Badger Towers

A few months ago I posted about the things I would like to be able to do.  The status of these things will now be updated, to make sure you’re paying attention.

We’re still living in Badger Towers 2, in the 2nd bedroom.  Our stuff is still piled high in the first bedroom while we sort out the rest of the house, but some of it is now in the loft and office. 

There were several things I wished I could do in this situation.

• Change clothes outside of the bathroom (we have no curtains)

This one is only partially resolved.  The thin temporary curtains we bought from habitat probably provide an erotic show to the neighbours when we have the lights on.

• Eat a meal in my own house (no kitchen or fridge)

We’ve started to eat in the house! The kitchen is mostly installed apart from the gas to the hob. Which means being a bit creative in cooking since nothing can be browned or fried or stir-fried.  We have a steamer though, so that helps.  Probably the biggest problem with eating in our house is the lack of chairs to sit on.

• See my dining room without a cement mixer in it

The dining room no longer has a cement mixer. Instead it has the table we got with the house, some dust sheets, a temporary kitchen work surface, decorating stuff, some spades, a fireplace, rubbish bags that missed the last skip. And no chairs.

• Let Steev out in the garden (no back door, no guarantee she’ll return)

Steev, our lovely adopted cat, not only has a catflap, but also has an RFID tag which the catflap reads.  She can come and go as she pleases, and she always comes back so far.  Unfortunately she’s not keen on operating the catflap door with her head because it needs a slight push to get through. We leave it propped open in the hope that one day we’ll be able to scan her and put the in/out status on Twitter.

• Unpack

We’ve unpacked gradually over the past 4 months, but only with an ad-hoc approach.  This has left stuff strewn across the first bedroom.  I still have a limited supply of pants.

• Have plumbing which doesn’t DRIP

The plumbing doesn’t drip.  The pipes clonk a bit though.

• Not to have to scoop Steev’s poop out of a litter tray in our bedroom

Done. There’s a pile of builder’s sand in the back garden which is better than any litter tray she’s ever used. The builders left it there because it was full of poo.

• Use the internet at speeds faster than 17kbps (avg speed of mobile broadband in our house)

Internet plumbed in and working. The CAT-5 cabling through the house installed by Martin, the world’s slowest electrician (but thorough and meticulous and tidy) work very well supplying 20Mbps to each room from the little tiny patch panel in the kitchen cupboard. I call this a win.

• Not have to listen to Kings of Leon/Empire State of Mind/Plan B/Take That or Flashdance every two hours (Builder FM)

Fixed! I actually kept putting the radio on Jack FM (70s-80s) every day, although I soon got sick of that.

• Keep the windows open to watch TV (makeshift aerial poking through)

Still unresolved. The aerial in the wall doesn’t seem to work, but the only way I have of testing this is by using my MythTV server and scanning for channels since our TV is still in storage.

I still feel a bit like we’re camping with running water and no shitting in a bucket, so it was good preparation for this year’s festival.  Living minimally is quite achievable, but I wish I had 10 minutes to sit down and write things like this.

Wed 12th May

Virgin came to install the broadband on Monday. Talk about ultra-efficient. It was fixed up, drilled, fitted and working in about an hour.  We tested it by unplugging the boiler from its extension lead daisy-chain.  Now you can have hot water or Internet in our house, but not at the same time.  So our plan to work from home at speeds faster than a 3G trickle seemed to be all go, until we discovered they have a shortage of wifi routers and would send one later.  Undeterred, Mrsbadger strung a 10m ethernet cable through the house at roughly garotting level.  It reaches the chair, but not the desk.  All my coupling connectors are packed deep in endless boxes marked “Misc Computer Stuff”.

Meanwhile, our structural engineer (a nice Chinese chap with a small business in Bristol) specced a steel for our kitchen and sent us unfathomable plans in PDF, which we just gave to the builder.  He’s ordered us a steel for £430 +VAT.  It had the added complication of having to support the puny joists, a slate floor and a roll-top cast-iron bath full of water (and a person).

We ordered a back door. French doors made in Yorkshire from Scandinavian timber, installed by an Albanian.

The 3rd bedroom was in a sorry state, so we had it skimmed. What a transformation.  Anton & his missus plastered and skimmed the place in a day and a bit to a really good finish, and tidied up afterwards. He keeps calling me Benny. I kind of like it. Mister Benny.

Oh and we have some £9 curtains from Habitat over our windows, so we don’t get woken up at 5am. Actually we do still get woken up when Steev the cat decides to do a log and not bury it properly.

Life is interesting living in one room, but we really need somewhere to sit soon.

We’re living in Badger Towers 2, in the 2nd bedroom, our stuff is all piled high in the first bedroom while we sort out the rest of the house.  There are several things I wish I could do in this situation.

