Below Belief

For those of you interested in following the gory details and the (assumed) disasters to come, you can see the day to day minutiae of the plan to refurbish our house on Grosvenor Gardens here.

At this stage of the project (before anything has happened) it’s time to think about major alternatives and question some of the obvious choices one makes… for example we’d like to make the house energy efficient…
(from the Energy Saving Trust)

There are some grants and subsidies for doing good energy-saving stuff with your home.
So we should go for lots of insulation (between the floors and in the roof)
We should wrap our hotwater tank carefully

Could we consider a sustainable heat pump or will that be too expensive?
Should we go for underfloor heating so we don’t have to use radiators throughout?
How should we arrange our plumbing to get the best water pressure and hot water?
We should definitely renovate the sash windows
Should we have long-drop toilets with compost outflow (joke)
Lots of choices.

It seems like everything in business currently has “2.0″ tacked to the end of it. It reminds me of 2000 when every project going had an “e-” prefix or @ carelessly replacing every “a” in it’s name. It smells of bandwagons and buzzwords.
It’s funny because the web has some genuinely novel things going on. Web 2.0, as has been written many times elsewhere is about bringing “community” and simple publishing (the web becomes bi-directional) to the absolute masses, becoming, like facebook has, as ubiquitous as email virtually overnight. But like blogging before it, once the concept reaches the boardroom with some over-eager executive touting it’s commerical potential, the sheer fragility of it is clear. Community works when it is out in the wilds of the internet, unguided by commerical principles but falls apart quickly like a quantum-measurement when it is controlled by an advertising force.
The rush to 2.0 everything is like dot-com boom two. And like that boom there will be some winners and there will be many losers.

I want one of these…
An individual picture made by photographing the fluorescing pieces of your own DNA as they swim in a gel petri dish. Unique art, life from art.
More here

So I had a recommended builder and two of his “Polish crew” in the house this morning, measuring up so they can give me a quote. He’s already brought his plumber, electrician and plasterer in to see the “state” of the place and these big fellas were his “building crew” – the heavy lifters for the loft extension and the rear extension. There are no stepladders in the house so when it came to making an inspection of the loft, they reverted to human gymnastics to get up into the hatch. Big fella 1 acted as anchor and braced himself in the hallway whilst Big fella 2 clambered up the man-mountain and hauled himself through the loft hatch. Once up there and armed with a lamp on a cable, he was able to do the necessary surveying in the dust of the attic. The process was hilarious to watch; swear words in Polish are just as obvious as their English counterparts…
Anyway, builders in general. What is it with this industry? We’re about to engage some builders in a pretty big project – this is a big purchase – probably the biggest purchase above the house itself we’ve ever made – so we’d like a contract in place to make sure we’re protected. And I would have thought the whole “quote” process was quite a simple, well practiced one but it’s proving to be so variable. Do we really have to choose a builder or building firm on face-merits and work out all the details later? Basically gamble?
Sensibility would suggest that putting together a list, room by room of the work which needs doing, perhaps with measurements and details might be a sensible thing (in the end, I’ve done this). And then to iterate on this list a couple of times till you get it right. Then it should be simple to estimate each piece of work… Sensible, if you’re a builder so you can build in contingency and understand what is being done and what skills you’ll need. Sensible for the client so they know exactly what is and isn’t included and so that there are no hidden surprises.
The best quote we’ve had so far has some level of detail but not nearly enough to know exactly what we’ll end up with. Will repairing some of the windows rather than replacing them knock substantial amount off, will they be able to fit a television socket at the same time as the rewiring to make it easier? What’s the difference in cost for tiling versus wooden floors in the downstairs hallway? Will they sand back all the woodwork?
Why can no one supply a decent list of “works to be done” and put our minds at rest? They’d win the deal.

S, this is Clue 1:

Murray Sherrington, mid-meal. Taken by Mark at our barbeque last weekend.
As Rhian said, on the surface he looks like Sherrington, but if you look closer there’s a deeper Barnes.
More photos here.

We are now the proud owners of a house (well, shed). A shed which needs months of work to make it habitable but one which we will one day be very proud of.
Amazingly (and in contrast to my previous experience) buying this house was pretty much painfree – this was mostly because we knew up front that buying it would be like opening our wallets and emptying the contents every day forever – so we put caution to the wind and worried not about tiny details. Actually it’s structurally sound – it just needs a lot of “internal modernisation” – and since we plan to do everything to it – it’s current state was unimportant.
So now we’re holding talent shows for builders – so we can pick the right man for the job. The list of work is long: rewiring, replumbing, new boiler, new central heating, plastering throughout, wood stripping throughout, new windows, loft extension, kitchen extension, new patio doors, new bathroom, new kitchen, new flooring, new tiles, refurbishment of fireplaces etc etc
This is the kind of thing we’re hoping to achieve within:

Walking into the place on Thursday we felt a mixture of relief, intrepidation and joy – there was a bit of jumping around on the dirty carpets and peering into old drawers, still containing a few trinkets from their previous, now-dead owner – but mostly we went around bashing things with a hammer to see if there were “period features” behind. We found two original fireplaces, in the front and rear bedrooms, long since boarded up with cheap 1960s wallpaper on hardboard – and other places where the fireplace had been completely removed.
It’s going to be an adventure.