to fight over the kitchen floor not being level. It's almost worth £500 to me to make sure they don't come back. Equally, the ongoing and slightly bitter argument about our central heating can wither on the vine now. We agreed that he would refund me the £100 he charged because his people broke our old heating controller and he had to replace it (apparently it was our fault for still wanting to live in the house and demand heating or hot water, other wise he'd have carefully removed it before his boys ripped a radiator off the wall above it and drenched the thing). Having refunded me, he spun me some utterly rubbish story about the way the boiler worked to justify the fact he'd put in a cheap and simplistic controller for the heating. Once I found this to be wrong - by calling up the boiler manufacturer - he started to get very shirty with me about replacing it, once again threatening to dredge up all sorts of other hidden costs that he would start to charge me for. I did point out that he caused over £600 of damage to stuff in our house (from the bookcase his carpenter fell through, to my office chair which is randomly missing some of its wheels, to the candlewick bedspread which they decided to cut up and use as a general cleaning cloth, etc).

Again, by not pursuing this I keep him out of my life, which I now consider a victory.

And there we go. A nice, straightforward 8-10 week project which would need us to be out of the house for at most 2 weeks. Instead, it lasted about 17 weeks and we were out of the house for 8 weeks. Ugh.

On the plus side:

• Our new bedroom is wonderful. We've finally got most of the new furniture built and installed - a decision I'm bound to regret when the carpet fitters turn up and demand we empty the rooms, but still - and it's still a good size and the views are lovely. Being away from the road mean it's really quiet too.
• The boys are really enjoying having their own bedrooms (although it took number 2 a little while to get used to the idea of having his own space) and it means that we've been able to move quite a few toys out of the playroom so this is now a nicer space to be in.
• The kitchen is great, and will be even better once we've decided exactly where everything ought to live (and where the heck we've put everything).
• Having a utility room is cool. Even though we've not quite worked out how to arrange things in there, yet (our oh-so-bright builders decided to put the appliances in there whilst we were away and cleverly put the freezer in so that you can't open the door properly because of the radiator) it's nice to have one room where the clothes washing happens and - for me - even better that it's not right outside my study door.
• The new colours of the rooms are fabulous and make the rooms look big. This is especially noticeable in the hallway.
• It even feels nice to have our garage back (particularly as the enormous stack of flat-pack furniture gradually diminishes - only 1 double wardrobe, 1 bedside table, a kitchen table and 9 chairs to go!)
  

On balance, then, an overwhelming relief that the whole thing is over and a growing sense of delight that the house is finally ours to live in again.

Game over.

Post script:
About a week or so after we came back from holiday, we were still waiting for the last of the building materials to be removed from the garage. Paul the Builder was claiming to be keen to get it moved on because he needed it for his new project (presumably the one to which we lost most of our workers as we approached the final limp to the finish). We were told that the householders had not returned from holiday, so there had been no access to the garage to store their stuff securely. Now they were home and everything could move one project to the right.

Saturday afternoon, around teatime, there was a knock on the door (Paul's men still hadn't put the doorbell back). It was the lady of the house from Paul the Builder's new project was at the door. Obviously she HAD returned from holiday now (though her plasterboard was still in our garage). She wanted to ask if we were happy with our project. Given that we were still living with quite a few of the, er, idiosyncrasies of the project at that stage we gave rather a warts and all account of what had happened. She went pale. She told us about her situation: it seems that her project had started whilst they were on holiday. Nothing wrong with this you may think, but the issue was more that she hadn't asked them to start - even she had not signed a contract. She also had her suspicions that the chimney stack she'd asked to be rebuilt had only been repointed. Furthermore, she told us about some research she'd been doing on other of his projects and all was not well. As well as one other project we knew he was being sued over, there was another project where he was being sued because someone's new floor had been condemned. Seems like we got off lightly.

Anyway, we agreed that she should definitely look elsewhere for her plumbing services and she was seriously considering telling them all to get out and stay out. Good luck to her. She has my sympathy, but I'm just glad this is over.

Next time, we buy a house that has all the rooms and amenities we want.

Pictures of our interior will doubtless arrive in due course for your delight and delectation. As soon as I work out where the lead for my camera has gone. Pictures of the exterior will follow, too, once we've got a landscape gardener in to get rid of all the rubble and concrete embedded into the mud which Paul the Builder could not be bothered to remove.

Thanks for reading, watch this space for more pictures in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

further beyond a joke?

Right, stay calm. Breathe. Let go of the sharp implement... It can't be that bad. It just CAN'T.

Surely?

OK, let's start gently. Some good things have happened:

• We've finally had enough dry weather that the bare external walls have dried out.
• Not only this, but the dry weather has continued long enough that these outside walls can be rendered and will be pebbledashed tomorrow.
• This is good because it means (I think) that the scaffolding can finally come down and we can see our actual house again. A major breakthrough.
• A few units in the kitchen have been fitted, including the worktop with the sink (which has been mostly plumbed)
• The wrappers have come off our new cooker and it looks GREAT.
• The external doors finally arrived the right way round and have been inserted into the appropriate appertures in the house.
• With the exception of a couple of bits of "finishing off" around windows, we are now mostly plastered (and the house)
• In certain lights the ceiling in our new bedroom is now completely painted
• Our new bedroom walls are ready to have the topcoats of coloured paint applied
• So is Little Miss's bedroom
• So is the family bathroom.

All this painting (whitewash plus 1 topcoat on the bedroom & bathroom walls, whitewash plus 2 topcoats on the ceilings) has taken about 20 hours to do.

However, in a less positive mode:

• The ensuite bathroom still needs its first white topcoat before it's ready for colour (that's about 5 hours per coat)
• There are no picture rails in our bedroom or Little Miss's so we can't do any more on the walls until then.
• We've still got to paint the entire kitchen, study, utility room and cloakroom from bare plaster.
• I don't know exactly how many hours of painting are left to be done, but it's got to be 50+. I have no idea when that's going to get done.
• Oh, and let's not forget all the woodwork that needs painting (skirting boards and picture rails, when they arrive)
• The holes and cracks Paul the Builder made in the playroom wall and ceiling still need to be repaired and the ceiling is lath and plaster and will be a difficult job to fix.
• Paul the Builder asked us for some payment and I pointed out that it wasn't due until he got more stuff actually finished. When Paul the Builder realised this, he immediately stopped all work on the kitchen and threw all his work on finishing what was needed to get payment.

