Four weeks in and we now have what looks very much like an extension. The walls are up, roof is finished, and now all that’s left to do before they knock a great big hole in our house is to fit the window and bi-folds.
Veluxes
During the first fortnight of the build, there were a few issues that cropped up. The last couple of weeks, however, have been spot on. There have been pretty much zero issues and the guys have got far better at keeping us posted and asking us questions.
A couple of days before the veluxes went in, Gavin (main man) asked us to have a think about where to put them. We’d planned to just have 2, but after thinking about the position of the island and 3 pendants above it, we realised that 2 wouldn’t work unless we wanted a light dangling from the Velux… Haz pointed out that 3 veluxes would work better so we asked Gavin if that was possible and how much extra it would be. He gave it the thumbs up and said it would be an extra £365 so we went for it. In hindsight, I have no idea why we originally had only 2 veluxes in the design as we want maximum natural light and 3 just looks better than 2. It’s a good job Gavin spoke to us rather than just following the plan or we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to add another Velux.
Padstones
Okay so there was one issue in the last couple of weeks. We grabbed Gavin one day for a natter before ordering our kitchen. It’s a good job we did as whilst looking through the structural engineer’s calculations, he noticed that the padstone required to support the steels above the opening at the back of our house is a lot bigger than expected… Initially he said the pillar supporting the steel would come into the room by 66cm on either side. SIXTY SIX CENTIMETRES!!!! Haz and I both passed out but when we came to, he corrected himself that the pillar would be 66cm wide and protrude out of the wall by 12cm. That’s far more reasonable than coming into the room by 66cm, but the original assumption was a 30cm wide pillar coming 15cm into the room. So slightly less deep, but 36cm wider than expected. Pretty disappointing than we weren’t told earlier about this and a bloody good job we checked before ordering our kitchen.
After getting this news we needed to make changes to our kitchen units as the pillar would eat into them more than expected. We switched the fridge freezer position with the pantry unit and took out the fancy pull-out drawers. In the end this wasn’t really a compromise and removing the fancy drawers saved us £360 so could have been a lot worse and paid for the extra velux, but having clarity on the pillar size earlier would have been far better.
Next Steps
We’ve got a week or so without the lads on site until the window & bi-folds have arrived. After that we’re likely to move out for a couple of weeks as apparently the knock through and stages afterwards are well messy. We had a proper catch-up with Gavin on Thursday and they’re ahead of schedule which is great but it also means we need to crack on with ordering appliances which tbh I’m quite excited about. How life has changed.
After a dodgy first couple of weeks, we have renewed faith in our builders. Of course, there’s a lot that could still go wrong but at least the trust is back!
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