Playing Puzzle Fifteen Indoors

We lost our master bedroom and living room to the build last weekend. The Puzzle Fifteen game commenced here!

Most of our stuff is now either representing a chaotic mish-mash of beds, book cases, wardrobes and TVs in our new (temporary) “master bedroom” (aka old study), or stuffed up to the ceiling in a smaller guest bedroom. Tight storage spaces meant us now sleeping on two mattresses atop our bed, bringing us 30cm closer to the ceiling than usual. I feel like a true Princess and The Pea , and Malc is suspected of suffering from the altitude sickness 🙂 I am considering a step for my side of the bed and a safety parachute to ease the ascends and descends. The two-mattress challenge serves as a handy acclimatisation period to get us used to sleeping in our first-floor future master bedroom ! 🙂

Last weekend also saw our dining room / kitchen downsized to allow for wall rebuild in our old master bedroom and living room. The addition of a false wall of a wooden frame and a huge blue tarpaulin looks like a distasteful feature wall , clashing with the rest of our kitchen/diner décor. The ceilings are gone in the living room and ex-master bedroom to expose the beams and to allow for new steels to go in, with the longest of the steels being over 8m long! The logistics of how we gonna get that hippo up are still being debated…

The plan is to work on one half of the house first, getting it watertight, relocating into our new bedroom, moving all the furniture into the new part of the house and then continuing work on the rest of the house. The theory is simple, if somewhat painful as far as constantly moving stuff around the house is concerned… Yet, it saves on pay-for storage and allows easy and quick access to all we need. Hopefully this will work all the way in practice too! The ambition is to stay in he house whilst it’s being built… We may have to survive for a few days here and there without gas & water … I may be able to deal with all that on (very) short term basis. If electricity AND Internet goes however – I may have to move! 🙂

At any rate, the deadline to finish the first half of the house build (walls and roof) is the 27th of July, when we have Kloeber coming in to install bi-folds in the living room and windows in our master bedroom! 🙂

Progress so far:

New foundations, concrete slab and waterproof membrane are in for the study and the snug, along with the steel rods for the retaining wall between us and the neighbours-above, which are yet to be concreted
External and internal side wall of the living room extension is up and the fireplace and chimney are being erected bit by bit
Scaffolding is now up around the back and the front of the house too as of today, all in all for a reasonable £900

Garden landscaping is continuing. We managed to burry ten (!) skipfuls of rubble and chalk so far, levelling off our sloping garden for the future lawn and the wild flower “meadow” at the bottom of the garden, topping it all up with reserved top soil. Most of the replanted flowers and plants are doing well, apart from the giant poppies, which look terrible. Today the plan is to build some more raised beds out of leftover railway sleepers and start laying foundations for the steps leading up to the chill-out corner.

So far we managed with only two skip lorries (£160 each) to take away huge concrete lumps of the old foundations which we could not neither break up nor burry (equating in total to 6-7 standard skips). The skip lorry guys apparently take away rubble from building sites, crash it into smaller rubble and then sell back to the building sites for new foundation builds! In the process they get paid trice! By those who are getting rid of the rubbish, by the government for not filling in the landfills, and by the new customer who needs that same rubbish in smaller chunks. Not a bad business model, but does require investing into a huge dumper truck with a crane, a rubble crusher and a big yard at the very least.

Next week plan is to work on the roof, removing old concrete tiles and pitching the roof frame higher, digging out the footings and laying foundations for the kitchen and utility room extension, erecting wall between the living room and store / utilities room (aka garage), finishing off chimney, erecting external and internal study and snug walls, continuing landscaping, building another wood shed and chopping up wood, etc

Next week Malc & I are taking the whole week off work to work on the house alongside the builders. With two brickies, two labourers and two foundation guys – two extra pairs of hands will still always come in useful!

And on a fun note : whilst shifting, what it felt like, thousands of heavy and light blocks from the front to the back of the house and shovelling thousands of tonnes of rubble yesterday, Malc had a great idea to break up the routine – to have a race with the heavy machinery vehicles on our front lawn – Malc on the dumper truck, Josh-the-labourer on the excavator and me… on my Toyota… (alternatively I could have gone for a three-wheel-barrow combo). The race was delayed until we get hold of the keys 🙂