Worse news:

The tiling of the bathrooms hasn't even been started. The materials were bought urgently at the start of the week and we were promised that this would be done during last week so that the family bathroom, at least, would be fully ready for us to use when we moved back in on Monday. The chap who does the tiling for Paul the Builder has been on site since Wednesday, but hasn't actually been allowed to do any tiling. Instead, he's been running errands and doing odd jobs for Paul the Builder all week.

However, the worst news is this:

Throughout the week, we've been working on the understanding that Paul the Builder was finishing off all the major internal stuff this week, and over the weekend, so that it would be safe and clean for us to move back on Monday. The main thing here was plastering of the hall, landing and staircase. One of Paul the Builder's workers was even set to work on Friday (and Saturday morning) preparing the walls so they could be plastered and dry by Monday so we could be home with no chance of little hands leaving their mark in new plaster, or getting in the way generally.

Anyway, the house was crawling with two teams of plasterers all day today, doing the render, but their boss declared there was "no way on earth" that they would be able to even start the plastering inside before Monday and that it was not going to be finished before Wednesday. Apparently I'm just meant to accept this as "one of those things, mate" and get on with life as a refugee.

I really don't know what to say or do now. The urge to tell Paul the Builder to get him and his men out of our damned house and leave us alone is occasionally overwhelming.

The slightly more level-headed side of me is intending to tell Paul the Builder that he has until Wednesday (when this last plastering is done) to get the rest of the house in order and all his rubbish off my propertly and then he can clear off and stay out. This ought, at least, to get us picture rails, doors (with working handles and frames) and all the last bits of incidental plaster tidying up finished. From there, he can stick his final payment where the sun doesn't shine (and I don't mean Sheringham).

However, given that everything we've been promised so far has either taken 2-3 times as long as planned, or just simply not been done at all, I don't have much faith even in this strategy.

Frankly, from here on, it's "just" plastering and kitchen fitting to do and - bluntly - any berk picked out of Yellow Pages can do these jobs at a time of our choosing. Letting someone else do the jobs we want doing and having Paul the Builder get out of our lives and leave him free to properly concentrate on the next job (rather than having to pretend to concentrate on ours at the same time) feels quite appealing to me and possibly him too, I imagine.

However, this is just likely to delay completion even more. I am, therefore, comprehensively at a loss.

We've promised the children that they can be back at home on Monday. This won't happen. We've promised my inlaws they can have their house back on Monday. This won't happen.

At this rate the children aren't going to have a summer holiday at all. Equally, we're not going to get to go on holiday next Saturday because we won't actually be able to get back in to our house to get the things we need to pack to GO on holiday.

I don't mind saying that I've genuinely been in tears today. I'm not saying this in some 21st Century, showing-I-am-a-New-Man-and-revealing-my-vulnerable-side sort of way but because this is so damned frustrating and painful this is what it has reduced me to. I seriously hope there are no ore setbacks on this because I really don't know how I'm going to handle them.

Back to the plan

Ok, so things are looking up again. Thanks to those of you who have stuck with us so far.


Right now, we have:
* a fully plastered upstairs
* a first coat of paint on the new plaster upstairs (except for under Little Miss's window, which unaccountably will not dry).
* a fully plastered kitchen, study, utility and downstairs cloakroom
* a full set of windows
* part of a kitchen.

These are all Good Things and I am particularly excited about the kitchen finally making some progress.

On the downside:

- two of the window panes are broken
- one of them is badly scratched
- the study window is SO not what we ordered. It's coming out again and the right thing is going is.
- there should be obscured glass in the cloakroom. I don't actually want the children able to pull faces at me while I'm in there (any more than they already do)
- the back doors arrived, and had to go straight back because the hinges / handles were left-to-right reversed from what was ordered
- some of the kitchen turned up broken
- best of all, the man who spec'd the kitchen measured the plans wrong by 1cm - which translates to HALF A METRE on the ground. So we've had to lose a unit unexpectedly. Not very happy with this, I have to say.

Nonetheless, we continue to move forward. This weekend, the renderers are coming in, which means we are definitely OUT - they render by spreading mortar on the wall then chucking buckets of gravel at it. I DON'T want the children getting that idea!

Nik is also slightly calmer (see earlier post). Thanks to all who emailed to offer him counselling / support / tranquilisers / a bash on the head with a brick until it was all over.

Things get beyond a joke

I'm sure there comes a point in every project when the problems reach such a point that the homeowner (or "victim" as they should better be named) feels ready to throw the book at his builder, tell him enough is enough and go and beg for any other tradesman to turn up and finish the job. Doubtless this is a venture more of hope than expectation - maybe someone whose reputation has been unsullied by the traumas and pains of recent problems and failures can sweep in to your life and fix all those last little tasks that stand between you and your home being returned to you.

That moment has certainly arrived for me and it is a task of great effort (physical and emotional) to restrain myself from ringing Paul, the "builder" and shouting at him and telling him to take his lack of management skills and get off my land.

No, the windows did not arrive. Apparently his manufacturer was let down by the glass supplier. Our frames sit somewhere in Croydon and some glass (whether it is the glass remains unclear) languishes in Perviale. So Paul will now tour London's outer reaches to harvest frames and glass and then assemble them and begin fitting them today.

Apparently, by the end of this week we should have all our upstairs windows fitted and those rooms finished. I will believe this when I see it.

In itself, I could almost find some tragi-comic value out of this tale of painful panes but this is not isolated. I have to put this in the context of the other vital materials that always arrived after they were needed; breeze blocks (twice), wood, cement (poured), cement (dry). And one can now add kitchen units to this as well, it seems.

I started the week with such optimism, the prospect that I would go off to a tedious and intensive 3-day meeting on Monday night, leaving a shell of a house and return on Friday morning to a lovely home with all its rooms ready for occupation, if not full use.

Instead, I face the prospect of yet another week homeless, sharing a bedroom with my sons and a living space with my in-laws (the headful of cold that is also trying to get elbow room doubtless isn't helping my mood).

