Home extensions 2017 - Christmas is coming

[Believeitornot]

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Bax, I love your style. Is that a DEVOL kitchen? I speak as someone who also went for white metro tiles with white grout. NEVER spray Viakal near them, ever!

I suggest going to Topps Tiles and buying the grout protector and applying it in the grout. Very laborious , but works. You'll notice the difference especially behind the tap.

We are home and I can see the walls & ceiling in the kitchen area have been plastered. Bodes well for flooring going in next week.

Bax your kitchen is beautiful!

Ah thanks! We're really pleased!

More kitchen love here bax. We finally ordered ours the night before last. The whole thing took us ages as we spotted a couple of annoying issues and had to change things around from the design. I’ve also ordered all the bathroom stuff for our ensuite and downstairs loo and all our ensuite tiles so I’m feeling quite shopped out!

We're off for a weekend in Harrogate next Friday for my birthday and we'll also be going to DIY kitchens to finalise the order and get it in before the sale ends. I'm quite excited as it looks great and it will be fab for my husband to see such a large showroom as he has no imagination! I'm also hoping that I'll finally get more quotes in. 2 of my 3 favourites promised quotes by the end of this week. My top favourite wants to send his plumber and electrician over first

The showroom is great 4years and they have lots of biscuits

Happy new year everyone! Hope you all had a lovely festive season.

It's been weird and unChristmassy this end, dealing with a house that is half-finished. We've had a number of problems, too - the screed has cracked (aiiiieeeee!! I'm hoping this isn't a huge problem as it's just a hairline crack, but fearing the worst) and the roof has leaked. Hopefully neither is huge to sort out, but they are annoying issues all the same. More annoying BY FAR, however, is the fact that Ikea have totally failed to deliver our kitchen on 27 December, as expected. It's been put back to 5 January - an apology, but no explanation. So DH and I haven't been able to put it together for the builder over the holiday, as planned. I'm intending to claim the cost of assembly back from Ikea as compensation for the delay.

Not much in the way of work here yet - builder doesn't show until tomorrow. The electrician has been in, harrumphing, which has rather broad down my post-Christmas mood. I am literally having to stand over him with a tape measure to get things straight. He left our electrics in such a state before Christmas that getting the utility lights to turn on involved 3 separate switches. Figuring it out was a bit like having a starring role in the Crystal Maze, which was hilarious at first but rather less so as the days have gone on.

I can't WAIT for it all to be over now!

That is frustrating whisky.

I am anticipating a burst of productivity from our builders as I overheard them talking finances and I think they really need to catch themselves up to keep paying wages. They were here this morning busying themselves with preparing the floor for parquet.

How frustrating Whisky! Why is it so hard to find a good tradesman? Well I've been buying Christmas decs for an extension that I don't have a builder for 🙈 Spent £100 on 70% off decs.....justifying that it would cost me much more if I waited until next winter

Whisky that sucks about your kitchen. I hope you can get some compensation back from Ikea. And equally I hope you can get your floor and roof lights sorted.

Dust that bodes well!

DH and I are stuck in builder hell. He's basically turned into a massive, unscrupulous bully. We have now paid everything we owe apart from £5K set back for project completion. He called me yesterday, pleading poverty, and asked us to pay the decorators (nb decorating is in his contract) £2K out of this £5K. We refused. He then said he'd walk away from the job, pull everyone out and cancel the second fix electrics due to happen next week. We said we'd sue him for non completion of project. He said he'd just wind up his company and not be liable for a thing.
So, we have relented as we feel totally backed into a corner. I still don't know if the second fix will happen or not. Plus we're on holiday next week. This was supposed to be our end-of-works get-away-from-it-all Holiday and I can imagine it'll now be spent fretting that the second fix hasn't happened and basically we have no leverage whatsoever to get it done

Oh no Tatlerer, what a nightmare. Have the decorators actually done their job or is it an advance payment? You are so much at the mercy of builders when it gets to that stage. I hope everything goes ok.

That absolutely sucks Tatlerer. What an asshole. These stories make me so worried about choosing the correct builder. Why are there so many wankers about?!?

I have lurked more than posted on the thread so far. But I’m wondering if anyone could help us? Basically our builder hasn’t done something to building regs - the main water pipe to the house in the kitchen floor hasn’t been buried properly. He had four chances to get it done properly and finally said it was done and we could floor over it. Got a tiler booked in who took one look and said it wasn’t safe.

It protrudes above the line of the floor. Got another builder to come out and look and he said it wasn’t safe and some of the kitchen would have to come out so it can be rectified.

What do we do now? Builder is chasing for a final payment even though there is still a lot of work left unfinished. Obviously we won’t pay him anything further.

DH doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him, but other people in RL say we need to give him a chance to fix it. What do we do now?

Oh blimey sorry so many of you are having problems now! It's so frustrating! I feel your pain!
I have good news, out tilers emailed, they have a hold up on another job so can come & do my tiling tomorrow!
Really excited!

