(This isn’t strictly a Cooper Acres-related post, but it has useful information in it, and it’s building-related…so it’s here)
Yesterday our new kitchen was signed-off and paid-for in full. The builders, who had become an integral part of our waking weekday hours, have all gone. They’ve moved on to their next project, and we’ve got our lives back. And a spanking new kitchen that used to be an old, unused garage.
It’ll take time for everything to settle down and get back to normal, but we’ve already learned a lot from the experience, some of which I’d like to offer up as advice to any would-be home improvers thinking of getting builders/trades in for a substantial project.
Firstly, and fundamentally, timing is everything. We started discussing the feasibility of a garage conversion back in spring 2010. We sat down with the contractor we chose for the conversion — Garage 2 Living — in July 2010. Ideas and quotes went back and forth over the following months, and we went from having a basic garage -> room-ready-for-an-IKEA-kitchen conversion to a more complex (and more expensive) garage -> fully-fitted kitchen conversion. Any regrets? None. The final result was far better than we’d planned with our IKEA idea (we’d been sold on the IKEA VÄRDE kitchen initially, liking the raw and rustic look), but what we have instead is far better. Final photos will follow when the tiling is installed. The lesson learned here was to start the planning phase when the weather was lousy and cold — and therefore a quiet time for outdoor trade work — and have it start in good/clement weather. Simple. Now we know.
The start date of November 7th was confirmed, and the conversion began. In the early days, I kept a daily garage conversion photo diary on Flickr. This was useful in many ways. Initially, it just served as a ‘hey, look at us’ set of photos to keep folks updated as to what was actually happening outside. As the project continued, I found myself referring to photos to find what had been done, what was planned, where wires/lights/sockets were going, plus sundry other jobs. At one point I had to find out the brand/model of halogen downlighters that the electrician had installed so I could locate suitable low-wattage replacements (documented elsewhere — How not to throw money down the sink with halogen lights — for your nerdy reading pleasure).
November turned into December, and Christmas arrived. As is customary for the UK, tools were downed and merriment was had. Christmas kills. OK, that maybe sounds a wee bit harsh, but the run-up to Christmas and the bit before New Year is dead time. Thankfully, we were watertight and able to use the kitchen fully. Unfortunately, it also snowed. Rather a lot. I know — snowing in winter — who’d‘a thunk it. And it was very cold for days and days. This meant the external rendering was delayed, so December turned into January. Bad weather stops play. I vaguely remember talking to one of the contractors on the first or second day, back in early/mid November, about when we’d be ‘in’, and Christmas seemed a long way off. Back in November, there were trades arriving at 8am sharp every weekday, like clockwork. As November turned into December, this turned into 830am, and then 9am — not for any tardy reason, it was just dark. Builders don’t work well in the dark. Astronomers do, but brickies don’t. At the other end of the day, a 4pm finish in November was quite normal and totally fine. In December, by 330pm, it was almost dark outside. Shorter days means a later start and earlier finish. From a labour point of view, we paid a set amount overall, so it made no odds to us whether a job took a day or two days, or sometimes longer. A day rate for a builder or labourer is the same regardless of the weather, I’m told. Perhaps the time of year and day length was factored into the overall price, and we paid a bit more for the anticipated longer timeframe — truth is, I don’t know, it’s just speculation. It’s fair to say that if the weather is nicer — let’s say, spring or early summer — then the working environment is more comfortable, and more can be done in a day. Too hot, and builders melt in the heat. Too cold, and they freeze. Well, maybe proper hardcore builders don’t wilt or shiver, but you get the idea.
Things that help with builder morale in cold weather: tea, coffee and biscuits. Standard issue tea and coffee for most trades seems to be milk and two sugars. And don’t skimp on the sugar. Having been a good host to our builder-y chums, I think I made upwards of 350 cups of coffee and tea over the build duration. Expect to have the kettle on a lot if it’s cold outside. Have a fast-boiling kettle ready. Have extra water on hand. When there’s a hose pipe connected to the kitchen sink that’s being used to fill a cement mixer outside, it’s not graceful having to race upstairs to fill a kettle from the bath. Having some old 2 litre water bottles pre-filled with tap water for 8am was actually very useful.
