Loft Conversion Week 1: Scaffolding and Plumbing
It's Friday 11th May at 8.15am, my house is in melt down as I try to rush the kids for school - I've got a guitar for one little person and another little person adamant they are not going to school today... I've also got my builder and his chief scaffolder on the doorstep and a really long truck full of tubes outside the house all set to start!
This is it, the first actual real step in our loft conversion, the scaffolding goes up today!
We're having a tin hat on the top of our scaffolding, it might be summer but this is British summer and having two June babies, I'm all to familiar with how much rain we can get so I know how key the hat will be!
The scaffolding is a long and complicated job that takes about a week, the people putting it together work hard usually for about 5 hours a day although some days were much less.
I always assumed that the rest of the time they were removing the scaffolding from another completed job but actually the limitations is on how much they can load onto the trucks each day from their storage yard.
It's an incredibly noisy job and the bangs and clatters certainly made me jump a number of times, there were a few moments where I was sure someone or a tube was going to crash through our flat roofed kitchen but all was fine.
It's such a crucial part, making sure the scaffolding is correctly put together to keep the builders safe whilst they do their job, I think it's a role often taken for granted - a lot more went into it than I previously thought would.
Week 1 also saw the plumber start, we had such a friendly happy plumber who helped me chose the best location for our new boiler and clearly explained issues I was sure about.
We decided to switch from a hot water tank and boiler to a new combi boiler so we could get rid of the water tanks and also because we had a combi boiler in our previous home and simply preferred the way it worked.
One of the things we hadn't anticipated though was that unfortunately all of our pipes needed replacing as some were aluminium which could burst under the pressure of the new boiler.
This meant our first extra expense and also all of our floors needed ripping up to replace the pipes. So much more chaos and mess than I had prepared myself for, things have been moved and all over the house my daughter's furniture had been moved into two other rooms, some of my things and bedside table had been moved to the other side of the room and not a single bed was left clear - all are mountains of stuff!
The flooring in our living room and hallway will need to be replaced which is a job I hadn't planned for especially with the living room being a recently completed project.
Our plumber was excellent and did a great job fitting in the new boiler and all the new pipe work - it all looks like such a complicated puzzle to me.
The new boiler has meant I got to set up my first exciting new gadget for this project - my Nest thermostat, I researched the Hive, Honeywell eco smart and the Nest but for me it was all about the extras you can get with Nest and I preferred the way it looked - I'm so happy with it already. My plumber fitted the smart link part to the boiler and then I did the rest myself as Nest is very intuitive to set up and straight forward to use, I can't wait to play with "works with nest" gadgets!
We also discovered a 1984 newspaper under the old flooring!
One thing I didn't know until right at the end of the scaffolding work was that it stops your Sky dish from working! I was told by Sky that I can pay £65 to have it moved onto a scaffold tube and another £65 to move it back to the chimney after the work is completed but there was quite a wait for an engineer and at the moment we are happy enough to use the app on our gadgets to watch anything, although that might change especially with a World Cup about to start!
For our house, the Scaffolding was completed on Tuesday 22nd May with plastic sheet wrapping being the final step.
Ready for our builder to start on Thursday for week 2. We have been lucky with our builder, he's proud of his work and has shown us his recent projects, offered great advice and has such a friendly approach we've built up trust quickly. It's great to see he is as enthusiastic and excited by our project as we are.
Emma
Little House Lovely
This is it, the first actual real step in our loft conversion, the scaffolding goes up today!
We're having a tin hat on the top of our scaffolding, it might be summer but this is British summer and having two June babies, I'm all to familiar with how much rain we can get so I know how key the hat will be!
The scaffolding is a long and complicated job that takes about a week, the people putting it together work hard usually for about 5 hours a day although some days were much less.
I always assumed that the rest of the time they were removing the scaffolding from another completed job but actually the limitations is on how much they can load onto the trucks each day from their storage yard.
It's an incredibly noisy job and the bangs and clatters certainly made me jump a number of times, there were a few moments where I was sure someone or a tube was going to crash through our flat roofed kitchen but all was fine.
It's such a crucial part, making sure the scaffolding is correctly put together to keep the builders safe whilst they do their job, I think it's a role often taken for granted - a lot more went into it than I previously thought would.
Week 1 also saw the plumber start, we had such a friendly happy plumber who helped me chose the best location for our new boiler and clearly explained issues I was sure about.
We decided to switch from a hot water tank and boiler to a new combi boiler so we could get rid of the water tanks and also because we had a combi boiler in our previous home and simply preferred the way it worked.
One of the things we hadn't anticipated though was that unfortunately all of our pipes needed replacing as some were aluminium which could burst under the pressure of the new boiler.
This meant our first extra expense and also all of our floors needed ripping up to replace the pipes. So much more chaos and mess than I had prepared myself for, things have been moved and all over the house my daughter's furniture had been moved into two other rooms, some of my things and bedside table had been moved to the other side of the room and not a single bed was left clear - all are mountains of stuff!
The flooring in our living room and hallway will need to be replaced which is a job I hadn't planned for especially with the living room being a recently completed project.
Our plumber was excellent and did a great job fitting in the new boiler and all the new pipe work - it all looks like such a complicated puzzle to me.
The new boiler has meant I got to set up my first exciting new gadget for this project - my Nest thermostat, I researched the Hive, Honeywell eco smart and the Nest but for me it was all about the extras you can get with Nest and I preferred the way it looked - I'm so happy with it already. My plumber fitted the smart link part to the boiler and then I did the rest myself as Nest is very intuitive to set up and straight forward to use, I can't wait to play with "works with nest" gadgets!
We also discovered a 1984 newspaper under the old flooring!
One thing I didn't know until right at the end of the scaffolding work was that it stops your Sky dish from working! I was told by Sky that I can pay £65 to have it moved onto a scaffold tube and another £65 to move it back to the chimney after the work is completed but there was quite a wait for an engineer and at the moment we are happy enough to use the app on our gadgets to watch anything, although that might change especially with a World Cup about to start!
For our house, the Scaffolding was completed on Tuesday 22nd May with plastic sheet wrapping being the final step.
Ready for our builder to start on Thursday for week 2. We have been lucky with our builder, he's proud of his work and has shown us his recent projects, offered great advice and has such a friendly approach we've built up trust quickly. It's great to see he is as enthusiastic and excited by our project as we are.
Emma
Little House Lovely
We’ve got Nest thermostat and the nest smoke alarm - great products!
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