OV9

More pics of the works please Rich, your house projects make for great reading. Kind of bothers me that after 24 years in construction I wouldn't have a clue how to do any of that crap myself!

Rich B wrote: Thu Oct 18, 2018 7:43 pm Fuck knows how they’re going to get in all the steels without playing giant dominoes!

That'll be one of those jobs where the builder's don't want you watching lol

I’ve basically just been designing, sorting building control, structural engineer and sourcing/managing the big items that are outside the main contract (sliding doors, kitchen, etc) and the small items that are design specific (doors, radiators, sanitary ware, etc).

Build-wise I’ve just been letting my builder get on with it - he knows when to involve me and when not from last time - he’s really good.

It’s all been demo so far - ceilings all down, dividing walls removed, forming new openings, stripping all the shitty wood chip paper, floor coverings, etc.





New front room entrance from hallway.


Uncovering the old steelwork (two extensions done weirdly.)


Tomorrow’s plan is to open up the rear and put the first steel in for the sliding doors to be surveyed next week (whole blue area will be glass).



They have a LOT of waste to remove too!

We're 3 weeks in tomorrow and it's starting to get less messy.

Plasterer should finish tomorrow and floor tiles going down Monday





I've ended up doing a lot of running around, sourcing stuff and clearing up but we are a couple of days ahead of schedule

I wish all companies would advertise and quote including vat , I've been caught today for £500 of vat despite speaking to them 3 times prior to ordering

what’s the overall layout Carlos? I’m assuming kitchen units go around where the bare block work is?

Can’t wait til I have a plastered ceiling!

We were lucky with the hardcore as I know 2 farmers who are filling an old quarry, I filled 3x3ton trailers for next to nothing and you have considerably more to shift than me.

Waste management is a headache.

Layout is like this below with a 3x4m dining/living area behind the breakfast bar.

Ooh, kitchen envy. One day we’ll decide what we want, apply for planning, get rejected and compromise, get build quotes and compromise further and end up penniless but with a new, slightly bigger kitchen. One day...

+1 on the kitchen envy - ours desperately needs a refurb as whilst it looks ok at a quick glance, its pretty much falling apart and the work surfaces are knackered. Ideally we'd do a cover over side return job but not sure it'll ever be worth the investment on this particular house. Not unless it turns out we stay here for much longer than we expect.

Luckily i dont have kitchen envy, but that looks superb Carlos.

Looks great, where’s the kitchen coming from?

Rich B wrote: Fri Oct 19, 2018 6:28 am Looks great, where’s the kitchen coming from?

All the doors and most of the carcasses from Howdens , quartz flooring, worktops and appliances elsewhere.

Pricing and picking the kitchen was torture, my wife enjoyed trawling around the grand looking glass fronted show rooms but I had no patience with 80s double glazing sales tactics.

I didn't really see any improvement in quality over Howdens as the price increased either.

Have you got any drawings, we are still tweaking ours now so always open to ideas ?

Tbh - Howden’s carcasses are excellent quality, I’ve put hundreds of them into commercial use with no issue and there’s a pretty good range to choose from.

I went to a few places with the 80s tactics too - Wren magically dropped from over £20k to £12k when I told them I was going elsewhere!

I ended up using a joinery company that I use at work with a bespoke design. Hopefully it’ll look good...!

I envy you lot. We've great plans for our house, particularly the kitchen area, but every time we save up enough money to make a good start, we go on holiday instaed!

I guess we can't want it bad enough

Jobbo wrote: Thu Oct 18, 2018 10:35 pm Ooh, kitchen envy. One day we’ll decide what we want, apply for planning, get rejected and compromise, get build quotes and compromise further and end up penniless but with a new, slightly bigger kitchen. One day...

Gwaredd wrote: Fri Oct 19, 2018 8:50 am I envy you lot. We've great plans for our house, particularly the kitchen area, but every time we save up enough money to make a good start, we go on holiday instaed!

I guess we can't want it bad enough

I bought the house specifically to do this project - we’ve been using a counter top oven and single hob for the last year waiting for it all to be ready to go!

Pffft, when we moved in here we said it'd take us 2 or 3 years to extend and renovate it. 8 years later we still have a 1950s kitchen with half the doors snapped off and a small electric hob. I've got broken windows in 3 rooms, we don't have heated hot water other than via an immersion, we have bare floorboards with holes in, the soil pipe snapped and is held together with duct tape, the rear where there used to be a conservatory that fell down is sealed up with old doors screwed across it.

I've done a full rewire and lots of plumbing, fitted a new boiler and spent loads of time clearing the garden. I've taken 20+ trees out, filled in a pond and made new sheds and a new spot to re-site the oil tank. Finally, finally though we're about to actually make a start on the main structure. I can not wait.

I did stick pics and plans up on the old forum thread but can't remember where I hosted them. Will dig them out and try and update it here.

I didn’t have any floor coverings until about 8 weeks ago. Sam started walking so I didn’t have much choice than get some temporary carpet tiles down! It was all looking fairly reasonable 3 weeks ago!

Similar views:

Got a call from my (excited) builder to tell me one of my walls had “fallen down”.... it looks huge in real life - I’m happy! The opening is 6.6m across:

House Update

We bought this about 8 years ago. It was probate and not on the market. The elderly owner had died and it had been left to her daughters. We found out about it by word of mouth and I made an offer which they accepted. It actually took about 9 months of stress to move in, but that's a different story.

At the time it was a stretch. We lived on the other side of the village and wanted a bigger place as we'd had a second child and our then 3 bed that we'd extended from a 2 bed was struggling as my wife's an author / illustrator and works from home so needs a studio. This is a 4 bed, bang in the middle of a very generous plot with a full-length loft with Velux windows, essentially an extra very large work space. It was designed in the 1930s but not actually built until the early '50s due to WWII and the original builder who owned the plot going bankrupt. The builder that built it also went bankrupt. They could have put double the amount of houses on the land easily, so I'm not that surprised. When we moved in it still pretty much original everything. The people we'd bought off being the original owners. On the first day the Aga was condemned and as that heated the water for the house we've had to use the electric immersion every since. We rewired it straight away and fitted a new consumer unit as the current wiring was fairly lethal.

It was a stretch for us to buy, but the plan was that it would prevent us needing to move again in a short timeframe as it had so much potential to be extended. In fact of all the houses around it built at the same time ours is the only one that hasn't been extended or modernised considerably. The plan is to add a few bedrooms, make some better communal living spaces, more loos as we currently have 1 for 5 of us (!), and a much bigger garage.

This is how is stands currently. Well actually it isn't as a walnut tree fell over a few years ago, crushed the conservatory, went through part of the roof and the 2 upstairs rear windows. So the conservatory isn't there any more and the door that went through into it is boarded up. I replaced the 2 upstairs windows with period looking double-glazed timber ones.



Anyway, here's the plans that we had approved a few years ago.







Will try and keep this updated with progress.