The roof is pretty much finished, the windows and doors have been ordered, the internal work has begun…
On Eloise’s insistence we drove past the house earlier on today. She wanted to see the roof. I was more interested in the fact that the bedroom windows were all wide open and momentarily doubted that I had shut them after sorting stuff out in that room on Saturday. Then I noticed that there were a couple of bottles of shower gel, shampoo etc on the window sill and suspected that the special shower cupboard that was a true 80’s feature of our bedroom is no more. Sure enough, the shower doors are now in the rubbish pile on the drive; work has started on the inside. Yeah! And I’m particularly pleased that I decided Saturday was the day to sort stuff out that had been dumped in the bedroom. At least all the random bedding etc has been bagged up and put inside the wardrobe rather than just lying around waiting to gather as much dust as possible!
The new velux over the stairs from first to second floor will be going in this week and internal work upstairs is underway so we should soon have an idea of the shape and size of the new (disproportionately large) landing. The main internal demolition work is on the ground floor and can’t be done until the house is sealed with windows and doors, as otherwise the whole house would be open from the back. The work that needs doing upstairs has no reason to wait and so it looks like the builders are getting stuck in.
I’m meeting with Steve on Wednesday to work out exactly what is going to be done in the next couple of weeks and to get some additional costs – we want to remove a chimney breast from the old dining room to open up the space, and to get the insulation on the existing top floor improved, hoping to warm the top rooms up in winter and cool them down in summer. Money seems to be rushing away from us at the moment. It’s very odd, having been trying not to spend money for so long, to suddenly be spending so much so quickly. I have to keep reminding myself that we are meant to be spending at the moment. That said, we have gone distinctly over budget with the kitchen. Oops. So far, we’re pretty much on budget for the bathrooms but I suspect that the tiling and decorating costs might change that. I’m looking for savings elsewhere but there don’t seem to be many to be found.
So what do we need to choose? Well, the kitchen is chosen (yeah!) but we need to finalise the bathroom stuff (and the en-suite and downstairs loo) and have realised that we probably need to have chosen the flooring for the bathroom before the sanitary ware can be installed so now we really need to choose flooring. And we can’t choose the flooring until we know what wall colour, tiles and overall look we’ll be going for in each room. So we need to choose the decoration for the bathrooms, and the kitchen/family room floor too. And we still have the possibility of moving the position of the internal walls for the en-suite and walk through wardrobe area in the master bedroom which impacts on the size of shower etc. As we’re away every weekend in August, we don’t have much time to see things in the flesh and it’s not really possible to see what tiles look like online. Either we’ll soon be awash with tile samples or we need to get down to some tile shops. That sounds like another child-friendly expedition!!
