The Chosen One!

We are going to go with APR, had a final chat with Richard who put some of our fears at bay and we signed up to the building work in his quote.

We are going to do all the building and electrics and plumbing. Not on the quote was the kitchen, tiling or bathrooms/kitchen and hard wood flooring. These can all be added later money permitting. Doors and minor alterations to create cupboards and bits and pieces on our hand out sheet were included so its not all bad news at least we get the carpentry we wanted including our galleried landing which should give us more light on the landing.

He will be starting around February time so this blog will be quiet until then......bye for now!

Last Orders

All the quotes are in except for Steve Gilbert, we are awaiting that hopefully on Wednesday and from there will make a final decision. APR have come out the cheapest and having spoken to Richard Fox he appears to be the builder I would be happiest coming in to do the work.

The quote came in low but some things were not added, despite that the final quote was still more than we can afford in one go so now its a case of deciding that parts of the construction are required and what parts are luxuries we can do without.

At the moment I am leaning towards leaving the porch untouched and leaving our crappy kitchen in one piece until we can start on that at a later date. The main things for me are a water tight property with good electrics, working boilder with decent plumbing and finally a shower so we can still live there after stage 1 is complete.

Richard is coming round tonight to discuss our options at this stage so if we get Steves quote on Wednesday we should be able to make a decision on our builder at long last.

October-November looks like the starting date.

The calm before the storm

We have only had 1 official quote back yet from Peter Ashcroft who came in higher than we were looking for which was a shame as we had several people recommend his high standards of work.

But fear not we have more irons in the fire and more to come back to us, Baxter & King have made rumblings closer to the figure we were looking at which included all the work on our 'wishlist' so I will be interested to see their final quote.

The other 3 are quiet although Richard from APR is awaiting the calcs before he will submit his final quote.

On the point of the cals, John Goodliffe has done them and they are winging there way to us as I type this so fingers crossed we can get them out to the final builders who are holding back waiting for the calcs to come through.

Things are starting to hot up. I will put up some photos on my Picasa to show you how the house looks before we put digger to concrete!