Reinforced

Huge excitement first thing this morning as my lovely next-door neighbour sent me photos of her two children transfixed at the garden wall watching concrete being pumped into the footing trenches from a lorry in the car park behind my garden. The trenches for my rebuilding and for my neighbour's on the other side were dug three weeks ago and the footings should have been poured soon after but there's an unresolved party wall issue on the further side so eventually the builders decided to pour just mine before the clay desiccates even more than it already has in the hot weather. I'm ever so envious of the children having a ring-side seat at my construction site and their mum invited me to come over and join them but as it happened today was a site-meeting day so I was going to be there soon anyway.

But not before I had prepared thoroughly for it. I got up early this morning to make sure I had all my questions noted, that I understood the current toings and froings on the air source heat pump (ASHP) and that I was prepared to address calmly some of the communications problems we've been having.

I arrived in my neighbour's garden just in time to see the last of the concrete being pumped into the trenches and the reinforced steel being puddled in. Then I went back out to the street for a pre-meeting with the architect who clarified some of my uncertainties about what I'd thought were changes in building materials (they weren't) and in how the ASHP and its associated grant would work. I had a gift of an opportunity to talk about communications when I got out my copies of the plans and he told me they were out of date. I asked him to send me the most recent ones and also to copy me into everything - I'd rather read too much than too little - and he agreed.

Then we was allowed into my garden, and jumped over the wet concrete trenches to meet with the foreman further away from the house while the concrete workers, who'd been on site since 6am, took a break.

It was a really useful meeting. The architect and foreman checked on issues that had arisen, worked out what was coming next and what each had to do to prepare and they involved me in decisions that needed my input. We all then climbed a very steep ladder to the first floor to look at the steels supporting the chimney now that the breast has gone. 

In the process of putting them in they'd discovered that the party wall was only one brick thick and they asked me whether I had noise issues with next door. Indeed I do - I am not at all fond of their daughter's taste in music - so we agreed cost-effective sound insulation.

The architect and I told the foreman our plans to use engineering bricks for some of the brick shortfall and he explained why that would seriously slow down the build: they are slippery, they require regular cleaning as the wall is going up, they require a different sort of mortar (he told us the precse proportions of sand, cement and water for different brick types- he is a man of detail!) . We agreed a different solution. That was a great lead in to talking about the brick fiasco from my point of view and it turned out that everyone had a different piece of the jigsaw on that. We agreed how it might be able to be put right.

Towards the end of the meeting the owner of the building firm whizzed in on his bike and with all the expertise present we were able to decide on a window supplier, material and colour, and he gave me advice on good value tiles.

Including my 30-minute pre-meeting with the architect the whole thing took two-and-a-half hours, rather than our usual 50 minutes, but was incredibly useful.