Friday 16 March

The front garden looks so different again this week.

The foundation has set as you can see, the additional drainage is there. Building inspector is due out on Monday, hopefully it will be passed. The gas meter is scheduled to be moved on 3 May. Not heard about the electric meter yet.

Tuesday 6 March - When I started writing this update. Finished off on Saturday 10 March.

Well time seems to be flying by now, can't believe we are already in March. We are into our sixth week of building.

Lots of workmen around this week, they're all busy with building this raft for the foundation. I think the concrete is being delivered on Friday.

Well it's now Saturday, and the concrete was delivered on Friday. Lots of men here this week, we counted 7 at one point. We have had lots of deliveries. Too many to remember them all. 

In fact I think I will just upload the photo's from this week and let them tell the progress this week.

A sample of our many deliveries.

Next a mound of earth appeared, thought we might be having a moat at one point.

Don't want our mound to get wet, do we?

Now the raft is being built. 

Can you see what it is yet?

This took a few days to build, every couple of inches, a cross piece had to be fastened in.

  

This long box like structure was placed underneath the cement mixer wagon to guide the cement into place.

Well and truly a building site now.

All ready for the cement mixer to arrive.

We seemed to have acquired a spectator, wonder who that could be? 

Nice sunny day - can you tell?

What a flurry of activity, the cement mixer caused. Can't believe how frantic the atmosphere was as the cement came pouring out of the chute, lots of instructions being shouted out, heard the words whoa, stop,STOP quite a few times. After 5 mins we left them to it.

Ryan's bathroom.

Living Room

At one point, a builder had a piece of  pipe that dispersed the air bubbles - think I might add construction  to my list of  (many?) talents

A view from our upstairs window.

Fancy a paddle?

1 March 2012 - Week 4

Arrived back today (from doctors - not been well)  to find an impromptu meeting with the builders and their gaffer. Which then became an unscheduled meeting between David and I, and the gaffer.

We are all trying to work together to get as much as possible done in Ryan's room, while we are away. However in doing Ryan's room, there's a knock on effect on the living room and kitchen. It's impossible to do these separately.It is estimated that it will take 3 weeks to do this portion of work. (This is probably only about 1/3 of the internal works).

Upshot is that, with the bank holidays and weekends, there is only 8 'working days' while we are off. This is insufficient time to get as much of the internal work done as we had hoped. So the plan is to use the two week we are off plus a week (no we are not extending our holiday) of 'slumming it'. This means as soon as we get back, we will only have the use of upstairs. We might (hopefully) have limited use of the kitchen.

This means Ryan will have to relocate into Leighton's bedroom, he's not used to the lofty heights of upstairs.

The headache is most of the furniture from downstairs needs to be removed, however we can't stuff it all upstairs cos we need to be able to live up there. Hmm. A lot of work to do in the next 29 days I think. (David hasn't even got any clothes to take on holiday yet, he's been managing with a couple of hastily bought pairs of trousers because all his other ones don't fit his new slimmer self).

Right, panic over, deep breath, panic still there, deep breath, deep breath, panic over, well lets just deal with today shall we for now.

Dumper truck gone today, another delivery of bags (little pebbles?).

Found out if everything works to schedule the work might be done by the end of May, beginning of June.