Garage and other stuff

Today was a bit hectic.

Supposed to get a concrete pump at 8am. He turns up way before then (while I'm on the way to the bank to get him his money) says he can't get to the house because the road is blocked by Police. Apparently a body found just at one end of the village.

Then the same problem caused the concrete lorries to be late. In the meantime, I was waiting for UK power networks to do the preliminary work to get our meter moved so it's not hanging down in the middle of the kitchen! A window man turned up, and a roofer, who was investigating why we had water coming into the house over the weekend (heavy rain) and 2 electricians who were there to do the follow up work for the meter move too.

Anyway, the concreting part was the most interesting - we had two concrete lorries:

and

and the concrete pump:

A load of pipework:

And a whacking great hole to fill:

While the concrete lorries were being swapped over, the reinforcing mesh went in:

Then the rest of the pour:

Until we had:

Then:

And finally:

That shuttering is 225mm high - so a standard scaffold board. The 'toe' of the foundation - so the trench all the way around was 500mm deep, then this on top. So even though there was some type 1 in the middle, that can't have been more than 50mm higher than the toe, so basically this is not going anywhere, Close to a 9" slab of reinforced concrete.

Garage and stuff...

Originally, I thought we could fit in 5 garages. Kind of a right angle type affair with 3 garages on one side and 2 on the other. Then, I thought we could do 4, one long building. In fact, we got as far as digging the foundations for a 4 garage building, and then realised we couldn't get the car to turn into it. I was kind of despairing when I found this picture:

and thought that will do.

So the two open bays are going to be for our two family wagons, and the closed bay with the catslide is going to be for the TVR.

The ground works look like this.

This is the drive. The area in front of the shed is where it's going, There'll be another hedge on the left hand side.

This is the first bit of the foundations. In here, this is the 'toe' of the foundations - there's a 400mm x 400mm hole all the way around. There's going to be another 200mm+ on top as a slab, with reinforcing wire in it. That's another of tomorrow's jobs.

The garage will be put up on the last week of August.

Here are some random garden pics:

The pond, with our neighbours garage the other side.

The stables at the bottom of the garden.

The strip of land that we bought that used to have apple trees on it.

Pushing on on lots of fronts.. pt.2

Finding a plumber has been a nightmare. Lots of poeple to call, none of them ever call back. I text, I call again, nothing. So I've carried on. These are the primary pipes for the boiler:

These are in the kitchen. That alcove would have been a big fireplace. The boiler house is behind the chimney. I thought it would be a case of drilling through with a big drill and then all would be good. So bought a 30mm SDS drill that's 450mm long and drilled away. Got to the end of the drill bit, and still not through. Had to get a breaker bar and do the rest. Lucky the diameter of the bar was about the same as the hole! Turns out the chimney wall is about 600mm thick.

Here's the boiler in its new house:

Wish I'd held the camera straight!

That boiler house is this one:

The primary pipes in the top picture go up the wall. They exit in the room above. Unfortunately behind a wall:

More work!

You might remember that the airing cupboard was looking like this. 

That wall on the right after the open door was in the way. So:

That's going to be the shower in the family bathroom. The pipes will be behind the wall of the shower.

Pushing on on lots of fronts... pt1

It's been much the same over the last few weeks. Lots of stuff done, but nothing really finished.

Claudia's room is the closest:

It's looking like a proper little girls room now. There's still a few things - carpets (obviously), door on and lights in.

The kitchen's moved on too:

That room with no wall, and no window is the old downstairs loo and shower. The wall that's left on the left as it were is the back wall of what will be the new downstairs loo. The wire hanging down is the power in from outside connected to the old consumer unit / fuse board, There will be a new one inside the new loo (it's actually there, connected to the old one). Tomorrow's project is to co-ordinate between UK power networks, First Utility and an electrician to get that old fuse board removed and the power coming from the pole into a box on the wall outside the house.

The view to the other end is new too:

The wall is down between the old kitchen and the old utility room, which, together with the other wall being knocked down makes a 15m x 5m long kitchen/breakfast room. Not bad for it being from a plan that I knocked up with GreenShot!

We're currently going through the process of getting quotes and designs. We have the first one that looks a bit like this:

The bifold doors are in too:

Other odds and sods..

The kitchen is where it's at in terms of the real work, but lots of other things progress too.

Floor in the boot room.

Tiling and floor in the en-suite. Remember the en suite was a bedroom before:

Loo and basin in en-suite. Looks like they're different colours - it's a trick of the light.

It's actually functional now, but needs finishing off.

The plumbing has cracked on. This is nothing like it is now! What this illustrates is the perfectly crap job the plumber did of connecting up the shower pump that feeds the en-suite. Those white pipes should not have been used at all - it's supposed to be all copper. And 22mm copper, not 15. The search for a decent plumber continues....

All the plumbing that's been done since then has been done by me.

I removed the hot water cylinder (as the boiler's been removed anyway - I did that too!).  This was the airing cupboard:

Few less pipes:

The two hot water cylinders in the loft are now in action. Bit of a false start, as we were supplied some pretty crummy immersion heaters to go in them. I got a pair of 36" jobs and wired them in instead via some time switches. So we have hot water, just no heating. Not a bother at the moment, but will soon be a problem if we cant't find the elusive decent plumber.

Updating this has reminded me of how many photos remain untaken. Have to do something about that.

Finally, here's a view of the house from the garden, and the garden from the house:

In the house one, you can see the little shelter thing over the back door. Makes all the difference to the look of that door. 

Bit of a kitchen catch up!

Been a while since I updated this. Start with the kitchen.  When I last updated this, the back of the house looked something like this:

At this point, the roof is whole (but a bit tired).

The next stage was to take the roof off:

The room you're looking at is the old utility room. At this point, the old boiler we had with the house was still running, and that wall with the ladder against it still divided the old kitchen from the utility room.

Next step was roof on. We're going for a sort of semi-vaulted thing in what is going to be the breakfast area of the new kitchen. We're keen to let as much light in as possible. So the roof has 2 Velux windows in it. Also we're fitting the largest practical bi-folds we can find into the front (or back!) wall. We've also made the window aperture match the height of the new doors. And we've bricked up the old doorway (photo shows midway through).

This is what it looked like before:

This is the new roof from the other side. Bit boring really!

I suppose you can see the little boiler house is done - over on the right.

The next step was to remove the wall between the old utility room and the old kitchen.

There's another Velux window in the picture over on the right. That's what we're using as the kitchen at the moment.

Another pic, a bit closer - save you zooming on the last.

And then the next wall, between the old kitchen and the old downstairs loo/shower room:

This is roughly up to date on the kitchen - there is a bit more progress, but it still looks a mess!