Category: House

Today Kathryn showed me a shortcut, or possibly a slightly-long-cut to the post office:

Which is good, because being out there and seeing beauty is definitely nice, as our house is being ripped apart prior to reassembly. Bits of it; corners, if you will; are holding their own against the onslaught. The back room which is to become a kitchen and is currently our lounge is, apart from the carpet by the internal door getting a bit grey and the groundhog like pipes peeking from the sides of the room, holding it’s own. It’s sprouted a large quantity of kitchen stuff, and the toaster’s sat in the fireplace, but otherwise it’s pretty sane. That stops, I suspect, on Friday.
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So, we went out yesterday to get some manure, some compost and some top soil with the intention of lasagne mulching the garden. Lasagne mulching is, essentially, the lazy person’s way to a nicely mulched garden. Given that we’re still moving in, we have a large supply of cardboard, and given our terribly random method of working we can just grab more mulch supplies and throw them down on top of our poorly worked soil. Which isn’t quite the idea, but it’s how we’re implementing it. We don’t have my mum’s husband here to help with the digging, and 91′ of garden is a lot of garden to dig over. We’re not eradicating the grass (sorry Sarah), but it’s being heavily restricted to a small bit of garden, such that we can lie on it. And it’s going to be mixed with short wild flowers.

We are trying to debate how to build the garage, and whether we can afford to have a structural engineer do the sums for us, or whether we just go around slapping whacking great (vertical) beams in to support the green roof we’d like to build. Each time we get a bit closer to affordability. And each time we’re stimied at the last post, but this time we think we have a solution – basically building a timber frame but using pallets as part of the construction material, then cladding it in eco-friendly-board, and rendering it in ecofriendly-render. Spray on render, such that even a numptie like me can potentially manage it.
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So, I was kind of intending to do a video podcast about our renovations to the house, but I’m sort of inclined to scrap that idea on the basis that, well, we’re not doing nearly as much as we were going to; and also without a camera person, it’s somewhat hard to do the show.

Am now kind of contemplating a podcast about it, probably something that would be a bit erratic. There’re a couple of problems with this. I never did do the multi-wordpress install gidget, and thus I’m maxed out on databases. Dead Bug Jumping, while on hiatus, takes up one, this site another, and Kathryn’s site another. I get three with my cheap-cheap webhosting, so meh. We’ll see.

The other problem is that we haven’t got mics, etc, here at the moment. So that makes recording the show somewhat difficult. And time wise there’s the usual sorts of challenges; made harder by the fact that my beloved and I don’t see each other enough anyhow.

Anyhow, today’s a long day with meeting many, many builders (well, four) and it’s interesting as to how different the experiences can be. One of them came around and was, well, unfriendly’s not the word, but just I didn’t get great vibes from him. He then just didn’t seem to listen terribly carefully, didn’t really look at the plans, and finally informed me that he’d need to send his digger driver around to see it to give an estimate.

Really, I thought, given that the information you had *before* turning up was to quote for excavating, building retaining walls, and laying a slab / building foundations one would think that you’d need…the digger driver… to quote. So why not bring him? Meh.

The second one gave me more of a positive vibe, he actually looked a the plans, stood and compared the plans to the ground, measured things, went and looked at the access and was fairly realistic about getting a lorry in (the first one just said ‘Oh, we can easily get in there’ – when I commented about the difficulty of getting a 3.5 ton lorry in he kind of dismissed it…).

Anyway, two more coming today. Then one on Saturday. Hopefully we can get the groundworks started soon and we’ll be on our way to having a garage. We’ve an architectural technician coming next week so we can, at least, get our plan approved by building regulations people – thus allowing us to be much more specific with builders and perhaps, after we’ve got some work done we might have an idea whether we like the builders we’ve got…

So, having cheerfully chatted to the people at work, and indeed the plumber, about my reasonable competence with plumbing the world decided I needed a reminder as to my place in the universe. Well, more accurately, I think I was a bit cocky.

So yesterday, after work, I set to on the temporary plumbing to run to the washing machine and the temporary ‘lead free’ cold tap in the kitchen. A fairly simple prospect, cut into the old pipe just after the stop cock, throw in a T piece, long straight run to the kitchen, another T to go off to the tap and another straight run down to the washer.

Easy.

Only, like I said, I didn’t perhaps take as much care as I should have for a job I’ve not done for a couple of years. The T piece in the kitchen? The solder didn’t flow properly on the underside (to be fair, the side nearest the floor) and I didn’t notice. That would have been okay, but then the joint to the old plumbing did not go well.

I scritched it with my steel wool, I fluxed it, and slapped it together and heated it, and heated it, and waited, and waited, and realised the solder was not going to flow. After digging out the actual *solder* as opposed to relying on the yorkshire joint, and slapping more flux and heat about I ended up with a joint which was looking like it’d leak. It did.