• Change clothes outside of the bathroom (we have no curtains)
• Eat a meal in my own house (no kitchen or fridge)
• See my dining room without a cement mixer in it
• Let Steev out in the garden (no back door, no guarantee she’ll return)
• Unpack
• Have plumbing which doesn’t DRIP
• Not to have to scoop Steev’s poop out of a litter tray in our bedroom
• Use the internet at speeds faster than 17kbps (avg speed of mobile broadband in our house)
• Not have to listen to Kings of Leon/Empire State of Mind/Plan B/Take That or Flashdance every two hours (Builder FM)
• Keep the windows open to watch TV (makeshift aerial poking through)

This is like camping, only with running water, no shitting in a bucket and not being woken up by the bastard early riser family in the next tent who play football against it at 7am.

Friday 16th April

We bought a fireplace from Oxford Salvage http://www.oxfordsalvage.co.uk/. The one we had spotted turned out to have the wrong grate, so we chose one that fitted better. Also, we’re going to replace the slip tiles with something nicer.

Delivery soon.

There are many things that seem like a good idea when legislation is passed or rules are made.  But at the sharp end of these are a bunch of people who have a job to do.  It gets harder for a skilled person to get paid to do something he’s good at without tripping over some rule or regulation.

So far in the process of renovating a house I’ve had to deal with:

• Understanding permitted development and its borderline interpretations (the hard way)
• Understanding planning submission formats
• Environment Agency flood report requirements
• Oxford City Council’s guidelines on light blocking and availability
• Understanding building control and regulations, and making the correct application without costing a thousand pounds
• Party Wall Agreement etc Act 1996
• Correct disposal of lead paint
• Correct disposal of plasterboard
• Correct disposal of solvents and wood treatment
• Certification of electricals (17th Edition)
• Fire regulations for loft conversions (changed late 2008)
• Parking permits and dispensations
• SAP Reports for energy efficiency
• Environmental impact statements

All I’m doing is getting a 1.2 metre side extension added to a terraced house and some renovations at the same time, but if you followed all the rules they lay out for you I suspect you’d never want to start. 

I was brought up to follow the rules and be a good citizen and do the right thing, but every time I take this approach I get stung for another cost, or fret that I fall under a particular regulation and end up hesitating.  When I say “oh sod it” and just get it done things fall into place and work.

As overall client and half-arsed project manager I understand I should have to deal with lots of different issues, but I just don’t see how a builder who’s supposed to be on-site trying to get things knocked down, removed, measured, rebuilt and finished has any time to find out any of this stuff. 

It’s probably quite easy to sit in your office like a cardinal writing edicts about something you heard from someone at a conference who stands to gain financially from you regulating it without really thinking of the consequences for the people doing it.  It makes every step a more costly, complex job than it would have been before. It means people like me who try to do The Right Thing end up suffering, whilst the people who bodge it and scarper often get away with it. Thank god we didn’t have any asbestos.

When the CBI or some other lobbying group grunt out another press release about “£11 million lost each day to improperly laced boots” or something, they fail to account for the “£20 million lost each day to boot lacing paperwork, red tape, phoning around, getting British Standard boot lace quotes, paying boot lace designers, architects, building control officers, surveyors, structural engineers, recyclers, disposers, councils etc.” 

It’s a bit like bribery. Only it’s legal and it doesn’t make life much easier.

Saturday 27th March

Clutching rubble sacks and a tarpaulin from Wickes Mrs Badger and I resume our hectic schedule at the customarily hectic 2pm.  We shovel the plasterboard into the sacks, each of which is hard enough to carry on its own without being in a 1 tonne bag. Schoolboy error averted.

I look up at the lath and see white fuzz and some black bits. Shit. Dry rot. If there’s one thing I didn’t want to find in this house it’s dry rot. The ground floor joists and boards looked good so we thought we’d escaped it. Seems not.  Dry rot is a fungus which creeps along wood, gaps, conduit etc. and is apparently very bad news. [Top DIY background information supplied by Badger Industries Inc.]

My crowbar comes out again and I start yanking down all the lath, bringing more of the 35+ year old detritus with me, this time onto the thoughtfully laid out tarpaulin supplied by Mrs Badger.  Doesn’t take long to clear this job up, that’s for sure.  I have another urge to BURN THINGS but without much clearance in the garden I can’t really set light to all this lath, which is much like kindling. Shame.