All that is currently offered to us is the prospect of bedrooms, bathrooms (fitted but unfinished) and the two downstairs rooms as stuffed with the rest of the house as they have been since May.

For reasons I cannot quite fathom progress on the rest of the project has been Methusulean. Having made it clear that we wanted - at the very least - to have access to the kitchen (so that we could get all the boxes of crockery, food and saucepans etc out of the two living rooms), we thought we had an agreement that this room would be plastered and available to us.

As of now, it remains boarded up and largely unplastered, to the extent that the kitchen units - which we had initially discussed being delivered now for fitting this week and next - are not deemed wanted on site until the middle of next week.

Having made it clear that we, at least, wanted to move our sink and old units to the utility and connect our new cooker so that we could have a temporary respite from microwave cooking, this is not being offered to us for another week.

Given the prospect of returning to this grotesque chimera of a house - living room-cum-office-cum-storeroom, plus playroom-cum-kitchen-cum-diningroom and an unplastered hallway with the new cooker sitting in the middle of it, like a beached whale, I vote no. Somehow, Paul the builder thinks we would be leaping at the prospect of returning to this mess and seems intent on walking away from the job for the weekend (doutbless at his usual 3pm because, well it's a Friday and we like to finish early, don't we) presumably with the sound of applause from a grateful household ringing in his ears.

Given the sense of urgency we thought we had imparted, to say I am disappointed is an understatement. Given the promises that were made about the amount of work that would be done, to say I am underwhelmed with the effort visible is also an understament. Having been promised a weekend of work from the plasterers, we returned on Monday to find they had flagrantly lied to avoid working. Having been promised two teams of plasterers shift working to give us over 12 hours a day of activity, every time we visit the house in the evening we find it empty and dark (and unplastered).

Hence, my initial reaction is to ring Paul the builder and shout at him; to make clear my personal feelings regarding the project management skills he was meant to bring to this project (at our great expense); to tell him exactly what I want to see from him and exactly what commitment I want from him. That he can spend his weekend sweating his lungs out, whilst we cry our hearts out; that if we don't get our house back completely and utterly with everything finished within a week he can kiss his money goodbye. But most of all I want to ring him and ask for my children's (rapidly disappearing) summer holiday back, to ask for my life back. To tell him that I can't stand the tension of not knowing when (if?) I will get my house back, my sofa back, my TV back, my time back; to ask him if he understands what aggravation he's causing and tell him to put it right. I want him to know that I'm disappointed that another of his customers is taking him to court over problems on their project but my disappointment is because he's failing us as a result, not because it's an unfair world and it shouldn't happen to him.

Instead, I'm stuck here in this distant, dreary, interminable meeting, festering and pouring my angst out into a webpage whilst the good Doctor and her father plot the demise of Paul the builder.

Death through Project Management sounds apt.

I've heard it said quite frequently that building an extension is a lot less stressful than moving house. Now, I'm not going to pretend for a moment that moving house is a carefree and painless process and is facilitated by good natured professionals whose only thought is to ensure your happiness. Right now though, as we (theoretically) reach the final steps of this project, I can't help but think that I would at least have an estate agent and conveyancer on my side helping me deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Also, in all probability, I'd have a completion date. These are things I'd kill for right now.

Plaster, but STILL no windows

Well, today I am pleased to report that we have:

*plastered rooms upstairs
*one working bathroom
*one partly plumbed bathroom
*no wallpaper on the stairs (this was a surprise)

Unfortunately, we STILL DON'T HAVE ANY WINDOWS.
This is getting quite dull, frankly. More tomorrow if I know anything else.

Things that make you go hmm.....

And what a corking, chart-topping hit that was.

Still no windows. Apparently promised faithfully for Wednesday, after which 'penalties' will be invoked by Paul the Builder. I wonder if they will all stand and kick footballs at the windowless apertures of my house? Also still no plasterers, who turned up at the weekend and then went away again without doing anything. A new set arrived today and finally got on with something, which is good - but are at least three days behind, which is bad.

Also, we've had a bit of a wobble with the study door. It turns out it can't go at the bottom of the stairs because although there's 2'6" of space on the hall side of the space, there's only 1"10 on the study side. Those of you paying attention will have spotted that this won't work in terms of a door frame. So, the study is staying off the kitchen (no sneaking out when we're not looking, after all, for Nik) and I'll get Young Masters #1 and #2 and Little Miss to paint a 'Beware of the Daddy' sign for the door, I think. Actually, the only inconvenience this causes is that it means the light switch has to be moved back to where it was last week. We'll cope, I feel.

We are also starting to get over excited about decorating this new house. Little Miss chose her new blind for her bedroom at the weekend (guess what, it's pink) and the Young Masters have expressed opinions on bedroom carpet. Young Master #1 wants gold coloured, which is reasonable and won't swear too badly at the paint. Young Master #2 wants crimson - which is rather unfortunate, when he has also decided on orange walls. We might have to work on that. I wonder if anyone can guess what colour Little Miss would like?

On a totally unrelated note, reports today from both the in-laws and the BBC (I will leave you to decide who is the more reliable...) suggest that the bits of Cheltenham we used to live in are now largely underwater, and that all clean drinking water is off, for approximately the next fortnight. I'm quite pleased we moved, but also quite concerned about the people we know there. If any of you are reading this, are you alright?

Where are my windows?

Apologies for the hiatus - again - things have been afoot, what with it being the end of term (we were up at school for some reason other than dropping off or collecting every day of the last fortnight) and Young Master #1 turning 6 and having a birthday party (thankfully not at our house).

Anyway, to bring you all up to speed.... I have turned into a Victorian Housewife and shrouded the whole house in Holland covers (ok, plastic, but the idea is valid). As some of you will know, I had leanings in this direction anyway, but what has finally tipped me over the edge is the onset of Plastering. Oh, the dust! The bathroom was plastered last weeked, during Amersham Carnival, and the rest was supposed to start late last week.

You will note my clever use of the word 'supposed' in that paragraph. In fact, in the technical parlance, the amount of additional plastering achieved has been nil. Not only have the windows faithfully promised for Wednesday(18th), then Friday (20th) last week not arrived (hmmm.....) which prevents the finishing of any room requiring a window; the plasterers have also been noticeably absent. There were supposed to be two teams working two shifts late last week (one lot eight til four, the other lot three til nine) but instead, no-one turned up. Apparently the evening lot did arrive, got into the kitchen (downstairs at the back) when they were supposed to be in the bathroom (upstairs at the front), trod in the new concrete (oops), then left in disgust. All very amusing no doubt, but we are supposed to be plastered and ready by this coming Friday (27th July).

