Timber kit day 3-4: in which things go pear shaped again ….

Posted on March 8, 2015 by nager

Heavy rain and strong winds were forecast again for Thursday and, as I sat in my Glasgow office, I looked out at the trees bending in the wind and heard the whistling through the telegraph wires, I thought of the guys up at Cuil Bay. The weather up there was worse – really horrific. Rosco and the team managed to get another layer of panels and roof beams up in a lull in the gales in the middle of the day, but things weren’t looking good.

I was feel a little miserable until I received a couple of photos from my neighbour showing how much they had managed to achieve. Wow. Look at this – and with that weather too!

On Friday things deteriorated further. The team heroically tried to get on the roof panels and managed four, but it was far too dangerous and they had to stop. The rain was torrential. They sent the crane home at 2pm as the wind picked up even further.

So we needed a crane for Monday. I already knew that the Oban company we had been using had the crane booked out all the following week, and the Fort William company was booked out the whole month building a school so I was at a bit of a loss. Dumbarton?

James from the company erecting the kit suggested I contact a company in Lochgilphead. They didn’t exist on the web, but he gave me ‘Harry the Crane’s’ number (as it came across from his contacts list).

Yes he could do it. (hooray!)

But could he be there at 8am?

‘That’s fine, we’ll just set off at 5am.

And No he couldn’t get directions to the plot by email.

‘I don’t ever go near a computer. Do you know how old I am?’

I checked the weather forecast. High winds all weekend and into Monday. A lull on Tuesday and then a full gale by Wednesday. Tuesday is the day! I confirmed the booking.

In the meantime my house is sitting utterly exposed to the elements and lacking a roof in torrential rain and high winds. Gusts of 99km/h forecast for Monday afternoon. I hope the house is still there when I get to the plot at 8am on Tuesday.

I NEED a crane

Posted on January 14, 2015 by nager

I’ve never needed a crane before and I don’t think I’ll ever need one again but I need one more than anything else just now.

With this project turning proper self-build with me as defacto project manager (or, as I tend to call it, chaos manger) I have needed to set my hand to such things as getting cranes and scaffolding. I thought this would be utterly straightforward. But I am gradually learning that almost nothing is.

I’ve got a date that the frame arrives. 23 February. 8am. It rolls off the factory floor and off on a huge lorry to Lochaber. I need to have a crane ready and waiting for it at 730am and a full setup of scaffolding built and then, over the next three-four days, the building goes up. Doors, windows and all.

I sought out some names to contact to get them booked in. ‘Be patient with scaffolding guys’ was the advice, ‘they’ve been hit in the head by too many bits of metal’….

Easy peasy. I’ve got two quotes coming from scaffolding companies (or at least I should have a second one coming but their email address is nowhere to be found on the web and the one he gave me over the phone doesn’t work).

Then I called the crane company but all their cranes are booked out for a school build until March. Eeeek. And where are there any other cranes? Oban. Well at least that’s not too far away. What if they are busy? That will be the central belt then. Oh.

I have taken to calling the crane folks on a daily basis -it’s joined the morning routine- kids up, twitter, breakfast with Radio 4, packed lunches, bike lights? Check. Helmet? Check. Ten layers of clothing? Check. Call the crane people? Check.

At least they have me on the radar. But they have only one crane driver and according to an unattributable source ‘a crane out of the Burrell collection’. But let me tell you, a crane out of the Burrell collection is better than no crane at all and I am going to keep on calling.

PostScript: this morning I called and it was all sorted out. A crane and a crane driver £50 an hour is mine from 730am on 23rd February. Phew.

And because I really am more comfortable with birds than machinery here’s a picture of a real crane

craneimage

How many engineers does one project really need?

Posted on January 12, 2015 by nager

I thought I just had one engineering firm on this project.

I know they are my engineers because they send me bills. And they send me reports and stuff. They came by at the very beginning and charged me loads of money to peer down some pits that Ronnie the local digger-driver had dug (They did more than that actually – they also made a lovely detailed contour map of the plot and told me about the water table and where the rock was)

It was really only this week that I discovered that there are actually three lots of engineers working in my project.

I need to write this blog if only to get my head around what happened on Friday.

We are in the final stages of getting a building warrant for the upper building (we’ve had the warrant for the foundations for ages and they are, in fact nearly built) and the SER certificate from the engineer was the final thing we needed. On Friday all the documents came through but there was an extra foundation wall or two in the diagram from what we are in the process of building. This, as you can imagine, is not a negligible difference.
Look here the foundation walls as we have them

…and here’s the Scotframe Diagram the builder was working to …. Identical

….and here’s the final ‘thank-goodness-it-wasn’t’ Engineer’s diagram that arrived on Friday

This probably should have created general panic from me but this came on one of my working days, which contain enough panic and chaos of their own. I’ve managed to compartmentalize life and work so one doesn’t bother the other too much during the 9-5pm, so, instead, I felt a rather distant unease, as if viewing the horror from a far-away planet.

In fact we’d been through something like this before – underneath that lovely screed in the part-finished foundations photo is a beautiful strip foundation. (But that’s another blog…)

It turned out there are engineers working for the timber kit company and still more engineers contracted by the timber kit company. And these engineers don’t seem to talk to our engineers.

