Connecting the Drain

Recent comments on this blog have descended into the sewer so in that spirit here is a picture of said sewer now it is all connected. The building inspector will be round to look today, this should be the final inspection.

In case anybody is wondering, the green cable is the Virgin Media cable for the house next door.

Building Control Report

We asked the building inspector to visit the house yesterday so we could consult with them on some of the things we were planning on doing and making sure we had their support.

It is always a good idea to do this as apparently inspectors prefer to get involved at the beginning of a project and to be asked for their opinion. It saves them having lots of arguments subsequently.

The inspector will have been able to see anything he wanted as the house is completely stripped out now and this includes all but one of the ceilings and all of the downstairs floorboards. This may seem drastic but the dpc is being installed on Thursday and all exposed timber is being treated. As there is hardly an unexposed piece of wood in the building this will be fairly comprehensive process.

Overall the visit went as expected; here are some of the main points.

1. The use of steel straps to hold the upstairs corner walls together is acceptable and there is no need to rebuild the corner itself.
2. We will be expected to put thermal plaster boards onto the wall. In the case of the downstairs this will be over the special waterproof dpc render.
3. We will need to add insulation under the floor downstairs.
4. The proposed site of the bathroom and soil pipe is ok and there is no need to provide additional strengthening to any of the flooring.
5. We need to insulate the loft to the current standard.

We had not expected to add under floor insulation but have no problem doing so. It is anticipated that this will only add about £200.00 to the cost. All of the other insulation points were not in the original plan but that was only because I didn’t think of them or didn’t know about them. We had subsequently anticipated that building control would ask to add them and there is no surprise that they did.

All in all a very successful visit.

Another expense

I have just posted the forms off to building control along with a cheque for £235.00.

I knew they would want to be involved in inspecting the new bathroom but it appears that they are also concerned with the plastering and they will insist (where practical) that we increase the "thermal properties" of the house. There is not that much extra that can be done when the house has been built with 9 inch walls without making the rooms smaller! They may insist that we use thermal plasterboard, where practical, and whilst that will increase costs slightly it is right that they force people to consider the environment.

They will also insist on the level of insulation in the loft and so on. We would have done this properly anyway but I think it is a good thing that somebody monitors this.