Day 24: Certificated

Well, very little of great note has occurred since last Wednesday. The roof is slightly more finished, but we still have no ground level windows or doors. Today one of the things that was holding up proceedings was resolved as our upstairs bathroom plumbing was rerouted so it didn't run below the roof line. The only external effect of this was the shiny new plughole and a length of white pipe - see photo. Josie did notice that the bath now makes a slightly different noise when emptying, but it's some way short of the "new bathroom" she declared it to be prior to having her bath.

I'm slightly alarmed at quite the amount of backpedaling that has occurred sine we slowed the project to keep pace with the kitchen install date. As far as I can tell there's a lot to be accomplished in the fifteen working days from next Monday, when they start knocking the old kitchen down, and the 22nd, by which time they will have had to have installed the doors and windows, made good the floor (which may simply be lying on bare earth our neighbours informed us), built a bathroom, supported the rest of the house on steels, built the pantry, plastered everything, built a wall around the dining room and knocked a window in said dining room and done all of the plumbing and electrics associated with the new kitchen including about a gazillion spotlights. We have also booked a decorator to come and paint the whole lot Magnolia (we really live in the edge in the Hopper household). This is due to take place prior to the kitchen install. Hmmm. That's ten individual quite large jobs that need doing, and even at the rate of one per day, they aren't going to make it. Of course, if we miss our kitchen install slot we are up a brown creek and there's no way it will be complete before Xmas. I say all this to you now dear readers, as my darling husband is adopting the ostrich approach to my concerns and muttering something along the lines of "lalalala I'm not listening!", so I need someone to sympathise with my concerns!

Anyway, we have finally heard from the council that the plans have been passed and a certificate issued, which I suppose is good news, if a little late in the day had there been any concerns.

Right, now I'm off to witter some more at Ed.

Day 21 - Let there be (roof) light(s)

Ed again...

Yay! Our extension is very nearly watertight, only a few more layers of slates to go on the left hand face of the new roof. In more exciting news, there are now four veluxes in the roof and the trifold door, the back door and the window ought to be in by the end of the week which is really pleasing. Of course, getting to "wind and weather proof" stage means paying another tranche of the invoice. ARRGGHHGHGHGH. Ahem. Sorry, I'm over it.

Of slight concern was the need for another steel to be put in to support the removal of the old fireplace in the kitchen. Gavin knocked a little hole into the wall in the kitchen to check that the party wall between our house was two bricks thick. He took out one brick and, fortunately, it is two bricks thick otherwise we would be left with a handy serving hatch through to Number 49.

It also occurs to me that once we have the doors and windows in the new walls our cats won't be able to get out on their regular ablutionary expeditions. Obviously, Helen lacks sympathy for the poor little furry beasts but I suspect that I might have to break out my "second cheapest in B&Q" jigsaw and winkle out a little hole in the new door for cat ingress/egress.

Hopefully, tomorrow I'll get home early enough to instruct Helen to take a picture of the TOP of the roof before the light goes.

Right, offski. It's the finale to tonight's exciting edition of Masterchef "The Professionals".

Days 19 and 20: Dig dig dig

Ok, so we didn't post anything yesterday but that is because nothing much happened. Apparently it was a "delivery day". Well I don't know what was being delivered or where it was being delivered to but I can confirm that there wasn't a single extra thing in the garden at the end of the day that hadn't been there at the start.

So anyway, the roofers arrived this morning to start living up to their name and thank heavens there was a roof covering on before the heavens opened at 5 p.m this evening. There are even a few tiles on as well. Apparently we will be watertight by Friday.

On consultation with Gavin the plan is that they will continue working on the new bit of kitchen, doing the first fix of the electrics and finishing off the walls etc, and then they'll start demolishing the existing kitchen w/c 1 November. This is fine, although doesn't quite gel with our pre-made arrangements to be away during the particularly kitchen-less bit. This will all link seamlessly with the arrival of the kitchen fitters w/c 22nd Nov.

Gavin also noted that Ed had said that he would dig out the area in front of the new trifold door himself. Gavin kindly offered to do it for us for the princely sum of just £840. Instead it took Ed 15 minutes in the pouring rain and it was done to the extent that it needs to be to get the trifold door in. To be fair, Gavin was going to dig out 2m worth and prep the area for a patio, but frankly, the way the budget is going he'd have been very lucky to get that gig. We won't even want a patio area until next Spring anyway.

