Home extensions 2017 - Christmas is coming

[Believeitornot]

New thread

old thread

Yes, but your floor is probably about 10 times the size of mine, 4years!!

I have no workmen here today. Next week, things kick off with stairs and more flooring and snagging again, but I am just loving, loving, loving the chance to be in my dressing gown and slippers still - at the shockingly late hour of 8am. Not even the prospect of 52 3,000 word essays to mark can dim my sunshine today!!

Filo, we've ended up with a little "coat room" (still not quite sure what to call it) as well, carved out of the corner of our old dining room. I'm still in the process of fitting it out as we ran out of money for a proper joiner. But even with just a shoe rack in there it's incredibly useful for sucking up all the clutter in the hallway.

I've also had some wallpaper delivered and am going to attempt to do it myself!! First time for everything

That flooring is gorgeous as is the window. I love seeing your photos!
Oh the thought of being in a dressing gown until gone 8am! What a treat!

Yay for peace and quiet Whisky! We do need around 66sqm of flooring so it was always going to be a depressing figure. It had better last 20 years

We're in need of a proper coat/shoes room. I have managed to squeeze a few cheap coat rack in to our little cupboard under the stairs this week which has gotten rid of our constantly toppling cost rack. I still got about 5 wicker baskets housing various shoes/boots/wellies/hats etc. It's one thing that I haven't figured out a solution for yet!

Namechange I was always scared of wallpapering, but I did our living room last year and it was much easier than I expected. Good luck 🍀

I LOVE my coat room. I used to hate coming into my house and seeing coats and shoes in the hall. However neatly you hang them, they always somehow look messy. My hall is also really quite small, so having extra space at the bottom of the stairs to turn is lovely. We put the boiler, underfloor heating controller and the electricity meter in there too - I was a bit worried whether I needed a heater to dry off wet coats (we are in a wet part of the country) but it turns out that the pipes for the boiler do a fine job of keeping it toasty! We have sacrificed a downstairs loo to do it, which probably makes the house less saleable, not more - but it works better for us since we never use a downstairs loo anyway. MIL is very peturbed about this as a move, and has done nothing but tell us how wrong we are since we made this decision .

Coat storage is one of the frustrations in our current house so keen to see people’s solutions.... oh the ambition I have these days!

Wise choice whisky. My wonderful brother has fixed multiple hooks to the inside of our small under stairs cupboard that had hidden all the coats!!!! Now I think that once the current kitchen door is blocked up, a storage bench will solve the shoe problem.

Coat storage- my Ikea pax wardrobe arrived today DH is putting it together tomorrow!

It's going in the utility room!

Half will be for coats, half for ironing board, iron, hoover steam cleaner etc!

Another little step forward, that will be the utility finished I will definitely post pics!

Loving your photos, Whisky I love your kitchen & the tilting window.
Oh and the bliss of being in PJ's until late! - and twatchops wasn't even here that often! 😂😂

We have had another fairly unproductive week. There was the excitement of work tops, but the guy doing our kitchen didn’t get much done and then walked off the job! The head builder is once more desperately trying to catch up.

I do finally have a kitchen door though. We have been here for over 5 years and never had any doors downstairs, the previous owner took them off. It drove me crazy. But today we have a kitchen door, so no more unzipping the orange tent door.

I have also chosen the bathroom suite and all the tiles. I am away next week and then we all move out for 3 weeks. If I do not have a finished kitchen and bathroom by then there will be hell to pay.

Oh Jesus Dust! What a nightmare 🙈 I hope a new kitchen fitter is found soon.

I've spent a lot of my pointless day thinking that we might need to extend 3m internally not externally so a total of 3.3m. Going to contact my builder and see how much extra it will cost. Who knew I'd stress so much over 30ish cm

There are other guys in the team who can fit the kitchen so it will be ok, just another delay.

Hope you can figure out the dimensions. I had slight worries that we should have extended further. But because of pipe location it turns out that wouldn’t have been possible anyway, we’d have had to go so far out that we’d end up with a postage stamp garden.

Oh dust - I know you're moving out soon, but it's so frustrating when you can't see progress happening. It can really drag you down. I am keeping my fingers crossed for you and hoping that next week your builders have a total flyer. Having doors really transforms a space. I am giving mine a second coat of varnish this weekend! Oh, my rock and roll lifestyle these days

rick - that's a really clever idea to use a Pax wardrobe! Can you use the hoover fittings for the kitchen in them?