Watch this space, I suppose. We will be.

Watertight? No, waterlogged!

Apologies to all (well, all two of you) our devoted fans for failing to update the blog for a month. Those of you living in the UK and looking out of the window will have noticed that it's been the wettest summer on record since records began in 1914 (although that's practically current affairs and barely counts as 'records' - it's still within living memory). We have spent all of this period without a roof. Yes, that's right, it's still not finished. Apparently it will be by the end of today, but I'm reserving judgement until bedtime.

In the meantime, though, other things have moved on, including:

* creation of the dormer windows at the front and the spaces where our bathrooms will be. This is very exciting (although Little Miss has announced that she 'will share Mummy's bathroom', which was not quite the plan).
* Little Miss's room taking shape and now even having a floor (which is A Good Thing).
* we have seen the view out of our new bedroom window and consider it splendid.

On the downside, it turns out that there's been a live connection loose under the kitchen floor for the last 20 years. Oh, and every time it rains, something in the house leaks. Most recently it was the hall ceiling (which means it was coming in through the suitcase cupboard - joy) but we've also had the usual cloakroom/inner lobby problem, the study, etc etc.

More pictures later when I've processed them.

Finally some pictures

Well, I finally got to survey the estate, camera in hand, this evening. Here are the results.
What you can see here (slightly garbled by technology) is

1) the full depth of my new kitchen (hee hee) from the new outside wall, to the yellow wall 16 feet away on the other side (chortle).
2) the study ceiling. Nuff said.
3) and 4) the productive bits of the garden continuing to be productive. This is nothing to do with the building, but inexplicably cheering, nonetheless.
5) the utility room at the back of the house waiting for its new roof. With luck, we'll be watertight by the end of the week, on that side at least!

Where did THAT week go?

Yoinks, suddenly it seems about a week has passed with no update. An inexcusable lapse, my blog audience, for which I can only apologise. Anyway, if it's any consolation, you've missed out on a fairly uneventful period in the project.

Not.

Well, you already know that we escaped the cold, wet bank holiday weekend by visiting my parents. What is not, perhaps, adequately clear is that just as Paul the Builder and his team had left for the weekend, we identified a small problem. Not only were the controls for our central heating stuck in a largely-unreachable kitchen but, due to the peculiarities of our heating system, it would be unusable anyway. All the work done removing radiators had led to a lot of water from the central heating system ending up in carpets and buckets on the ground floor. Not, inherently, their natural habitat, nor particularly productive. This meant that we wouldn't have working heating for the weekend.

Hence, a retreat to my parents' seemed sensible, even if it meant 7 people sharing 3 bedrooms. We decided that the couples would stay together and the children would share a room, although the amount of sleep most of us got suggests this was largely an academic matter (with apologies to any academics reading this who might object to their chosen profession being used synonymously with "completely meaningless")

However, all such inconveniences were, largely, forgiven and forgotten when we returned home to discover that the temperature in our house was an arctic 10C. That's 50F to those of you still struggling with decimalisation (or otherwise afflicted, eg with George Bush's education system). Even the time our central heating packed in on Boxing day a few years ago (different house) and we couldn't get it fixed until the new year didn't quite compare to this. Words fail me for a description of how miseable and uncomfortable that night was, which is slightly unfortunate for a blog, so I shall change the subject and move on.

The rest of the half-term holiday week limped on in predictable fashion to the extent that the only thing that really sticks in my mind was the point when half the ceiling in my study decided it had had enough being up there and concluded it wanted to be down here. So down it came.

Now, living through the building work has left me reasonably immune to the bangs and crashes of construction. Needless to say, my level was reset at the moment a bucket full of bricks, mixed with soaking roof insulation material and plasterboard all decided to make themselves fully aquainted with the floor around me and the edge of my desk. I'll try not to play the drama queen about this but OH MY GOD A BRICK LANDED INCHES FROM MY HEAD.

Madam will claim that more of it came down near her, the next morning, but that was clearly several feet away and far less dangerous. Mind you, as a way of getting me out of bed in the morning, the rumble of falling masonry and a scream is as effective as it is unwelcome.

Typically, as these things increasingly seem inclined to do, this initially happened scant moments after Paul the Builder and his team had left for the day. A full and frank exchange of views was conducted on the phone that evening and we concluded that they'd take a look at the rest of the roof at that end of the study and in the adjacent cloakroom and decide whether it could be made safe enough to let us continue to use it, or whether we'd just be better leaving the house now and not coming back until some time in July. Gulp.

They decided it could be made safe, by the simple expedient of pulling the entire ceiling down (on the reasonable grounds that if it's been pulled down, it can't fall down). Since when, we've been showering and shi... abluting even more alfresco, with a plywood and tarpaulin roof.

So life went on. Walls were built, some bits of them were knocked down and rebuilt (don't ask) and, for a while, the house was mostly water tight and not looking like it was about to jump out and attack us.

Clearly it had succeded in lulling us in to a false sense of security. Again, just after Paul the Builder and his team had left for the week, I noticed a slight absence of hot water from the tap. I even checked I was using the right tap. I was. I got my best hiking gear on and summoned up my courage for an assault on the south face of the old kitchen to investigate whether the boiler could shed any light on the situation.

It could. The boiler was telling me it was knackered. The quaint little flashing red light and fault code were my clues. Another frank exchange of views on the phone and it was agreed that one of the lads would come back on Saturday morning to try and fix it.

I wasn't quite prepared for this to mean that he'd drop by at 7.45am, clamber into our bathroom and fiddle with the water pressure, shrug his shoulders and drive off before I could get to him to explain what actually needed doing. So, a weekend without hot water. No problem, we'd go to my in-laws and use theirs. But wait, what's that you say? Their hot water is knackered too. But of course. Handily they had an electric shower we could use, but it wasn't going to win too many fans among the children (and didn't, if the screams of terror I heard from my bunker at the end of their garden were anything to go by).

