Day 37 - The Plumbers and Snagging

After a few hours of successful decorating over the weekend, we were ready for the plumbers today.  By the end of the day the three radiators were on the walls and working, and issues regarding the plumbing in of the mascerators and fitted cupboards were discussed and ironed out.  Marcus was still away on his long weekend, but Simon was here to do items on the snagging list, finish off the architrave on the stairs, clear off the scaffolding and again, tidy up with a view to being finished tomorrow.  Marcus and Simon will both be here to clear everything out, finish any snagging and help with the installation of the bathroom (as there will be bits of carpentry to be done).  The end is in sight - or rather the end of the building work and the beginning of the major redecoration programme for the whole house.

Day 16 - Structure Complete

The day started with a hasty meeting about the bathroom.  Having spent most of the night considering our options we delivered our verdict to the plumbers, who straight away got down to moving the pipes they had already laid for the basin and shower.  They were also able to complete the macerator discharge pipe now, which luckily didn't have to change (because they hadn't done that end of it yet).  Then they came inside and connected up all the pipes in the airing cupboard.

Meanwhile, Marcus and Simon carried on with the remainder of the structural work.  They completed the dwarf wall on top of the steel beam which will become the wall of the stairwell.  They removed the purlin from above the stairs, where it will be in the way, and trimmed the joists for the last Velux window.  They also installed a big chunk of timber to support the end of the front ridge beam.

By 15:30 they were taking bags of rubbish to the skip, so we got a quick progress update.  The structure is now all complete, so the building inspector will be coming to inspect it tomorrow.

The next phase is electrical first fix before the chicken-wire goes down with insulation on top.  The evening was spent finalising where the sockets and lights are going to go.

We Have a Problem

Steve the plumber mentioned it first. As he measured up for where the pipes had to go, he said we were a bit tight between the wash basin and the shower. There wouldn't be room to stand in front of the basin, let alone bend over to wash your face.
We checked our plans and realised that we had drawn the wash basin smaller than it really is. So it was our planning error. And something has to be done about it - the bathroom will be unusable if we build it as planned. We have a few options:

• Re-arrange the whole bathroom and put the shower on the opposite wall. This would require a different window (the original has already been ordered).
• Get a smaller shower (we've already bought the big one).
• Get a smaller basin - such as a counter-top one.
• Move the walls to make the bathroom bigger - clearly not a cheap option at this stage.

After a sleepless night and a lot of thinking, we decided to go with a combination of a smaller shower and a minor re-arrangement of the furniture. This will lead to a bit of re-work by the plumbers, and we'll have to sell that big shower enclosure on ebay (what would we do without ebay?) At least now we will have a bathroom that works, even if our shower won't be quite the monster we had been expecting.

Day 15 - Roofers and Plumbers

At 07:55 this morning we had a couple of roofers sitting in their van waiting for Marcus. At 09:00 two plumbers turned up. The plumber had a delay on another of his jobs, so he was shortly joined by a third plumber. So it's been busy up on the scaffolding today! The roofers have finished the dormer cheeks with very neat looking tiles. (The front will be uPVC cladding, so not their problem.) They stopped quite early, but they will be coming back soon to finish off. They couldn't finish today because they needed to use some mortar, which needs a temperature of at least 4 degrees to cure it - which was not available today. The plumbers ran flexible pipes up to the bathroom and spent a lot of time worrying about how they were going to do our macerators. We are using two macerators, one for the shower and one for the toilet. They need separate pipes all the way to the soil stack and use different diameter pipes. The upshot is that the two discharge pipes take completely different routes across the loft and individually required their own set of head-scratching and technical advice from the manufacturers. I'd agree with all advice I've had - if you can possibly avoid a macerator, do.

Meanwhile, Marcus and Simon quietly got on with the rest of the supporting walls in the study and under the East-facing slope of the main roof. This included the stud wall to separate the bedroom and study areas. This is almost complete, and they move on to the wall round the stairs tomorrow.