All systems go!

Flo rang the council this week to enquire as to the status of our request for building work. The clerk sounded young and enthusiastic and reported that she'd heard back from the construction department and that they had no objections. She was still waiting to hear back from the fire department and expected to hear something by the end of last week or probably later this week.

We spoke to our building contractor today and passed on the news; he considered that if the construction department had no objections then everything should be fine and that we could commence this week; the fire department were only likely to comment on proposed locations for fire detectors and thicknesses of walls, both of which would not impact the plan. This is good news since it means that we're confident to start preparing to knock down the remaining walls and can order the steel beams that are going to hold up the house when the walls are knocked out.

There's still plenty to work on however. We've had some quotes back for making and installing the new stair case and they all seem rather expensive. So we're going to get some more quotes and see if we can get the cost down there a bit. We also need to source the wooden floor that we're planning on installing in the back portion of the house; we're going to De Oude Plank next weekend and look for a floor. The intention now is for me to install the wooden floor myself; having seen a number of quotes now it's evident that the majority of costs are incurred in the form of labour... it typically costs as much or more to have stuff fitted than the material costs! Since fitting the floor is quite labour intensive but relatively straight forward, there's a fair bit of money to be saved by doing it ourselves. The same goes to painting; it's just not economic to pay someone else to do it!

We also need to finalise the decision on the floor in the front of the house. We're pretty certain that it's going to be a cement based floor, but need to decide on whether it's just painted or whether to have an epoxy layer installed. Painting the floor with a specially made paint is the cheapest option, but we both agree that the epoxy looks much nicer. However, we consider the prices we've seen for epoxy layers to be a bit excessive, so unless we can find a place that offers them at a cheaper price then we'reprobably going to opt for just painting the floor, but getting the builder contractor to level and polish the cement beforehand. Next weekend is going to be busy, since we also need to pay a visit to Decopox to get another quote.

On the garden front, we're still waiting to get a quote off the guy who came 'round a few weeks back. Seems that gardeners are in high demand, particularly now that the weather is getting better! Rather than wait though, we're chasing up another quote from a lead from Flo's mum. Since she gave us a good lead for getting a lighting plan done (for which we've received a quote but not the plan yet), we thought we couldn't miss the chance of another good contact for the garden. We've therefore sent off an email to Voshol; the gardener happens to be a neighbour of Flo's mum and despite being busy, he's reported as being interested in carrying out the work.

We've decided to hold off on all non-critical work on the house in the short term such as the division at the front of the house and installing wine racks in the cellar. This is to concentrate on the critical stuff, but also to give us more time to decide on what we really want for these. As long as we plan the critical stuff, we can accomodate fitting in the ancillary things later. We're finding it difficult to visualise the house up front; there's so much that's being changed that it's difficult to have a feel for how it's going to look and so we run the risk of making some inappropriate decisions if we try and decide on everything up front. This also makes it a bit less stressful for us in the short-term... and extends the fun and games in the long term!