Another Monday rolled around and I attempted to explain what the actual problem with the boiler was and - one electrician and two "heating engineers" later (I think that's what plumbers are called in Buckinghamshire) - we had a working boiler and hot water.

Ready to stumble headlong into the next problem then, clearly. Which I suppose would be a good moment to mention the rather sheepish look on the face on one of the builders when we got home from the school run. Apparently they'd "dropped a bit of wood". Now, to me, that means a twig or small bit of rubbish. Clear warning that I'm not cut out for life as a builder. What they actually meant was they'd dropped a 5 foot long plank into our shower cubicle, cracking the base of it and breaking the shower curtain pole off the wall.

So, with the smell of silicone sealant hanging heavily in our nostrils, we battle forward.

Now, Paul the Builder always had an objective to get rid of the enormous, well, thing in the ceiling in the study. It's basically a 3 ft part of the old end wall of the house that hangs down, almost cutting the room in half. Now, I see his point. Unless Tracy Emin is going to put her name to it, it's neither use nor ornament, but I'd have been prepared to leave it in place for the sake of a quiet life.

However, Paul felt compelled to see if he could get rid of some of it - by moving whatever structural beam it contained upwards. Apparently it would just be a one-day job of knocking some plaster off, exposing the beam and then moving it upwards, then I could have my study back.

So out came the chisels and sure enough, it wasn't long before they'd struck the next problem. Saw that coming, didn't you? The structural beam it contained wasn't a structural beam. Now, OK, it wasn't exactly a string of Silly Putty, but it clearly wasn't up to the job of supporting the new bits of house that would be above it.

Paul's solution was to recommend a new, proper, steel beam be obtained and installed. The benefit (apart from the whole "your house won't fall down" thing, obviously) being that the ceiling in the study will be completely flat. The downside being that we won't be able to use the study "for the rest of the duration of the build" said Paul, calmly.

So, here I sit, in my combined living room / office / playroom / toilet / kitchen store room, rewiring the network (for the second time in two weeks) and trying to work out whether anyone will notice if I try and sneak my main tower PC in here, behind a chair or something.

Still, I suppose, on the plus side, I'm now working in a room with my stereo & TV so I should finally be able to listen to some music (of which I have not done enough since we moved here) and catch up on all the DVDs unwatched on the shelf. Equally, I can now network up the Xbox which will hopefully be useful eventually.

Well, that was a wall of text. More exciting photos of walls and scaffolding will follow soon. All I have to do now is work out which box all my leads are hiding in, so I can get the photos off the camera and uploaded here.

More rain

Will it never stop? After the wettest bank holiday weekend in recorded history, we came back to the wettest half-term in living memory. The weekend was enlived by a visit to Grandma and Grandpa (thank you very much!) and the week has been punctuated with trips to Nanna and Grandpa (thanks also due here). The rain has not stopped. The study ceiling has fallen in. We have an alarmingly open-air shower room (we feel 'connected to nature'). It all looks like a very long way to a finished product.....

New highs and lows

Today, the council have 'improved' the area outside our home by planting some scratty bushes which they dug up from somewhere else in the area (I kid you not - the men planting them told us) on some waste ground. This will apparently 'bring the area up' and 'make the entrance to Amersham more pleasant'. Last time I checked, we were rather more towards the middle than at the entrance. If the bushes survive both the planting process and the Friday night rampage through the park for the local youth I'll be surprised, but we'll see.

Today's other surprises included:
* the cupboard in the kitchen falling off the wall (luckily it was empty). The contents is still all over the table, which will make breakfast tomorrow a challenge.
* the ceiling falling in on the downstairs cloakroom. Given that the roof has gone and water has been cascading down it for the last couple of days this wasn't a surprise, but it still wasn't very welcome!

Ah well, onwards and upwards. This all seemed like a good idea at the planning stage.

Back to the Bedsit

Ok, so Nik and I never actually lived in a bedsit. Feeling we had missed out on an important stage in our development, we are now trying this with three young children in tow.

As of today, our kitchen looks like this:

Not so good in terms of food preparation, or serving come to that.

So, as a result, the playroom looks like this:

Very interesting. I've not included a picture of the 'waste disposal system', which broadly involves a flaming great pipe going out of the wall and emptying into a bucket. Yes, you heard me.

Very medieval. I see this as a historical challenge, rather than a lifestyle choice. The children were sufficiently unnerved by the whole experience of the sink ending up in the playroom that Little Miss hid behind the armchair in the living room; and Young Masters #1 and #2 are both asleep in the same bed (very cute, but squashed).

All rather soggy

So, after yesterday's forays into interesting ventilation techniques, today we moved into a new phase - total immersion.



About 4am this morning, Little Miss woke up declaring it was 'too dark' (perhaps this was a clue that it was still nighttime?). Closer inspection of the situation revealed water pouring down through the bathroom above the window and then on through the lightfittings (!) in the Inner Lobby. The upstairs light circuit had blown (hence Little Miss's light going out) and we - well, I, himself was asleep - were paddling. So, being a sensible sort of girl, I turned everything electrical off and went back to bed.



Unfortunately, at 7am it did not all turn out to have been a bad dream.



There was still water dripping from a selection of interesting places. The carpet in the Inner Lobby discernably went 'squelch'. Nevermind, we thought, some lovely builders who know about these things will arrive very soon and all will be well.



Indeed, all was well. But even more soggy. By the end of the day, although the bathroom problem had been solved by the simple expedient of destroying the wall down which the water was running, there was still water running down the kitchen wall, over the timer for the central heating. And in the Inner Lobby, the issue got so pressing that they had to make a hole in the ceiling to let the water out into a Very Big Bucket.



Like all sensible parents, at this point we went to Nanna's house. And stayed until after bathtime, so it was all clean(ish), dry(ish), rewired(ish) and no longer my problem by the time we got home.



So, a diverting day. Tomorrow should be better, though. Tomorrow we move the piano into the middle of the playroom, so that the sink can be plumbed into the corner. I'll let Nik tell you about that.

Living in interesting times

Well, what an interesting day. I think it's fair to say that, no matter how prepared you think you are for the end wall of your house to be knocked down, you are never adequately prepared for it.