Day 18: The last bricks done

Ed again:

The builders finished the end wall today and did a bit more furtling around with the rafters (see below) to get things ready for the four velux windows we are going to have dotted about the place.

The yellow plastic is to stop water getting down inside the walls if it rains overnight.

In that vein, Builder Number #1 told me sternly this morning that I would need to paint something(s) called the "Soffits" and the "Fascias" with two coats of undercoat and a gloss coat as a matter of some urgency lest "blowing" take place.

I took this to be a BAD THING so I popped to the local DIY store and relieved myself of some £35 (!!!) for undercoat, gloss, paint brush and paint brush cleaning stuff.

Thus armed I plan to give the wood a damn good coat of painting at tomorrow (Sat) after Helen has been on the local Parkrun and I've taken Millie to ballet. Rock and roll.

======= Day 18 and a half =======

As Saturday's and Sunday's don't merit their own entries (they aren't official "Days" by the rules of this blog), I am happy to also tell both of our readers that I have done the first coat of undercoat of the soffits and fascias.

The wood now defintely looks whiter than before and Socks is very pleased with the little pedestal which Builder Number #2 has built for her (it can't have been Builder Number #1 because, as avid blog readers will be aware, him hatey de catins).

Right, enough with all this blogging. It's the X-factor, don't you know.

Day 17 : a bit more done

Ed here, once again, and we missed a day. Sorry to all avid 5 blog readers.


Anyway, looking back to Thursday, here is a nice picture of an extension with a roof on it! We were amazed to see how quickly the clever roofer types managed to build it.


There was a certain amount of allusion by our builder towards some sort of painful additional costs incurred etc etc but luckily I managed to say "lalalalalala" in my head and have now forgotten all of what he said. Good.

Just a short post for Thursday, with an exciting longer post to follow shortly for Friday.

Day 16: Tall Walls

After a somewhat unsettled night childwise, with little Jo of woe waking us charmingly at 3 a.m. with a regurgitation performance that put Linda Blair to shame, work was a struggle today. How delightful, therefore, to come home and find some extremely tall walls. There is now scaffolding around and inside the walls to facilitate the putting on of the roof. Good.

We had another letter from Reading BC today telling us that our application for a certificate of lawfulness was incomplete as it didn't include the requisite number of copies of the "before" and "after" floorplans. Sigh. If only we knew somewhere with hundreds of photocopiers...

We have yet to hear how Gavin's consultation with James the kitchen guy went today. I get the impression that several pints may have been involved, so hopefully Gavin will have convinced James that we are Optiplan's favourite customer and they should just get a blinking move on already.

Day 15: Rocking all over the Garden

Back to the blog again today after my brief hiatus. I will be demanding a rematch on the badminton front. At least now I know how I'm supposed to serve, so I shall look to build on that!


I worked from home today. This meant that my cogitations were accompanied by the builders' choice of music as they merrily piled brick upon brick in their quest to reach the mysterious "plate" by the end of the week. I love delicious coincidence so was thrilled when Pink Floyd's "(Another brick in) The Wall" came on. [If the Welhams are reading this - note the strategic use of pub quiz song title brackets!] This was followed by The mighty Quo and Rocking all over the World - marvellous fun. May have gone a bit far in informing Twitter that my builders were "Bricking all over the Garden."


A lady from Reading building control came around and I heard her pronounce the very words "That's fine, you can carry on." I am taking this as gold standard reassurance that everything is going to be fine with the council.

A small issue has come to light regarding the supporting of the remainder of the chimney breast which will be suspended above the new cloakroom. Apparently there are still too many bricks up there to just leave it unsupported, so we're going to need another steel. This will need to be lodged in the wall between us and our neighbours. In order to check that the wall is suitable for supporting a steel Gavin is going to come round and poke a hole in our wall to see how thick it is... there is a small risk that he will poke right through into our neighbours' house. Amy and John have just finished a complete renovation of their house including replastering all of the walls, so you can imagine how popular Gavin will be if he suddenly appears through an impromptu peephole.