4years - a few centimetres can make a huge difference, though! It's a good idea to agonise about those things now, and not later when it's too late! Provided there aren't drains or something in the way, I bet you find the extra cost is negligible.

Dust sorry you have had a rubbish week - but you've made me notice I still don't have a kitchen door! It's been off so long I'd got used to it!

Whisky I'm not sure, our old Henry will be off to the tip any day now and we have one of the lush cordless dysons to replace it. I haven't let DH use it until I was confident most of the dust was gone. I think DH is going to Heath Robinson the charging point into the back of the Pax! I'll let you know how we get on!

whisky: Well done on sourcing your floors so cheaply. It does look really good.

Dust Sorry about the kitchen fitter walking off.

We also had the most disastrous day on Friday. Site foreman has walked off (there were issues with the electricity in the morning, my husband was raging as he needed to be online).
An hour later we had a long text from next door that said they never consented to the builders walking onto their drive (I was worried about this but was reassured they'd checked with them .... hm..) and they wanted things to be sorted asap.
We have leaks from the roof as tiling hasn't been finished.
But the garage has now been concreted and screed for the living/dining area is coming on Monday. There was a bummer there too as we've just been told (like I read it here before) that you can't lay flooring down on it for another 40 days if you have the ufh on. Which won't be functional until the beginning of March.
I really hope we'll be done with this by the end of May. I did expect it to be a 6 month project. We started in Sept.
On the plus side: I have a lovely tap and my new dishwasher waiting to be put in in 2 weeks time.

So we are out in another house whilst the grime really sets in. We've just had concrete base and ufh laid. Hopefully bathroom back in soon which makes it livable again.

What's this about 40days for heating on floor?!

tika- 《groan》why do these things always come together?? You poor thing, it sounds so stressful!

Hope you can sort the neighbours with some outrage that the builders didn't check this and a bottle of wine!!

The screed for the floor is actually not that bad to live with for a few weeks. It is a wee bit dusty and obviously not a "proper" floor but it's actually better than all the dirt and crap you get under bare floorboards or worse, no floorboards at all. Make sure the whole crew know that the ufh has to go on very very slowly over the 40 days- someone turned ours up too quickly and the screed cracked. Fortunately we realised before it became a huge issue. You should still have a floor in easily before May, right?

Pumping: that’s the full drying time for screed. We want to put engineered wood on top and can’t be laid earlier as it’d soak up the moisture from the screed. I know others have also waited 6 weeks but our guys have previously said 1 week.... which made me think there’d be different types of screeds.

Our flooring guy has said 1 day per mm of screed so he thinks it'll be at least 2 months before we can have flooring laid 🤷🏽‍♀️ we're expecting it and I've built it into our 'schedule'

Can’t believe it’s really happening but digger is on site today! Have the customary 16 week schedule (which I’m sure will become the 30 week one before we can blink-unless we happen to have bax’s builders😉)
Decision making and tissues at the ready

Hooray whattodo - you're off! Enjoy the part where they are outside, it is the best bit

I'm having the staircase refurbished today. It involves shifting a newel post - am slightly concerned that this may turn out to be the one piece of wood that holds up the entire house!

It's so exciting whattodo! Definitely enjoy the beginning, it's fab seeing the bricks going up!

Getting up early is getting tiring now. I've been working late shifts all weekend and then have to up at 715 today on my day off 😫
On a positive we have the first layer of rendering nearly on, we have a digger back to get out a tree and tree stump ready for the driveway next week and our driveway arrives today. I'm beginning to wonder if our neighbours think we're keeping our horrible old door 😂

Front door not driveway 😂

Eek have just been to the house and progress! Structural changes are beginning to take shape, with some walls coming down and others going up! And we now have toilets. Whoop!

Have been living with chest pain anxiety since Wednesday; the quote for finishing off our loft came up a whopping 5k more than they'd originally said it would be when we bought the house. No explanation why. We've got a meeting this afternoon to iron out the differences, so I'm crossing everything they've just made a mistake and it's not actually going to cost 5k more. If it is, we're up a creek without a paddle and a loan may be on the horizon. :( Also just received word that the flooring, electrics and bathroom tile are going to be considerably more than anticipated, which all just adds stress and means I'm not sleeping much at night.

I cannot wait for this all to be over.

Lingua - oh no, extra financial costs are massively stressful. I really hope you can sort this out, and that it turns out to be a mistake (or that there's some element that you can simply cut).

Can you find equivalent but cheaper flooring and tiles to cut your costs? Sometimes supplying the materials yourself and just paying for labour can work out much cheaper.