By mid-morning we had possibly the best ventilated loft in town, since the entire gable wall had been removed at loft level. By the end of the day, the upstairs toilet had an alarming hole in the gable wall and the spare bedroom was rather more open plan than is sensible. It would have lovely views over the adjacent field, were it not for the fact that a great big tarpaulin had been strung over the end of the house in an attempt to render us even slightly water tight.

Equally, I don't think one can ever be over prepared, mentally, for the various sounds of one's house being demolished noisily around you. Bricks landing on the ground from roof height, bits of mortar pinging off the tiles, scuttling down the roof and crashing to the floor are even more alarming than they might otherwise be when they are (formerly) parts of your own home and castle.

As if this wasn't turmoil enough, Paul the Builder also slipped casually into the conversation that the new steels (to support the new upstairs and roof) would be arriving in a few days and that we'd be "losing the end metre of the kitchen" in order that they can build the walls up to support them, in readiness for the new floors to be built.

Now, a metre might not seem like much to you, but when your kitchen starts off as, er, volumetrically challenged as ours, trust me you notice. Especially when the metre concerned is the metre that contains our fridge, our freezer, our only remaining cupboard AND our washing machine. Not good.

Suffice to say that we are reviewing our options, vis-a-vis accommodation for the next few weeks.

Today also featured a spontaneous and unexpected visit from what we first took to be two Care in the Community patients out on day release to gaze over people's fences in a mostly non-threatening way. It subsequently transpired that they were subcontractors for Three Valleys Water and had come to install our new outside stop tap. Such were their monosyllabic communication skills, we only worked it out when: a) we saw their van, which had printed (in small lettering) "Working for Three Valleys Water" and b) when they started digging around the hole in which our old stop tap lies. The assumption being that no-one would do this for fun, even if they had some mental impairment.

Anyway, this was sufficiently unexpected and unannounced that Paul the Builder and his team had to do a quick change of plan and get the other end of our new water main sorted out so that we would only have the minimal interruption to water supply. Typically, the interruption we did endure co-incided with a crushing need on my part to visit the toilet (and, inevitably, it felt like being one of those "special" visits where you want to flush immediately at the risk of getting the World Health Organisation visiting). But I digress.

Somehow it managed to take them the best part of two hours to do the simple job required. What was most worrying was the way they seemed genuinely surprised to find their hole in the ground was rapidly filling with water, once they opened up the end of the mains pipe. They were so completely unprepared that it wasn't until water was flowing down the driveway that they thought to go and connect up their pump and clear the hole again. The truly special part of this process was that they pumped the water away up hill so much of it came straight back down the drive at them again.

Still, I suppose with intellectual capacity like that it probably explains why the only job they can get is one that involves standing in cold, muddy water for most of the day trying to find, let alone fix, pipes.

Tomorrow, apparently, the rest of the gable wall comes down, so adieu bathroom. Madame is off now to have a ceremonial last bath. I'm looking forward to a last "proper" shower in the morning.

Thereafter, we think we will use my in-laws as a daycare centre for keeping the children busy after school / pre-school and for teatime and bath, then bring them home for bed. We can put the essential kitchen stuff (fridge, freezer, microwave, kettle etc) in the playroom since it's not otherwise going to be used. This'll be fine until they pull up floorboards in Little Miss's room for the new support steel, but we'll work with that.

At least we should be OK until the fatal moment comes when we have no working toilets. Then even I may get driven from the house and need to seek temporary alternate accommodations. Hurrah for wireless internets.

A word about recycling

No, not a long treatise about how it's very important to separate your glass, cardboard, metal and food waste from the countless tons of plastic wrapping that everything arrives in from the supermarket.

And given the skips-full of rubble, offcuts of brick, waste cement, scrap wood, etc, and so forth that this project has already generated (before we start demolishing any existing walls), we're not exactly in a position to get too preachy, are we? In fact, given the general extent to which our house is operating at half speed presently, it's becoming quite a hassle to even keep up with the usual level of household recycling. When you have precisely NO free space in the kitchen, given the choice between waiting for a "batchload" of food scraps, or cans, or whatever to build up and just chucking it into the main bin, it's a bit of a no-brainer.

Ho hum.

Anyway, this was not meant to be a rant about that sort of recycling... back to the plot. It's the weekend, so we have no builders but somehow even less house, because we're readying ourselves for operation Knock-Down-The-End-Wall-Of-The-House (OK so the name needs work).

What we have done, though, is manage to indulge in a little recycling of a different kind. To this end we have been lucky to procure four doors from a house down the road that is being knocked about by builders even more than is ours. Our immediate issue is that the style of internal doors we have in the house (the original ones at least) don't appear to exist in a form that you can buy anymore. Unless you include spending vast amounts of money on getting some custom made - which we don't. As you can imagine, this left us with somewhat of a problem. Two recently added (as in "in the last 20 years") internal doors were already boring plain panel doors which didn't really suit the house - made worse by the fact that the door handles were about 2 feet lower than all the other ones. We were hoping we could put that right with the extension and not repeat the mistake with the additional doors we were adding.

So, when we found the chap down the road chucking his out, we jumped at the opportunity. OK, so they're not pristine. Indeed one of them has an interesting hole in the middle which is going to need a little thought (current favourite idea is to replace the panel with glass). But they do match. Allegedly they even fit.

Similarly, we'd been thinking about getting some desks for the kids to have in their new bedrooms. Number One Son especially had asked for a real school desk with a lift up lid. The only place we'd seen anything previously was Ikea, but we managed to find someone who had just obtained an entire schools worth of desks and were selling them off, so we grabbed three. Inkwells and slightly rude grafitti included. Bargain.

Four doors and three desks for £70 is a nice thing to have and hurrah for recycled materials. The past is clearly the future. Or something.

Day 14

Yet more blocks arrive today. And more cement (of the dry, in bags, variety rather than the wet, in large mixer lorries type).

Plenty of slightly alarming banging and clanking sounds from all around the house as hundreds of blocks are carried up ladders onto the platforms in the scaffolding. This is followed by even more alarming hammering sounds coming from somewhere near the corner of the downstairs toilet, though I'm not entirely sure why.

Had a nice chat with Paul the Builder (builders can be remarkably civil when asking for huge wodges of money, it seems) and he explained all the pain and angst we would be going through in the next few weeks as the work progresses.

