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.