This afternoon the man from Optiplan came round to measure up for the kitchen. All was going swimmingly until he said: "OK, so we'll be looking to start installation on November 22nd." Now, for those of you enlightened souls who have read the Twilight novels, you'll know that "Edward's" reaction to stress is to become unnaturally still. My Edward is somewhat the same. "Hmmm," he said, as we both mentally noted that our kitchen is coming out on Monday next week, so this will leave us nearly SIX WEEKS without a kitchen! We have asked Gavin to have a word with the chief kitchen guy to see if he can hurry them along a little, and actually, we can get Gavin to do all of his bits and just re-wire and re-plumb our existing cooker, fridge and dishwasher into the new kitchen, but this isn't ideal in any sense.

Simon, the Optiplan guy, told us that if we spotted any problems after the initial install we should bring them up immediately with the fitters, noting cheekily that, "there's an important date about a month from the 22nd November that you'll want it finished by!" "Yes," said I, "My mother-in-law is coming to visit then, and if it's not flipping perfect I shall ask her to sort out whoever is responsible." I hope this has stricken fear into his very soul.

This really is a bit of a blow, although all seasoned renovators will now be nodding their heads sagely at our naivete. We had rather hoped that we'd be done and dusted by mid-November, but it doesn't look like there's a cat's chance in hell that it will be. Speaking of cats, I swopped several amusing cat-related anecdotes with Nick the builder this morning. Neither of us are enormous fans of the furry little monsters, so we passed a fun ten minutes swopping stories of mild cat torture, and in his case, taking matters into his own hands when the vet wanted to charge him £40 to put his girlfriend's cat down...

Days 14 : Walls!! (Sausages)

So then, it's 13 days into our 30-40 day project and the walls are just about eye height and Helen has got bored writing the blog and I've been drafted in to do it.

I see myself as more of an amusing commentator rather than an original content generator so I'm not sure what to put except that the walls went up at breakneck speed today and should be finished up to "plate" (which is builder speak for something I didn't really understand at the first pass) by Wednesday afternoon.

The kitchen fitters are coming tomorrow afternoon so I need to be here to make decisions and sound definite about things when the occasion demands. I'm not looking forward to it as I might end up getting the sink cut into the granite some inches too far to the left/right. Oooh, the pressure.

On another note, Helen lost to Mel at Badminton this evening. Badminton is a game which Helen has never previously played but in which she was confident of a famous victory as recently as 8.00pm this evening.

Right. Offski. Enjoy the pics.

Day 13: Friday - Tatt's the way to do it!

Despite the inauspicious omens and yesterday's mood of doom, today has gone very well from a construction point of view. The sun was shining, and it's my day off work, the juxtaposition of which gave me an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the builders by analysing their body art. Chief builder Nick apparently has two children, Ellie and Jack, of whom he is very fond... at least one presumes so, given that he has their names inscribed in three inch high letters across his back. Actually maybe Ellie is his wife, and Jack his son - I didn't ask for detail. I'm not really allowed to talk with the practical men, as it turns out my ability to understand anything even remotely architectural conforms depressingly to the female stereotype. Ed has spent the entire evening so far trying to explain how the supporting steels are going to hold the house up, and eventually forced me to peer through at our neighbours extension to "see how they've done it". I dutifully looked and made a good show of seeing the light - fortunately my dramatic skills are far superior to my spatial awareness.

So now we actually have a little tiny two-brick-high wall around the new bit, which is very helpful for visualising the new space. Much muttering is still going on on the topic of plumbing and supporting structure etc, and our neighbours have helpfully told us that they needed to have cartloads of concrete shoved under the end of the original house as they don't have any footings either. As the practical men have already concreted round the outside of the original bit, if they're going to do any digging, they'll have to do it from the inside, which sounds like something that will cause an unholy mess, but as we're only a week away from that in any case, I guess we'll be getting used to it!

A proper domestic goddess would be spending the weekend cooking up a storm to create freezer stock of meals so that we can microwave them once the oven is out of action, but it's going to be sunny, so I'm going shopping in Gunwharf with my sister and her small son. Then on Sunday I'll be exhausted from all that shopping so I'm going to Nirvana Spa with the fabulous Mrs Stickley. So no extra-curricular cooking for me!

In order to prepare himself for spending tomorrow wrangling three under-fives including the CRAZY Finlay while Sally and I hit the shops, Ed has gone for a curry with Mr Stickley and his Charvil massive. It's so sweet, they even have matching shirts on (Bloke uniform when they're not sure what to wear: jeans and a blue/white striped shirt.) This leaves me at home with a nice supply of wine, and an evening's unrestricted girlie viewing. Result!

