Tenders etc

So, what's been going on since my last post? As usual a lot of waiting on the architect!
During the summer they were working on the tender document to send out to builders and my, did it take some time. I know that their job is to get as much information in the document as possible in order for the quotes to be accurate but everything seemed to be incredibly slow.

Apparently it's standard for builders to need 4 weeks to get together their prices so the tenders were sent out to 4 builders and Will & I contacted 3 independently. After a couple of weeks one of the building companies (Hare Builders) requested an extra week - and we stupidly said "OK" so it went on an extra week. The prices were amazingly varied with the highest being Hare, £200k above the bottom two!!
 
During the process we contacted and met with 2 of the architect's builders and one who we contacted directly. For us, we knew that we needed to be able to get on with the contractor and hopefully get a good working relationship going with them, as we had realised by this point, that we would want deal directly with the builder during the build foreseeing problems if we kept the architect in control.

We made our decision on price, of course, but also on personality. It came down to two companies in the end and we chose the company who appear happy to deal direct with us, listen to us and work together with us. They are a very small company but really keen to build something a bit interesting and high spec and concentrate solely on our project. They've quoted a 32 week build which takes us to May next year.... if we're in then we will be SO chuffed!!

Code 3 it is..

Oh my, I'm bad at this blogging lark.  I've just got back on it because at last we have some stuff going on & taking a look at my last post realised that I never concluded that little chapter in the story of our build.
After much pestering by phone & email the council caved & gave us an answer. Yes, we can build to code 3 with the condition that we do everything we said we would in our letter of appeal. That's fine, we're happy!

Planning Department - A Law unto Themselves

One of our planning conditions was to achieve Code 4 of Sustainable Homes which I won't knock because the intentions are good but there's no differentiating between the solo builder and the developers, we are all treated the same.
Canterbury City Council have a policy of requiring Code 4 where other neighbouring councils ask for Code 3 and some councils don't ask for any. This all works on a points system divided into categories such as energy efficiency, water usage, materials, waste etc etc. We reach Code 4 on many of these areas but when totalled up just come short and in order for us to get all the points required we would have to spend a whole lot of money that we can't afford on a heat pump so we have applied to the council to vary the condition to allow us to build to Code 3.

The decision should have been made yesterday but can we get an answer from the council? For the last few weeks I have been trying to call the case officer for this application & all I ever get is a recorded message saying that she's on extended leave until April - it's now May! When I speak to anyone else at the council they tell me that she is now back at work but on light duties working only Wednesday & Friday mornings so I call every Wednesday & Friday morning & still only get the recorded message... aaaargh!!!!

We are now a day past decision date & are still none the wiser, how is it that they get away with treating people like this? It is so frustrating & inconsiderate. Phew that's better, I've got that off my chest!!

Elevations of Property

At last I've worked out how to change the format of the architect's images of the the proposed build to put on this blog so here they are .....

South Elevation at top facing the street and North Elevation at the bottom looking out over the back garden and the views to the sea

East and West Elevations

Cross Section showing levels

Planning Permission Granted!!

Check out the link Oh my this put a smile on our faces!!!  And we had no opposition from any local residents so we are very grateful to have such lovely future neighbours!

Click this link to see our conditions (we've been lucky :))

Planning Permission...GRANTED!!!

Updating

I know I've been very bad at keeping up this blog but this last few months have been very tedious....
We had the joy of getting our planning permission passed in January & I naively thought "hey hey here we go"!!! How wrong I was!

It would appear that we need numerous weeks for every kind of report to be done from surface rainwater run off through thermal calculations to our inside leg measurement before we can go anywhere with this thing. So, to start, we had a 8 hour meeting with our architect, yes 8 whole hours with no food and no break. My head was banging by the time I went home!! Friends have asked me, 'what did you talk about?'  and I have to say it's a very difficult question to answer but the honest answer is, every little detail of the build. We probably did an hour on drains..... (I found my mind wandering at this point), they want to know what taps we want, what precise tile we want in the bathroom & so on. This seems far too early to make decisions when all we have is a plot of earth with a shed on it but we're told they need to know all this to prepare the tender documents for the builders. I think my beloved did a good 30 minutes on how he wants the skirting boards to be....(head banging against the table...lol)  

Headaches with Southern Water's Drain

When we bought the plot we knew that a public sewer ran down the East side of the plot near to the boundary and knew that this would affect the build, however, we didn't realise how difficult it would be to talk to someone at Southern Water about it.  Infact, it's not possible to talk to anybody at Southern Water!! They use a consultancy called Atkins to deal with these sorts of things who were very vague and non committal.

Before we could take the plans any further we needed to know for definite how close we could build to the drain.  Baring in mind that we were told that they need 24 hour access to the drain for checks, maintenance etc it was stunning to find out that they didn't know for sure the diameter of of said drain and without that they couldn't give us an answer. The biggest indignity was that we would have to fork out £850 for them to send a camera down it to find the answer! If the drain was of a larger diameter we would only be able to build 4 metres from it unless we paid for a "build over" whereby they may let us build closer but on the condition we pay a further £850 at the end of the build to make sure that we hadn't damaged the drain & sign something to say we would be responsible for any damage to the drain at a later date.

Survey Drawing

You can see the line of the drain on the right of the plot with the man hole covers shown with circles.  Actually on the ground only 1 man hole cover was exposed.

We had no choice but to pay the fee for them to check the drain which probably took one man half an hour.  We were lucky though, the drain was found to not be such a major one and we were granted permission to build 3 metres from the drain. A result but a very expensive one!!