It’s been a reasonably eventful start to the new year where the house is concerned.
Due to a suspicious lack of activity at the house this week, we decided to withold this weeks fairly meaty payment to the new gang starting the loft. It certainly had the desired effect – causing ructions which reached the MD of the building company and resulting in somewhat threatening messages on the answerphone. Anyway it was all resolved quite nicely and won’t happen again – and it was all down to miscommunication since the guys had actually done a lot of “work” (or at least ordered a lot of the stuff)- so we paid and they promise to be on site, in force (7 of them) on Monday.
The scaffold was also delayed by a couple of days and the monkey boys who put the stuff up finally turned up on Monday this week. They did a kind of two-days on, two-days off kind of thing which was also confusing but the net result is that our house is now entirely sheathed in scaffold – front, back, top and sides.
There was scepticism from the project manager (Paul) over whether the builder (Barry) had “over-done” it on the scaffold – apparently protecting the roof from rain is only a secondary concern when you’re trying to squeeze profits on the job. But I’m glad Barry went the extra mile. Especially since London flooded today from all the rain.
Of course it could never be that simple and the enormous scaffold shield did a good job of rendering next door’s satellite dish pretty much useless. So now we have to get a company to come and move it to keep the neighbours sweet. All in a days work for a property developer.
In other news, the other gang is close to finishing the refurb job. The two main bay windows were replaced today and look good and we’re down to skirting boards, architraves and the final bathroom reorg in the grand pecking order of the snag list.
Photos will follow when chance happens to make it light when I’m able to be at the house.In the meantime imagine some mechano connected by corrugated iron and that’s pretty much it.