I pondered things, there were too many joints around to make life easy, so I decided to lop a chunk out of the old plumbing (it is, by now, 1800 on a Sunday), rootle around in the ‘plumbing stuff’ box. Find the four (yes, four) remaining straight joints. Ponder some more. Have a plan that uses three of them…

Make up a whole new section of pipes, carefully cleaning and fluxing the joints – now paranoia has struck and I spend ages doing each bit of pipe. Spend ages scritching the old pipework with the steel wool until glints in the half-light under the stairs. Put lots of flux on. Heat. The solder flows beautifully on the other joints, on these, it just sort of sits there mocking me. Eventually it looks like it’s done ‘something’. Stare at it optimistically. Turn on. Get impromptu shower as both straight joints fail (fortunately, the stopcock is right there, so it’s less than a second before it’s turned off again).

Whimper.

Debate crying.

Debate expense of calling a plumber to make two sodding joints on a sunday night.

Stare some more. Decide that I *know* you can ‘proper’ solder flux joints. Drain the water out as much as I can to get the pipes really hot – because my blow torch is completely unable to get the damn joints hot enough when there’s water within about 8 feet of them. Decide to fix the solder joint in the kitchen. After about 10 minutes of heating with my hideously erratic blowtorch (one way up it suddenly goes to max-flow and then goes out, the other way up it’ll sputter and just about put out enough gas to stay alight). Slather it in blobby solder, curse because it looks like crap and the tiles next to it are now dirty yellow-brown.

Go back into the under-stairs disaster. Look at the popped apart joints. Take them properly apart. Clean, again, flux, again, this time have the genius idea that I could tin the pipes like I would a wire. Tin both pipes, but one of them doesn’t want to tin so well – I put this down to the fact that it’s right by the stop-cock (anyone seeing how dumb I was being?) and I’m struggling to get the pipe really hot.

Manage to hodge the thing together, feed in solder. One straight joint looks like an accident in a solder factory, there’s so much solder hanging around it. The other is like Mr Blobby’s solder-based twin. Wait as the pipes cool. Turn the water on. Turn it off again, rapidly because water is gently spraying out of Mr Blobby.

Stare at the stop-cock pipe. My beloved comes home and endures my self flagellation as I – exhausted as it’s now after 2000 and I’ve been up since 0500 and currently stressed to high heaven by the fact that the house currently has no water supply at all – try and work out some solution. Realise that I’m being a dumbass. I never had to make more than one joint to the old plumbing. I’ve got spare olives for reusing compression joints. Fish out a new olive, take out the old pipe running from the compression jointed stopcock to the new plumbing, use my *last* straight joint and make a new joint – f’ing awful as it is – to the new pipework and lo, it only leaks from the compression joints which I never do up tight enough*.

Overnight there have been no explosions. I am still waiting for the straight-solder joint to the old plumbing to fail, but I do have a spare compression joint kicking around to replace it with if I need to. I’m not keen to because it’s a bitsa part. I think it probably dates back to my childhood and my dad unleashing me on the old cut-out plumbing with bits he’d taken off from the main house plumbing ‘cos it’s definately not as it came out of the packaging.

It’s messy, but it does, currently, work.

And it adds a sort of victorian slum style to our house:

* I broke one once, and have since had no ability to do them up until I can see they’re leaking.

We planted these a few days ago – and lo, growage has occured!

The garden….begins.

So, we’ve got quotes in for plumbing and electrics which are affordable, and we’re waiting for the builder’s quotes. I’m now stuck trying to work out the scheduling in my head. We kind of want the electrician in first, but obviously that has the slight problem that there’s a wall where there shouldn’t be, no wall were there should be, and a sink where there should be plugs, possibly. Although perhaps we should keep the sink there? But then that’s a pain in terms of the rest of the organisation – we need to plan out the kitchen a bit more which is made harder by having no clue what we are going to do with it.

As my brain tries to work out whether the best plan is to unleash the electrician, then the builder and finally the plumber (which seems more or less the best order, with just the bathroom and the back bedroom presenting ‘difficulties’ – it also tries to work out layouts for the kitchen that make sense and utilise the things we’d like to use, in terms of sort-of-units (Edwardian shop counter*, anyone?). At any rate, I’m now going to shut the computer and go and work on my degree for a bit, and then, once that’s done, I may let my brain have free reign again.

* Kathryn found this yesterday and it’s awesome, and would make a great kitchen ‘unit’. It’s arranging our somewhat difficult space to make a sensible kitchen that’s causing problems.

So, we may scratch the podcast, there’s not much to talk about, really. We can’t afford to do much of what we wanted to do. Which is fine, in a way. We’ll end up with a nice comfy house whichever path we go down, but it’s somewhat shocking the difference between the quoted ‘use this as a rough figure for your build costs’ and the ‘this is what it’ll cost’ quotes we’ve got.