Basically the gable end wall of the house will be knocked out at loft and first floor level early next week. They'll then put some great big girders in to support the new bits of house and then some temporary support poles in to stop the end of the roof from falling down. Which is nice.

Can't remember if I've already mentioned this, but it means the end of an upstairs bathroom for us in the process and the loss of our spare bedroom. Intriguingly, the upstairs toilet, which is also against that soon-to-be-ex-wall will be retained, by the expedient of creating a temporary plywood wall to box it in. I have a suspicion it's going to be rather like using an outdoor toilet, but 15 feet up in the air. Interesting.

Anyway, other than the loss of that upstairs wall, the rest of the house should be OK - with the possible exception of the kitchen which just might have a big lump taken out of the same gable wall so they can fit the new girder thing in. Apparently I am to be reassured by the fact Paul has promised to use lots of rockwool insulation and tarpaulin to insulate and protect us. Apparently it'll keep us safe from pretty much everything apart from rain (and probably wind too). Oh good, at least we needn't fear attack from flying sharks.

However, as it transpires, the reprieve for the kitchen is only temporary. In a few weeks, just after half term, apparently, is the point where things get really ugly and we lose the kitchen & downstairs loo while they knock out all the old external walls - and some internal ones - to create the new kitchen. This involves "sealing off" part of the house in a futile attempt to keep the brick dust contained.

Unfortunately, this includes sealing off the bit of the hallway from which I access my study. Paul did generously offer to knock through "some kind of entrace" around the corner, but I haven't the heart to point out that's where the main fuse box is located. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, although if work stays as hectic as it has been the last few days I'll probably end up in meetings most of the next month anyway.

Paul had a good look at the scaffolding and said he was a little "disappointed" with it. I thought this was because he wanted more, but apparently he means that they'd been a little excessive with it. Apparently he was rather hoping for enough space round the side of the house for his men to be able to walk around it.

The architect has presented us with (yet) another entertaining little issue to deal with. Yes, after the window debacle and the back door poser. This time it's something to do with the pitch of the roof on the single storey bit at the back, where our utility and downstairs loo will be. I have to say I didn't follow the problem fully, but it seems that the drawings don't quite match reality and if he does things exactly according to plan, we end up with a roof that's too shallow so rainwater ends up getting blown uphill or something. Lucky it.

Like I said, I was in "nod and smile" mode for most of this, just watching Paul's grin and the way his arms whirled around as he tried to explain (he almost took off at one point) but it's either a question of fudging the angle of the slope or changing tiles to ones that look "a bit like" our existing tiles. Fascinating.

Day 13 - Scaffolding

Well I went away on Wednesday night on a business trip (the usual painful night in a Holiday Inn eating salt with food hidden in it, sleeping in a large sponge with a quilt thrown on top and two rags for pillows, with a room considerately located right next to the place where the glass recycling happens, noisily, at 5am, leaving me well prepared for an early meeting next day. Not.).

However, I get home, eventually, to discover my house has been turned in to some complex modern art installation by the addition of more scaffolding than you see sticking out of the Milennium Dome. I feel a bit like in that scene in Crocodile Dundee 2, where he and the girl are walking through the city at night and someone tries to rob them. "you call that a building site? Now THAT'S what I call a building site."

The house has a very subterrenean feel now. Many of the downstairs windows were already getting blocked by new exterior walls cropping up. Now many of the rest of them are in the shadow of extensive platforms built on the scaffolding.

Day 12 - a minor issue with doors and windows

OK.

For the last couple of days I've been telling Nik that the gap left for the back door out of the utility room looks a little... narrow, shall we say? As in, 'I'll never get out of there with a basket of wet washing'. Today, Paul knocked on the door and mentioned that it was 20cm narrower than standard and had we asked for this on purpose? Er no. So that's a fix for later this week.

It also transpired that in getting the windows in a nice clean line along the south-eastern side of the house, the architect unfortunately forgot to allow for the fact that we'd probably want units in the kitchen - which would currently come up higher than the windowsill once the worktop was placed atop said units.

Hey ho. Raise the kitchen windows, make the study window a little smaller. Not so difficult, then. And it's still raining.

Day 11 - Blocks at last!

Blocks and builders finally arrived this morning, just as we were setting off for school (cue 5 minutes of standing around admiring the lorry and a mad dash into the playground at 8.51 and 30 seconds....). Building is now going in ernest and the walls are positively flying up, despite the rain. It's now rained every day for 10 days and surely the water table has recovered? Hello? You can stop now with the whole 'wet' thing. Spring is supposed to be here!

Day 10 - later

Well, eventually blocks did arrive. Paul the builder ordered 36 pallets of blocks. I don't know exactly how many blocks you get in a pallet, but I'm going to guess at "around 100". Big buggers they are, too. Not exactly certain where they're going to live in the (hopefully) short period of time before they are turned in to the South Wing of Whitzend (TM).

Anyway, for now this is not a problem. We were expecting 36 pallets. That's about 3,600 blocks in total.

At about 2pm the blocks arrived. There were 36 of them.

36 Blocks.

In total.

Apparently we're not having a two storey extension with new mega-kitchen and master bedroom suite, we're having an outside toilet.

For midgets.

So, Paul the builder gets a phonecall to explain what's afoot. He rattles off a marvellous string of choice Anglo-Saxonisms and nobly declares "well, it was too wet to do anything today anyway." Evidently Alan, Graham and Tom (we think he's called Tom, because there's a wheelbarrow in the garden with "TOM" written in big, yellow letters) were elsewhere doing something to (or in) the bathroom of another of Paul the builder's projects.

Allegedly the remaining 35.6 pallets of blocks will arrive tomorrow.

We are not holding our collective breath.

Meanwhile the study is almost entirely bereft of books and only has half its usual amount of computer stuff plugged in. I am meant to be dismantling the rest of the mess of wires and largely unused hardware that I grandiosely call "the network" and moving it over to the other desk this evening. As you can see, I am not.

Day 10 - 11am

No blocks (or builders). Lots of rain. Perhaps the forecasts were a little optimistic. It's nice to have the place to ourselves for a morning, though.

Days 6-9 - Walls!

Ok, so just to be clear, we're talking building days here, not elapse time. In elapse time, this is Week 2.

