Finalising the specification

Seb, our architect, has spoken.

(As an aside, I still cannot really grasp who I have become.  My mental self-image struggles to adopt to me being someone who talks about having an architect, or gardener, or tennis court.  It seems like it must be happening to someone else and I’m just along for the ride.  There’s a Talking Heads song in there somewhere).

So anyway, Seb has spoken and suggested external insulation instead of internal insulation for the ground and first floors.  Which is good.  I suspect it might be slightly cheaper (thus justifying the cost of an architect), will reduce internal disruption and give us an excuse to redecorate the outside of the house.

And combined with that guidance and his more detailed spec for the rest of the insulation, we’re on the finishing straight for this stage of work.  All (all!  Ha!) that we need to do now is commission the builder and get on it.  The list will now be:

• the insulation


• changing the boiler


• changing the lights in the kitchen for LED downlighters, unfortunately this will entail changing the ceiling as the holes in the current ceiling are too big


• putting power sockets and most excitingly of all for me, data sockets into many of the rooms

That’s probably it for this phase of work, but I suspect that will be enough to trigger lots of dust, shouting, heart-tightening expense and a little bit of stress over the coming months.