Last night we had another meeting with the building contractor and we were pleasantly suprised to hear that he'd already started work on the house again, confident that we are getting approval from the council.
Working with a reduced workforce until we receive the approval, he informed us that yesterday they managed to knock out another non-loading bearing wall (where the kitchen is going to be) and that his plumber had removed most of the old pipe work, radiators and the old central heating boiler. Both Flo and I could barely hold back our smiles when we heard and both of us wanted to jump straight in the car to go and have a look; removing the remaining walls is going to have such a big effect on the room, it's difficult to really imagine it, so we're keen to go and see it as soon as possible.
We're still uncovering unusual things in the house. It seems that whoever commissioned some of the earlier building work was either on a tight budget, was on a tight timeline or was plain lazy; it appears that there used to be a fireplace where are new kitchen is going to be, but when they bricked off this part of the house, they didn't bother removing the fireplace but instead just bricked it into the wall. This explains the unusual shape of the wall as it currently stands. Also, it appears that the ceiling in the back of the house was installed much lower than it could have been. The builder suggested that he could remove the ceiling and re-install it higher to let more light into the rooms (there's about 40 cm of space between the floor on the 1st floor and the ceiling of the ground floor at present!) but we agreed to leave it as it is since this helps us keep the cost down and will help on the heating bills, plus the ceiling is high enough as it is.
One set back was that the building contractor advised us not to start on the garden until his guys had finished. He said that they're using the garden to store things and they will be making a mess there as they throw things out of the window. He advised that it would be much easier to clean up afterwards if the garden remained in-tact and that if it were to rain when the garden was all dug up then his guys would undoubtedly bring loads of dirt into the house. He did make up for the news however by informing us that he knows a good gardener that could do the work for us, so that's a good lead to chase up.
We went through the electrical plan also last night, which was good timing since we also received the lighting plan from the shop we went to a couple of weeks back. We've been pretty ruthless going through the electrical points and switches and have managed to strip out alot of the work, which should have a significant impact on the cost. Don't worry though... it still remains very practical and we haven't skimped in places where we need the electrical points like the kitchen.
So things are starting to progress. The steel beams that will replace the load bearing walls are on order, but take about 4 days to manufacture. Hopefully we'll receive official approval this week which will give the go ahead to knock out the remaining walls hopefully before the weekend. As soon as this is done we'll go and take some pictures so you can start to get a feel for how it's going to look...
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