Lots of places recommend 1000 – 2000 ukp per square meter finished costs for builds, based on your level of finish. Bare plaster box, we asked for and still got a quote of well over 1,500 per square meter. That’s not the nice eco-friendly box we wanted, that’s cheap block.

We asked some timber specialists for quotes… Dear Goddess! Their prices were insane. Having splattered everywhere that the cost of building in timber is cheaper – you can pre-cut it all, rock up on site and throw it up in an afternoon and still have time for a cuppa, we were looking at massively more per square meter, so I’ve no idea where they were getting that from.

So we’ve cut, cut and cut. Away went the underdeck office, the studio, the garage with capacity to add a studio, the garage being built by someone else, the extension, external insulation…. all gone. Well, probably.

I think my last ditch attempt at getting a quote which make some kind of financial sense has been sent out, I sat down with a basic drawing program and knocked up an architectural ‘sketch’ of what we want, just to get a costing from another company. It doesn’t necessarily include the foundations, which will have to be factored in. The thing is, the house is huge. We don’t *need* a bigger house. It’s just that the house is huge in places we don’t need it to be huge. It’s lovely that the lounge is vast, but actually? We could probably get away with one 2/3rds the size. What we need is a bigger kitchen (currently 2.2m x 2.2m-ish). Adding our current dining room to the kitchen works less well than it might because a full meter of it is taken up with fireplace. We don’t want to take the fire place out…

So, I’m down from a really nice big garage to a wood-framed garage of dubious quality, or possibly a single garage on a massive slab of concrete. Not limecrete because our finances won’t stretch that far. I’ve even drifted down to looking at second hand concrete sectional garages…

On the interesting side, just had a call from the plumbers, and their quote actually comes into the ballpark that I’d envisaged. Less, in fact, than I’d envisaged. Which is the first nice thing that’s happened with the quotes so far. Perhaps it will all work out the way we’d like. However, at the moment it’s all a bit stressful here at chez us. Especially with the paperwork for Kathryn’s Indefinite Leave to Remain to sort, and the stress around that.

One of the things I enjoy about the ED is the variety of work, I have little in the way of attention span, and it’s nice to work somewhere where I can flit around doing incredibly different things and where I get to utilise a wide range of skills.

The down side of this is that what starts as a really ‘good’ shift; one in which there’s a lot of cheer and enjoyment. One where the department is – not quiet – but just that nice level of busy to keep you ticking over. One of those shifts can be transformed into a dark, unforgiving place in seconds.

Obviously, I can’t talk about *what* happened yesterday, we all worked well as a team, we did everything we could, but as I walked to my car while the day staff took over and carried on working, we knew it was unlikely to be enough.

Sometimes it’s your time, and whatever we do, it’s not going to change that.

*House*

So, as you may have noticed, we are not, in fact, in our new house. This is because the alledged solicitors aren’t by any stretch of anyone’s imagination competent. After 3 attempts at answering the questions sent to them incorrectly, the vendor and the estate agent had a little discussion, decided they didn’t understand the questions and talked to our solicitors.

Our solicitors said “Yes, you’re not meant to be answering them. They’re for your solicitor to answer”. Yes, that’s right. The vendor’s illustrious solicitors are so inordinately incompetent that they actually don’t know which bits are their work, and which bits are the questions for the vendors. I’m astonished that we’ve actually managed to get this far, although I suspect that that’s probably the vendor answering questions well, rather than the solicitors managing anything very much.

We have threatened to, and will start to look at new properties in the new year. I have no faith in this company’s abilities to actually produce the right paperwork at any point, except potentially by a happy accident. Possibly we’ll have a house at some point, but we have no idea when that might be.

So, as I may have mentioned earlier – I had a lie in this morning. By a lie-in I mean ’08:30′, not anything particularly exotic. Unfortunately, despite having lived in this body for 32 years I’ve still not learned that my body has a way of punishing any slight transgression of the no-lie-in-unless-you-suck-down-a-pint-of-water-at-the-same-time-or-are-ill rule.

I get a raging headache. And sometimes feel a bit sick. I’ve been rewarded with both of them, ameliorated slightly by Paracetamol (aka tylenol or acetaminophen), ‘brufen and food. However it’s still there, quietly kicking me in the head. I’ve decided, therefore, to go for a walk after this cup of refreshing tea.

I’ve also decided to put the washing machine through a hot wash because it smells a bit, well, mank. Okay, a bit stale. It’s not awful but I’ve no desire to wait for ‘awful’ so I think fixing it now is a good plan. I’ve also sprayed the pepper…

… with some organic bug killer because the fracking thing is covered in fruit-flies, again. I’ve no idea where they come from, but hopefully this will prevent the little white eggs turning into more of the buggers.
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