Most builder drinks were with-sugar, at the last count we got through more than 4kg of sugar, purely on drinks. I know how each builder likes their drinks. I used the same mug for each person where possible. Barry The Gaffer got the big University of Birmingham mug with the chip in the lip (tea, white, no sugar), Jason The Plasterer/Builder got a promotional black Rightmove mug (coffee, white, two sugars — though he developed a fondness for hot chocolate when I offered one up), Jake The Apprentice had a white Cotswold Wildlife Park mug (tea, white, two sugars), and any short-term trades got what they were given. They all seemed genuinely appreciative of hot drinks — from my point of view, it was something I could easily do, and it was helpful, so I did it. If you look after your builders, they’ll look after you. I was initially doing this as a common courtesy, but it makes a lot of sense when there are people working on the fabric of your house. I got rather obsessed by the whole hot drink-making experience, if we’re being totally truthful. I made so many hot drinks that it killed our electric kettle. It was a bit poorly beforehand, but the repeated filling and boiling (and the lid breaking) meant it was time for it to die gracefully.
Builders/trades generally aren’t eco-friendly or have awareness of energy use. There will undoubtedly be exceptions to this, but we had a proper chalk-and-cheese situation with us and them. We do what we can to reduce the energy use of this house. As we work, live and sleep in it, we’re around 24/7 and therefore have higher resource usage: while normal people go to work in an office and have a nicely heated car to get there and back, we have a 1960s end-terrace house with insulation that could really do with improving (something we’re doing this year). When the building work went from mostly outside to mostly inside, there was a lot more builder coming-and-going through the front door and newly-created connecting door from hallway to new kitchen. Bear in mind that it’s cold, and the heating may have been on — it wasn’t uncommon to find the front door open. I used to gently close it when I walked by without attracting too much attention, I made a conscious decision to not be that guy and start moaning about the price of home heating before flailing my arms wildly and yelling at a brickie.
When they were working inside, there were two or three 400W halogen floodlights on for hours at a time. The electrician fitted standard-issue 50W halogen spots into the ceiling. There was no heating in the room until the week before Christmas, so a 4kW fan heater was on for long periods. All of this together sent my electric use through sky-high: on a normal work day, we use less than 10kWh of electricity a day, and that includes two computers, servers, an electric cooker, and various other bits and pieces. During the building work, this doubled. On one day we chomped through 43kWh – which nearly made me cry. Now, I totally understand that builders need tools, and power tools are a world apart from low-wattage lightbulbs, but a bit more awareness of the surroundings would reap major benefits. Not leaving 1200W of floodlight on when they all go for a late morning fast-food refill would be a start, for example.
Expect noise, and lots of it. Radios, power tools, singing, trucks of stuff arriving, it all adds up. To be absolutely fair, I normally have a very quiet workday, save for loud music when I need to hit my stride, so this was more pronounced than it would be for other people. Oh, and Jason The Plasterer sang better than Jake The Apprentice — I suspect singing is something that improves with experience and exposure to local commercial radio. That said, we were exposed to local commercial radio for a long time — daily, for ~6hr a day — and my singing hasn’t improved any, so this might be a fallacy. If quiet is important to you, whether it’s your work life, sense of place, or just needed for sanity, get some good headphones or ear defenders. Unless you need to be asked questions about the build as it goes on, in which case you might as well resign yourself to being interrupted regularly and get used to it. It took me about two weeks and I learned the hard way. The balance between knocking out most of the background noise and not knocking out the irregular yells of ‘PETE!’ is a fine one, and one that I did not find.
There will be far more building materials involved than you can possibly imagine. Honestly, it’s mind-blowing the amount of stuff we had on the front drive. Even with an admittedly generously-sized drive (~42m²), it was soon filled with blocks, bricks, sand, a skip, wood, and things that I didn’t even recognise. With wet trade building work, there’s always waste. Builders cannot tell the difference between a recycling bin and a rubbish bin, so keep the recycling bin hidden if you don’t want it filled with landfill. Yes, I’m quite anal about the way I process my waste. I like recycling, and the local council likes us to recycle. So much so that we have differently colour-ed bins — I know, how very ’90s — for recycling (green, obviously) and landfill (grey/black). Bits of junk that were easy to dispose of were put in a bin, usually the closest. In addition, there’s a noticeable accumulation of grime on the front drive, now. Before it was just there, now it’s menacing and in need of a pressure wash. It’s dirty work, this building lark — far messier than I’d anticipated. It has, however, made me far more aware of what’s in the front drive, and what it looks like. I look at other driveways and houses now, I get all judgemental and snarky if someone hasn’t looked after their roof and it’s got birds living in it. I do this because I used to be that guy…and this whole building caboodle has been an experience I will never forget.
Was the outcome — a shiny kitchen and ~18m² of floor space added to the house — worth the upheaval and mess? Definitely. Life-changing. In a good way. Would I do it again, the whole house renovation/extension thing? Absolutely not.