I haven’t been here for a while due to things being frustratingly slow.

Tatlerer, that must be so stressful. It’s so ridiculous that people can be in the business with this attitude.

As for us (doing a double storey extension and rebuild garage). We had to reschedule everything for about the 4th time now. My kitchen was postponed from mid dec to mid jan, then end of jan, mid feb is the current. I’m not sire how long the chippie can take this for to be honest. On top of that they’ve now nearly doubled our electrics quote for extras. I’ll try and post a pic of their quote later to ask forum opinion whether it looks about right or we’re being taken for total monkeys. And also for others to see what things they need to specify before asking for a quote and getting a contract.

tatlerer - I am so, so sorry this is happening. Your builder sounds like he has been reasonable and decent up to this point, so it must be a huge shock to witness this volte-face. What he's doing isn't just unethical, it's downright spiteful. "Bullying" is the right word.

What is in the contract that he still needs to do - is it more than £5ks worth of work? Could you call his bluff and hire your own set of tradespeople? Even if it's slightly more - say £7k - it might be worth paying the extra to be rid of someone you now know to be unethical. Second fix electrics seems to be largely screwing on sockets and testing!

wollstonecraft - I think people are sadly probably right that you have to give him another chance. It may be time to put your complaint in writing if you haven't already done so? Could you give Citizens' Advice a ring? I would maybe get another builder out and ask them to look and tell you what needs to be done and get a price for this, so that you have a decent second opinion.

tika - very, VERY sensible to do the detail now. Even if it's delaying things, it can save a lot of expense in the long run.

More news from Ikea here - on top of the 3 cover panels that are delayed to the end of January, our delivery on Friday (already postponed rom 27th December) will now NOT include the ovens, or drawer fronts that we need. These are due on the 5TH FEBRUARY. I could cry, I really could. They were in stock 3 days ago, so clearly they have sold them to other customers. Customer service can do nothing to help - we just have to wait. Deeply, deeply regretting not going with DIY Kitchens now.

On top of this, I'm having to stand over the electrician and literally correct every single thing he does. EVERYTHING is wrong. He just installed a smoke alarm out of line with the landing lights. HE IS A TOTAL WANKER.

Been following this thread for months and only now are we at stage of having specs from architect and starting to get quotes. Does anybody have any advice for this stage from your cumulative experience! It's not a big job just some walls down, steels in and new pitched roof.

Oh blimey, I am sorry everyone is having such a tough time.

Can I get radiator advice? I need to choose some radiators, we are going vertical to save space. Anybody bought any nice vertical radiators?

dust - I got mine from Mr Central Heating! I've had some from there in raw metal installed downstairs for a few years and they look great and are beefy in terms of the BTUs. The 2 column ones are really slender, but you may have to get them in a powdercoated finish (the gunmetal is really close to the raw metal).

fem - my advice would be: do the detail NOW. Don't just think "Oh, it's just a shell, it'll be OK". Every choice you make will have knock-on effects that determine what you can and can't do at a later stage, so it's good to work out what you want in terms of second fix finishes for every surface now and to ensure that the shell is constructed in such a way that allows you to have the finished article you want. This also helps in cost terms, because second fix prices are much larger than you think.

It is absolutely exhausting to spend hours and hours poring over plans and thinking about how you will use a space that doesn't exist yet, and where you will want sockets, radiators (or underfloor heating) etc. I think I got quite demoralised about it after spending a huge chunk of every Sunday for about a year on it. It was a big learning curve, because everything was news to me, and I still missed things that I wish I'd looked into in more depth, but it also saved me some expensive mistakes!

fem - my second piece of advice would be GET A GOOD ELECTRICIAN!!

Would you just look at this radiator? It is fabulous. And £770 so not remotely in my budget. But it is so clever!

Yeah but imagine all the polishing

Oh I know, but I think it might be worth it.

OK, so I’d be interested what everyone thingks of this quote.
So original quote was £6,900 for rewiring orignal house and new, 54 downlights, sockets, switches and ‘outside lights’ (this is where we failed to specify what we want). Now on top of that £2,400 for elctrical underfloor heating for 4 bathrooms (I just want this to take the chill out bathroom tiles as I hate cold, we’d still have radiators). Now I’m not sure sure it’s worth it. We had this in the preious house but that only had one bathroom. Might go for vinyl in bathrooms (hate vinyl really).
On top of this they want another £2,600 for lating out the electrics for mist system, heat recovery and air source heat pump (which they should have knowns all along we’re having), relocation of fuseboard and solar inventer,, one extra datapoint,, 12 outside lights, cabling for outside electrical gates, supply for dishwasher (??? that surely is not an extra).
So altogether we went from 7K to 11 K.
Is this realistic? The house was originally a 3 bed now becoming 5/6.
Oh, they’re also wanting to charge us for ‘reinstalling the electricity to the outbuilding’ that their electrician has cut off... that must be a joke.