Friday
Nothing happened yesterday due to the weather, rained all morning and blowing a gale for the whole day. The news had loads of reports of trucks being blown over.
This morning and again there is a knock at the door. The weather looks a lot more promising with the wind having dropped and blue sky visible. The porch is being worked on today which means digging up the concrete driveway. My son (7) was excited when he saw the pneumatic drill, as much as he would have liked to stay and watch, he had to get to school.
So now the whole house is rattling to the sounds of the drill. It shouldn't last too long, once the concrete is up, it will be spade work. Meanwhile we have moved one of the cars onto the road and are using the back door to get into the house, walking through the dirt and mud dug up last week.
The architect contacted me by email on Wednesday. He and the builder wants a meeting on Saturday morning to discuss how to deal with the drain and manhole that appeared unexpectedly while digging up the back garden. Looks like we will have 3 options.
1 . Get a specialist company to drive piles around the sewer and bridge over that.
2 . Dig down and pour in concrete pads, then bridge over the manhole.
To my untrained mind, those two options appear very similar, the only difference is that for option 1, the piling company get the extra money, for option 2, the builders do the work and so get the extra, currently estimated at around £2,500
Option 3 is to change the shape of the extension to work around the problem, which will mean more work for the architect, and resubmitting the plans to the council for approval, which would cause even more delay.
We are going to have to be careful how we deal with this as the architect and builder has vested interest in the decision. If there is more cash flying around, they will want as much as possible flying towards them.