Fortunately the architects flagged up the discrepancy to me and I pointed out that our architects could have been working from an earlier plan. With much difficulty we got hold of the various engineers and got things sorted. Or rather the archticted did, I don’t really know what happened. All I know is now that the engineers from the timber frame company sent back some annotated drawings and all is now well with the foundation plan as we have it. Well until the next thing goes wrong anyway.

Self-Build Insurance

Posted on January 12, 2015 by nager

I suppose it might have been an idea to get site insurance before we had the foundations more or less complete.

We’ve have third party liability insurance on the plot since the beginning (a extension from an existing policy that we have for a woodland – it’s miles away but it cost us no extra to have the plot on the policy) so I think I had that box ticked in my mind and thought no more about it.

It was only when I was trying to work through the box-ticking exercise , which is seeing if you qualify for an interest free loan to install renewables, that my mind was tweaked: having self-build insurance was one of the ways to prove that you were a self-builder to enable you to get the grant.

‘Oh. Self Build insurance? Ah. Better get some’

So I spent the morning in the phone to various companies. Mostly to sales folks
Them ‘What kind of heating will the house have”
Me ‘air source heat pump’
Them ‘can you explain?’ (I do my best but perhaps go too far into the idea of a reverse fridge and the principles of squeezing a gas to make it hotter and confuse her)
‘Well I’ve never come across that before’ she said at last.

Another hadn’t heard of SIPs (structured insulated panels and the kind of construction we are going for with the kit house). She had it down as ‘unconventional construction’ and said that they probably wouldn’t be able to insure us (later when I sent accompanying documentation she did send a quote)

But one company, BuildCare, put me straight through to a reassuringly expert sounding man rather than going straight into 20 minutes of asking my personal details. I am not sure whether it was his gruff North of Aberdeen accent but I imagined he was straight off a constitution site and seemed to understand my totally ameteurish descriptions of everything and translated it into builder-speak for the forms.

That all seemed so simple and now I have a couple of quotes (two people I was dealing with – seemingly from different companies – Zurich and SelfBuild appeared to work at the same company and worked at neighbouring desks) so much for looking about for the best price..

Now I have reams of forms to fill in and I seem to have to register as a developer. Some questions seem
A bit hard – my project manager? Eeeek. Contracts? Eeeeek eeek.

One of the questions I was asked by every insurance brokers on the phone comes into stark contrast ‘Will you be selling the house once you have built it?’ …. Eh? ‘Surely no one goes through this just so they can sell it?’

Going it alone

Posted on June 2, 2014 by nager

So now I am in charge of getting this house built. I suppose I always was, but I felt rather removed from the action. I can’t say I feel like that now.

We put out tenders in April to six builders, five were local and one a project manager based some distance from Cuil Bay. By the closing date we only had one quote back, which came from the distant project manager, was double the money we have and 30% higher than even the, already utterly unaffordable, estimate of the quantity surveyor. The architect suggested this was a quote from someone who didn’t so much want the work, as showing interest to keep their names on the architect’s list.

Over the past year, every estimate of costs we’ve had has been terrifyingly high, but each time this happened and I squeaked with alarm, the architects soothingly said ‘let’s wait until we get quotes in’. However now we were at the end of the process and we didn’t even have any quotes in.

I had been warned by my sawmill friend from Morven that the building market was buoyant and we might struggle to find builders with only sending the tender out in April. And he was right.

The other concern was that by going with the architect as project managers I was losing the control and the involvement in the build myself. The very reason for wanting to build a house in the first place. The architects, used to managing big social housing developments or other big schemes had a very paperwork and process-heavy system involving a QS who keeps tabs on costs at every stage and the architects to ensure every detail is delivered according to spec. I had been happy to take this route being completely new to this building thing and in the hope that the QS would help keep costs under control.

However there is the addition of costs doing it this way, that I had convinced myself would pay for itself in the end. The QS would be paid a percentage of the build costs.

It did fleetingly cross my mind that paying a QS a percentage of the build costs is rather a perverse incentive: If they do their job the very best in keeping the costs down they will get paid less than if they slack off and I have to pay more for the house. But I shrugged this off – we’re all professionals.

Anyway it wasn’t that which made me decide to go it alone, it was that we were getting absolutely nowhere with getting anyone to build my house. It looked like local builders had enough work to take the jobs they wanted and the extra hassel of dealing with QS and piles of paperwork and bills of quantities and forms to fill in when they usual deal directly with the client meant that I wasn’t going to get it built anytime soon.

This house needs a different approach and it looks like that approach is me….. Me with a busy job and a demanding family and with my naisant company calling ceilidhs to disco music.

This should be interesting.

Messing about in kayaks

Posted on May 30, 2013 by nager

“There is NOTHING… absolutely nothing… half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Thus spake Ratty in the wonderful first chapter of Wind in the Willows. And I can now confirm his assertion to be true, having spent a blissful morning drifting around the sea near Arisaig in a sea kayak. The sea was green, the sky was blue (in parts) and the islands of Eigg and Rum, and the Black Cullin of Skye made a heart-lifting backdrop.

My experience of messing about in boats has, save some punting while at university and the pedalos on lake Luzern, been almost entirely vicarious. My first experiences of boating were with Ratty on the river (picnic essential) and with Titty

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