Day 12: Bucket loads of concrete

I should have written this yesterday but was struck with a bout of blogger's ennui i.e. just couldn't be bothered You can tell by my melancholy expression in the photo and the apparent wringing of hands that I clearly wasn't in the mood. Not sure quite where the demeanour of doom had come from, but it passed swiftly and with no casualties (Ed is very good at the "duck and cover" tactic when such a situation occurs.) Anyway, they poured bucket loads of concrete and left it to set...

What a misery!

Day 11: Floor and Flaws

I had sort of expected there to be more verticality to the build today, but apparently you need to do a bit more than just plonk bricks together, so today the guys have been laying the foundations for the floor, which they are presumably going to pour concrete into tomorrow.

Gavin has also emailed Ed with a list of yet more little plumbing foibles that need sorting out - all small things, but totalling around £500 altogether. Unfortunately I think some of the plumbing is the original Victorian stuff and it's in need of refreshment. More concerningly from a budget point of view Gavin is now worried that knocking down the chimney breast may have a detrimental effect on the remaining bits of chimney breast above it on the second floor, so we need to get the surveyor to check that it's not all going to collapse the minute they approach it with a sledgehammer. Also, it turns out the house has no foundations, so the building inspector may insist that we have the two load-bearing corners underpinned before we can proceed. Coming from the Isle of Wight as I do, the word "underpinning" strikes fear into my very heart and wallet, as it was a relatively common requirement for houses built on the slippy slidy gault or "Blue Slipper" clay of the Island and always cost an absolute fortune. Ed is more insouciant about it, but I should think there'll be some hissing through teeth before the end of this partiular chapter.

What is, quite literally, a tonne of bricks, has been delivered onto the back garden, and they are all reclaimed and look fairly lovely and very clean considering. It's rather exciting to think that they'll soon be part of our house!

Day 10: Hans Brix!!!!

Hurray, for finally we have some bricks laid down in the trench in a kitchen extension sort of a shape. Looks like they finished fiddling about with the plumbing and managed to crack on a bit with the actual building. Hopefully the building control guy from Reading BC will be happy with what they've done. He's still sending us dire warnings through the post that if we don't get approval it'll all have to come down again...

I've just noticed that if Josie conforms to the theory that at two years old you are half of your adult height, then she's going to be a midget. Clearly taking after Aunty Beth. Mind you, she makes a lot of noise for one so small, and has just spent the past half hour screaming at the injustice of being put to bed.

Day nine (I think): If it's not rain it's drain.

This weekend I had a makeover at the hairdressers, bought a cloakroom suite, made a lemon cheesecake and attended a fifth birthday party along with a "Cinderella" entertainer so stunning that she made every Dad's jaw hit the floor as she walked in. It was fun watching their brains scramble for equilibrium.

Saturday we nipped to Wickes and bought a very budget bathroom suite. £199 for this piece of plumbing mastery. Time will no doubt tell us whether this is a false economy.

Today dawned fairly promisingly with the main weather front having moved through overnight, so the practical types were here bright and early to crack on with the construction. They've apparently spent most of the day wrangling with the drainage system, however, and it was but for the grace of God that Ed looked up at the side of the house BEFORE either of us made a comfort visit to our ensuite bathroom... those pipes in no way line up.

Gavin emailed us at about 7.00 p.m. to inform us that we hadn't got a usable ensuite bathroom - helpful. Apparently he's coming round tomorrow to give it a good hard coat of looking at.

Apart from that there are a couple of new drain hatches, and a tonne of bricks on the front lawn, plus a load of sand. I did watch the Countryfile weather report yesterday, but I can't remember all the details. It's that odd time of year where TV programmes are all punctuated by people who are doing Strictly, so you're never quite sure whether they're about to do a Cha cha cha or at any given moment. Countryfile's Matt Baker is pretty damn good already, and frankly, I just checked out his CV - he has the credentials!

I must say I thought Ann Widdicombe was also very entertaining on Saturday evening and with the politician's rhinoceros-hide and her quick wit, I think she'll be quite popular in a John Sargent style, even if the dancing is shocking. A friend referred to her as yet another example of the cruel and unusual punishment being meted out to Anton Du Beke for managing to cause a race row on the BBC's beloved Strictly...

Gosh, I've completely digressed. Anyway, so hopefully the drainage will get done tomorrow and they'll start putting some of those bricks together...