Kitchen and Bathroom

At last I can publish some photographs of the kitchen and bathroom looking almost finished. They need a good clean to remove all the dust but we are pretty much there. You cannot see any more of the bath in this picture as it is full of water having just been sealed.

I am very pleased with how the kitchen has turned out. The cupboards on the left hand side work really well but there is still plenty of room to openthe oven door and get access to cloakroom through the door at the end.

Energy Performance Certificates

I am now in possession of two Energy Performance Certificates for the same house. I don't suppose this has happened that often as there cannot be that many houses that have been bought and sold since the introduction of HIPs. I have never really bothered to look at these things in too much detail before but when you have two of them it affords you the opportunity to compare them.

It is difficult to know why the Government (or more particularly the EU) have decided to make these things compulsory. I am not sure they tell you much that you wouldn't already know and they do not impose any type of obligation on the home owner to actually improve things. If they were designed to persuade people to improve efficiency I think they may have failed in their mission.

The certificate measures two things and gives a rating. Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impact. As far as I can work out it gives two measurements for each rating, what you are now and what you could get to or Current and Potential as they describe it. I assume that the Potential rating is what you could do at a reasonable cost. Otherwise you could get a maximum rating by knocking the house down and rebuilding it in an environmentally friendly way. This is clearly not practical.

Anyway to get to the point when the house was first assessed (before we did anything). We achieved the following results.

And after all the work has been done we got this.

I am pleased we have improved (we certainly should have done with the amount spent) but why is there such a discrepancy in the potential figures. Surely a properties potential is it's potential and that should remain the same. The only recommendation we had was "to install low energy efficient light bulbs" which we didn't do as we had some old ones to use up. It rather makes a mockery of the system if the potential figures aren't the same.

The Other White House

The outside of the house has been painted now. It looks so much better.

The estate agent took a picture yesterday. Here is it on their website.

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.

A Quantity Surveyor

The kitchen floor was being installed today and Mrs APD has been told that she failed to order sufficient tiles. This has come as a surprise as we were told what quantity was required but there is little we can do about that now.

Tomorrow morning, Mrs APD is off to order another 4m2 of floor tiles (luckily Topps tiles has then in stock) so the kitchen and cloakroom can be finished off.

We just may be done by the weekend .... but there again.

A New Clock

As the original date for project completion has been and gone there seems little point in keeping the project clock up doing nothing.

I have found a new gadget that is counting up from completion to completion. I hope it doesn't get too high.

The Carpets are In

The carpets have been laid and fitted and they have made a huge difference to the look of the house. It feels warm an cosy now. The warmth is helped by the fact that the gas has been fully connected and we have had all of the radiators on. The house is so well insulated they had to switch them all off again after only 20 mins as the house got too hot!

I hadn't seen this new stair rail before. It looks better than it does in these photographs but it still looks pretty special. In the near future there is a danger this house may look like a home.

Here is an older picture of the outside of the house. There is some more painting to be done as you can see and then that is is another job completed. The agent is keen to get a proper picture. I did suggest we could use this one and then "PhotoShop" it but as we are hopeful of improved weather over the next couple of days it shouldn't be necessary.