Demolition Day

Day 1 for the builders it may be, but we've been waiting a year for this moment. Twelve months have passed since we decided to buy Carnhill and extend it. The extension has turned into a refurbishment, remodelling, roof heightening, landscaping and all manner of improvements taking our original budget estimation of £50K - £100K and multiplying it by a factor or three!



Demolition
The builders set about their task by not exactly building anything. Instead, they set their sights on demoilishing anything that was going to get in their way. First task? Remove the roof. Second task? Demolish the garage so that the heavy plant can get access to the rear of the property in order to start the digging of foundations.

The result wasn't as shocking as I was expecting (though I do feel sorry for the neighbours who may have had to suffer quite a noisy day).

It's amazing what a squad of hard-working individuals can get through in a day! And when I say squad, I mean squad... the cul-de-sac had its first ever traffic jam this morning when van after van turned up.

Grafitti
Of course, now that the house is officially a building site, it will attract the unsavioury elements in our society. In fact, they turned up last week to leave their mark on the empty shell.

The scrawls on the windows gave away their political persuasion:

"We run this show"
"Keep out"
"FTPSNI"
"FTUDA"
"FTUVF"

Lovely language, but it is a miracle that they didn't provide us with this poetry before now! The house has been empty for over 2 years after all. Ah well... the windows will be removed soon enough.

Signed up

Just back from holiday yesterday and signed on the dotted line today... we have a contract now to pay huge chunks of money to our builder every month for the next 8. A bit scary but nothing ventured... etc.

He starts to rip it up on Monday morning. Stephen will be there with his camera no doubt.. pics to follow.

VAT VAT VAT!

From 4th, January 2011, the VAT rate goes up from 17.5% to 20%. This will increase the price of our renovations of course - I haven't found anything yet that decreases them! We need to get as much paid for before then as we can!

Ideas Part 1

I have lots of ideas of how I imagine our new house. As they say - pictures speak a thousand words so I am going to publish some pictures here. Some ideas might have to change but here goes...

The doors

White, flat and shiny (?). had thought eggshell (?) but maybe gloss. There are no skirting boards here, I have read somewhere that walls are more easily damaged if u don't have them, so I think we will. However in tiled areas, I would use skirting tiles:

The door handles, something like this:

The Stairs

I think that glass up the sides and plain white plaster upstairs on the landing might be an option:

Hubby likes the open tread, but as our stairs are not going to be attached to a wall, I imagine we would need a "spine" to support them. That's what I'm not keen on, don't like too many bits! Decisions decisions...

Demolition Averted

While the merits of a complete demolition and a rebuild cannot be denied, there are one nor two issues with such an approach.

Issue 1: The house is mortgaged and I can't believe that our friends in the bank would be too happy with us knocking the house down. In fact, the terms and conditions pretty much state that we should not devalue the house at all. Would demolition temporarily devalue the house?

Issue 2: We really want to get started as soon as possible. We've been waiting far too long already. Demolition will introduce a major delay to the work whereas a straight extension/renovation can get underway on the 2nd August.

So the decision as to whether demolish or not was quite straightforward in the end - we're not doing it.

The Results Are In...

The builders quotes have been received and there has been a clear winner which is good news. Even better news is that we have met the builder and I believe we will be able to work with him. That may sound odd to some, but I was worried that he might be one of those cocky, winky, alright darlin' types that would upset me over time. He isn't like that at all which is brilliant news.

The only complication we have now, though, is a decision as to whether the house should be demolished and rebuilt which means VAT on the construction will be zero-rated. There are other benefits, of course:

• New house comes with a warranty
• New house will have modern materials and better insulation
• New house means no strange "joins" between the existing house and the extension

The downside is an extended construction period. Decisions, decisions. At least the builder can start pretty soon - 1st August. A 30 week construction period will take us through to the end of February (including a 2 week holiday for Christmas). Winter weather will probably mean that we don't get in to the house until Easter 2011. In other words, almost a whole year AFTER we had originally hoped for.

Even so... the excitement is building!

And we thought we'd be in....

When we decided to buy Carnhill, we believed (wrongly) that there was a chance of getting plans completed, builders selected and the job finished by the summer of 2010.

It's now June 2010, and we still don't have a builder selected. Thankfully, we are quite easy going and not ovely concerned but having said that, I don't believe we have been unnecessarily tardy in our approach to this project.

The fact still remains that it has taken a very long time to get to our current stage! And there is absolutely nothing that can be done to hurry this stage along. Builders should have received the working drawings from which we should receive quotes by 21st June - 3 weeks. It's quite exciting really - what will they come back with? £100K? £150K? £200K? More?

This will be the first time that we can properly compare our budget against a properly quantified quotation. Here's hoping that we have set aside enough funds for completion. And my recent re-assessment of completion dates may have to be re-assessed again. Have we a chance of getting in to the house before Christmas? Unlikely at our current rate!