Thursday 26 June 2008

Floored!



As these photos show, the wood flooring is now fitted everywhere upstairs. It looks great and we are very pleased. The first is of Andrew and me admiring it in the main bathroom with Ian looking on. (Note absence of shoes - joiners' orders!) The second picture shows Andrew either going up or down the ladder (can't remember which) with Robin the decorator looking up.

In fact, on first appearance, things seem to be looking up in general as the floor is now being laid downstairs and should be almost finished by the time we visit next. A lot of other major work is about to start (Then again, isn't it always?) - kitchen and other cupboard fitting, the rest of the stained glass windows, bathroom fitments, installing the re-measured conservatory roof for starters. Ian's men are still sorting out the drains and downpipes and will soon get on putting up the garage roof-timbers. But, wouldn't you know it? The joiners are the second lot of people to measure wrongly, having miscalculated the angle of the roof. Actually they're the third. The architects didn't include the various flooring layers upstairs when they calculated wall-height. This admittedly only a few centimetres out has a big knock-on effect for the shower in our en suite. If we are to keep the cabinet walls at the same height then the shower tray already supplied will be too wide. The solution is either to reduce the height of the cabinet walls or reduce the width of the floor tray. We've decided on the latter so that will be another delay. We also really need the staircase fitted now and I don't think the company involved have started work on it yet. Nor has the iron-work balustrading been made yet, let alone delivered. It's bad enough climbing up and down the ladder to see upstairs but even less fun for installing the baths, loos and basins, not to mention the timber for the upstairs cupboards and all the internal doors. As regards the ironwork we've just heard the forge want to charge us a lot more than originally agreed. This is because they have decided each piece needed to be bigger thus requiring more work in the casting of the mould and more work equals more cost. I hope this will not cause too many headaches and/or delay in progress. I suspect it will. Did I say things were looking up?

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