Some bits of the Oxford Journal newspaper come down with the plaster and I take a breather to read it in the garden. The date is 1975. I was one year old then which means I’m only 4 years away from being 40. I remember my parents being 40 and joking about “life begins at 40”. My sister Mia, who died in January this year, didn’t make it past 43. She doesn’t get older now. Soon I’ll overtake her. Time passes quickly, but we’re so busy making plans for the future that we miss the point.  You need to enjoy this bit, here, now. After a few tears I recall the words of Ferris Bueller:

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it”

So far this house has refused to give up anything datable prior to 1975. It gives a great sense of perspective to know that it was at least 60 years old when this “old” stuff was left. The paint is probably the oldest thing here apart from the structure of the building and floorboards, yet so many lives have passed through, all with their brilliant ideas about how to renovate and improve it. We’re just the 2010 caretakers. We’d better do a good job.

Pub? Yeah, ok.

Found today:

Dry Rot (see above)

Woodworm in the joists

Oxford Journal from 1975

Friday 26th March

I have a helper!  Herbie, Action Maori Executive, joins me to get some jobs done by cycling from Kidlington and arriving a full 40 minutes early.  Just as we’re getting started Martin the electrician calls inviting us to Full English Friday.  Herb’s on a roll and I can’t leave him on his own to stuff my face with bacon. This means we end up working from 10-4 without a break.  Hunger is psychological anyway, yes?

Me and Mrs Badger deliberate on the phone over the removal of the kitchen ceiling.  If we don’t remove it we’ll never know the state of the bathroom joists.  It would make the electrician and plumber’s jobs much easier, and perhaps save some upstairs floorboards in the process.  Problem is, plasterboard is now a restricted disposal material or something and must be disposed of separately at a cost. Furthermore it can’t be left outside before disposal because when it gets wet it doubles in weight. Marvellous.

I go for a trip to the recycling centre (what we used to call “the tip” in the 80s) to throw away the ivy from my half-finished job last week and go to ask the men at the trade waste weighbridge if I can dispose of my own plasterboard, in my own car, for free.  Before I have a chance to speak one of them reports Abingdon Windows for dumping plasterboard hidden under rubble to avoid paying.  Ha, busted! They tell me a third of a tonne is the minimum weight and will cost me £64.  Damn. 

RecyclingMan: “How much does it weigh?”

Me: “What, my ceiling? Er…  Err…”

RecyclingMan: “Roughly”

Me: “Er, I… I’ve never been asked that before”

Back at Badger Towers 2, armed with a new, cheaper quote from Bucks Recycling Skip Hire (http://www.bucksrecycling.co.uk/) we prise the plasterboard off the ceiling with Martin the Electrician’s suggested technique of using A SPADE as a lever. Works a treat and great slabs of plasterboard start falling from the ceiling.  It turns out we have two layers of plasterboard and then the lath (wooden sticks) from the old lath & plaster ceiling from years ago. John was going to tack another layer of plasterboard onto the ceiling, which would have made me Ben “Four Ceilings” Ward. A lucky escape. 

The first two layers come down with a satisfying crash and billowing dust. It looks like 9/11 in our kitchen. I have plaster in my ears, down my shirt and in my pockets. My goggles steam up instantly so I’m just working by touch, propping up large slabs of plasterboard as they hinge on paper and funnel 100 years of plaster and bathroom detritus onto my head.

What are we going to carry it in? I dash (in Friday rush hour traffic) to Jewson and buy a 1 tonne bag.  “Do you want a bag for that?” says the bloke behind the counter. They’re taking the piss again aren’t they?

As we merrily fill the 1 tonne bag with plasterboard a thought occurs to me.  I can’t lift a tonne to the front of the house. Gah, this builder thing is harder than it looks.  I decide to buy rubble sacks tomorrow and we leave the 1 tonne (hopefully) of ceiling on the floor.

Found today:

Millions of conkers

Lots of sweetie wrappers:

A dinosaur colouring picture & some pencils:

Some boot, a knob and a bead:

Thursday 25th March

After my wood chucking yesterday I find my back hurts and I’m having trouble moving.  You don’t get this problem working on the internet.

The underfloor heating pipes are going down, clipped into place by the plumbers.  I quickly wrap the time capsule in a plastic bag and stick it under the floor before the heating pipes go over.  Once the pipes are in there’ll be a screed poured over the top and it’ll be sealed in forever (or until the heating breaks down). People of the future who decide underfloor heating is a daft idea will rip up the floor and marvel at our piece of blank paper, since I suspect budget laser printouts will probably not last the distance.

The kitchen is still lined with ugly wood panelling. The manifold can’t be fitted to the wall because there’s no plaster behind these panels, so a makeshift bit of wood provides a fixing.  We still need three more manifold outlets for Kitchen 1 & 2 and Hallway circuits.  They will be arriving ‘by Tuesday’, organised by a man in Northern Ireland from an Italian firm.  I think “by Tuesday” probably means ‘eventually’.

