Conundrums

A long site meeting. So long that it was interrupted by my neighbours' site meeting before we reconvened, but there is a lot happening on my house and I went with a long list of questions. One of which was how they would fit the staircase's 90 degree dog-leg into the 80 degree angle between the side and partition walls. This has been exercising the builders for the last fortnight at least and increasingly me too. It suddenly occurred to me last night that their solution might be to slice a bit off the staircase and make the top steps narrower and I wanted to prevent that. But before I'd even asked the question the builder said he was planning to set the staircase back from the partition wall and fill the gap with wood. Perfect. When I told him that I had come up with exactly that as a possible solution we shared a wide grin.

The other decisions weren't quite so quick but we discussed and agreed on everything that needs deciding for the next few days' work and the builders patiently explained the new bathroom plan - adjusted to take account of larger duct pipes than originally designed around - that I hadn't understood. (Actually, I still don't - doubtless more on that over the next few days.)

To my surprise the architect asked the builders to do an airtightness test. The house needs to be airtight for the ventilation system to work efficiently but when we were trimming the budget months ago the EnerPHit airtightness tests (usually three during a build), the official EnerPHit inspections and the certification were cut. So the builder resisted. They have been working diligently to meet the standards but without the formalities and we had a long discussion about where the house was almost certainly airtight (all the new work) and where it might not be (the old party walls).

As well as being beyond my budget, doing a test now would throw out the tight schedule - the plasterers have already had to be rebooked for next week after the freezing weather delayed earlier jobs. So I agreed that there will not be an airtightness test.


Edit two days later: the builders have decided to render the party walls at their own expense this coming weekend so that when the plasterboard installer starts on Monday they can be confident that the walls will be airtight. That is supremely conscientious.
And it dawned on me that just possibly the architect has lost interest in my house because it will not be EnerPHit certificated. I have no idea whether that was a feather they wanted in their cap.