Anyway, this is the week it got exciting - walls started to go up. The soakaway got dug (and now there's a 5 foot hole at the end of the garden covered in plywood). We now know that plywood is nice and bouncy - because I found M, O and L bouncing gently on it (over the 5 foot hole), telling me 'look Mum, the garden bounces!'. Ahem.

Now the walls have begun, we can see how big the extension is going to be - and man, that is one big kitchen! Photos to follow when Nik is less busy, because I'm not sure how to do it.

However, the other thing that happened this week was that the weather broke. Having enjoyed the warmest, driest April since records began (or somesuch), we now find ourselves in the first week of May with rain forecast every day for the next fortnight and the hole in the kitchen wall proving much more of a problem. The fluffy draught-excluder we were using in the kitchen is now decidedly soggy (and I have concluded he was probably more decorative than useful in intent). At least it means we no longer have to pretend that the washing line works when put through the garden table into the parasol base, to hold it up - actually, this is only effective until the wind blows, then all the washing ends up in the hedge.

So, once again, we were cracking on at a great rate - and then there was a world shortage of blocks. Apparently, they're not be had in the south east, and the fact that the builders have basically finished the first lot becomes embarrassing. The next lot arrive on Monday morning about 10, along with the builders....

Day 5 - concrete

The concrete finally arrived! At 7.30 this morning. Can you hear how chuffed we were with that? M, O and L all ate breakfast in the study, watching the concrete lorry spew stuff all over our drive.... sorry, disgorge concrete into the barrows carefully placed below the chute by the builders. Let's face it, it's not every day a chap has a concrete lorry on his drive before breakfast. And to be fair to the builders, they did put tarpaulin down, it was just a lot messier than I was expecting!

So, the concrete went in.... and everything stopped again while we waited for it to set. I'm seeing a pattern here. Good job there's a long weekend coming up.

Day 4 - Stalled!

Well, we're playing catch-up already on this blog, and I've stepped in to post while Nik is busy. Hello, by the way.

Anyway, Day 4 - motoring along nicely, we thought - the bricks arrived. Hurrah! The concrete did not arrive. Those familiar with the building process will be aware that you need concrete in the foundations before you can put blocks on it. The critical path has diverted, I fear.

So the blocks sat on the drive, and we waited...

Day 3

Day 2

The Dig, Day 1

Dateline Monday 30 April 2007. 08:00 hours.

Work begins. Over the previous weekend, all sorts of "stuff" and a variety of "things" had been arriving at the house so the builders could get to work. Boards, bins and plenty of odd containers liberally splattered with cement. Most interesting of all, though, was the digger which arrived on Saturday afternoon amid a chorus of "wowee"s from the children and various belches of diesel smoke (from the digger). You can see some of them (just about) to the side of this picture.

We'd been lulled into a false sense of security through talking to Paul, the chap in charge of the team of builders. He'd told us that the way they'd be spending the first "several weeks" working on the outside of the property. This all made sense, dig the foundations, put up the new walls, get the roof sorted and make the new house from the outside, before coming indoors to knock seven bells out of the inner walls. So, we were sitting pretty, thinking that we had until at least June before we'd start to see any disruption to life inside the house.

You can see the "but" coming, can't you?

Apparently, it turns out that the little single-story bit of the house sticking out towards the camera also counts as part of the "outside of the property." No problem, you may say. Well, that little, single-story bit of the house sticking out towards the camera just happens to be our pantry. It's the only cupboard we have in the kitchen. It's where all our food is stored. and a lot of our cookware. And our bin. And our glasses. And mugs and cups.

It may be worth point out at this stage that about 50% of the reason for us having an extension in the first place was that we need a bigger kitchen. I'm not just saying that in the "oh, it would be nicer to have more space" sort of way like when people say they "need" a holiday in Mauritius. We need a bigger kitchen like Labour need not to have Comrade Brown as PM. A lot.

So, with about an hour's notice we have to empty the pantry. But where do we empty it to? Well, the rest of the kitchen is about the only starting point.

Although, as you can see here, not a great end point.

Suffice to say, lunch that day was takeaway. And eaten in the playroom. We spent the afternoon scratching our heads and mourning the premature loss of our pantry, the one part of the kitchen of which we were particularly proud.

By the time tea happened (also takeaway), we'd found most of the space in the room, by the simple expedient of making hasty decisions about what stuff we would not need for the next 3-4 months, shoving that stuff in boxes and putting the 3 glasses, 2 tins of beans and jar of coffee that remained in a new wall cupboard Paul had managed to salvage from the kitchen of another house his team were removing.

I suppose you could argue that this was some life-affirming educational experience and that it would teach us valuable things about priorities in kitchen layout and design, to the ultimate benefit of our new kitchen when it finally gets built. But for now, it's not very convincing and trying to live the day on 1 coffee cup and 1 glass per person is too much of a cloud for me to appreciate the enlightenment it might be delivering.

By the end of the day, the pantry had well and truly gone. The doorway being gracefully shown off in that picture no longer had a pantry beyond it. It had a digger, plasterboard and not much else.

Now, apart from the thudding of hammers as the pantry walls came down, the day had been relatively quiet. OK, there were people pushing wheelbarrows around and talking and a radio playing the stream of power ballads that Heart FM chooses to inflict on its daytime listeners, but it didn't feel like I was living on a building site. This was, if I say so, a pleasant surprise because Paul had made not-exactly-subtle jokes about how noisy it would be and how difficult it would be for me to be in the office all day, since I work from home.

There was one rather noisy and unwelcome interruption though, if not exactly unexpected. Alan, Graham and the rest of Paul's team had been piling the rubble from the excavation outside. Very neat piling, mind, and putting it on boards to protect the grass underneath from mess. They'd also put their company sign on top of it so people would know whose it was. This, however, did not stop some trumped up little jobsworth from the council that own the land storming over to our house and shouting at us and threatening us to get it moved "or else". the history between us and Mr Jobsworth is probably enough for a blog of its own, so I'll not bore you with the details. Suffice to say the Councilllors who appointed him are looking in to the matter...

Anyway, by the end of day 1, we had no pantry and some lots of groundwork done in our garden where holes for foundations would go. All in all, a pretty productive day. Time to sit down (with some more takeaway) and collapse, ready to see what day 2 will hold.