The kitchen is full of crap, cement mixers, bricks, the appliances we were hoping to save and a brand new boiler.  Everything is in a mess. But the good news is the electrical wiring is starting to go in upstairs. This pleases me.  Moving the carpet to access the floorboards upstairs we find a green foam underlay which has turned to dust.  Carpet sucks.  The floorboards are in great condition though and Mrs Badger has plans for polishing them up.

I take the car to the garage to get a new exhaust. While I’m waiting I sit having fish & chips by Hinksey Lake while my contractors do my bidding. I quite enjoy it.  I should become a manager.

Just as things are winding down for the day, Gary the Plumber slips on the doorstep and half falls through the insulation layer in the hallway.  He’s not impressed, but Mark the Plumber thinks this is the funniest thing he’s seen all week and is still chuckling as they rev their transit off into the sunset.

Found today:

Pants

Technically not found, but placed today: A time capsule.

Wednesday 24th March

[excuse the hiatus, I might post some highlights from last week]

Wednesday.  The day when the plumbers come to fit the under-floor heating.  The electrician is moving on to upstairs first fix, which includes ground floor lighting.  He’s re-wired all of downstairs and the only two plugs working are by the electricity meter.  These are essential to the operation of his power tools and the kettle.

All of a sudden the man turns up to collect the pile of detritus outside, which includes all the formica and chipboard you could ever want. We frantically empty the ‘fitted’ wardrobes from upstairs and hoik it all into the lorry, keeping anything I can BURN. Because operating the internet doesn’t require much heavy lifting I do something bad to my back which slows me down to the speed of a pensioner for the rest of the day.

Whilst this is happening the under-floor heating delivery arrives with hundreds of metres of very thick 17mm pipe, the manifold and the paraphenalia.  We hurriedly unpack this and look for the designs and instructions from our family-friend supplier. What we find is three scrappy pages of A4, with spirals allegedly showing the layout of the pipes and a few numbers, but no titles anywhere.  It looks exactly like the kind of homework you dash off on the bus when you have to hand it in first lesson.  2/10 see me.

We discuss the positioning of the pipes and discover from John that he only planned to notch the joists on one side, hence the doubling up on one side of each room.  We knew they were too shallow to notch without beefing up, but something got lost in the translation.  In addition to this, the coils are far longer than 50m.  They’re getting on for 100m which means the bits toward the end will be cold.  Mrs Badger decides to redesign it with two coils per room and some kind of splitter so we don’t need extra valves.

The plumbers finally arrive after their emergency callout (Full English?) and we relate the UFH plans to them carefully by babbling at them from three directions at once.  In the middle of all this the neighbour with the boundary dispute decides this is a good time to get a solicitor’s letter out from 1988 requesting someone recognises the boundary next time the house is sold or the fence is repaired. And also, by the way, I just got round to making a public comment on your planning application.  Thanks.

So at this point a visit from the Jehova’s Witnesses probably would be less welcome than usual. They’re sneaky though. The first rule of Jehova’s Witnesses is you don’t talk about Jehova’s Witnesses.  “We’re having a meeting in the area and we’d love you to come along.” Mrs Badger being the polite new neighbour was all friendly and pleasant with the new friendly visitors, if slightly impatient. Eventually they drop the J-bomb - “Jesus died for our sins” and it’s game over for them.

After some grumbling the plumbers tell us we can’t fit “splitters” or “T-connectors” to make two coils from one valve because the flow won’t be even and they might even “cross-circulate”. Fair point, they’re the experts.  They send us off into plumbing supply land (Horspath Industrial Estate) to find an extra three valves for the end of our manifold. When we get there we discover the system we have is unbranded, nobody sells under-floor heating in anything but kits and it’s all at least two weeks before it would arrive anyway. Bollocks.

Fed up of the sideways knowing looks between plumbing suppliers behind their trade counters, we call the original supplier and ask him to send more valves. 

The rest of the day consists of me making trips back to the same plumbing suppliers, this time without the wife. They somehow treat me differently when she’s not there, but I still get the “we could tell you anything mate and you’d believe it” looks.

I had prepared a time capsule for putting under the floor.  Today conspired against me.

Found today:

Never get things supplied by favour because you can’t shout at them when it doesn’t work.

Under-floor-heating only comes in complete kits for a reason

We have nice floorboards upstairs.

Monday 15th March (contd)

We finally make it to the house in the afternoon. There’s so little skirting board to save we decide to replace most of it downstairs.

Then we attack the windows with the Nitro-Mors, this time properly masked and gloved.  The windows are in a right state, and a mixture of stripper, sanding, scraping and sandpaper seems to make little progress.

Building inspectors are arranged, and re-arranged. Wednesday is now box-ticking day. We choose a brick that matches the back wall so Ted can build our back wall.

Martin our electrician friend comes round to give a quote and we spend a long time going over what we need, adding plugs and ideas everywhere.

Found today: Can’t remember