Popping in to the house to see progress as we’d been told the electrics and plumbing was being worked on. This is when a few more issues started to come out of the woodwork.
Plumbing
We’re due to have an en suite bathroom in the loft room and there was always a question of how the plumbing would join the to be main bathroom at the back of the house and existing pipework for the water and soil pipe. On the drawings we had the toilet against the party wall towards the front but the builders pointed out that now there was an additional (unexpected) steel beam across the middle of the house (party wall to party wall), and the ceiling had been lowered so that it was now an integrated ceiling/loft floor, this meant that there was no space for a waste pipe under the floors as there was no gap.
This was resolved through a re-jiggling of the bathroom suite so that the toilet was against the internal wall in the middle of the house and meant the pipe dropped down the other side of the steel beam so that there was no blockage. Apparently this was not an issue for the water pipe given the size was much smaller. It also meant moving the bathroom door into the eaves somewhat given otherwise you would walk straight into the toilet. We’re yet to see whether this works adequately as the frame hasn’t yet been moved but let’s hope!
Electrics
There are cables everywhere, all across the ceilings, down the walls, popping out of walls. In the loft this is particularly obvious as there is nothing else to separate the walls and on the ceiling. It brings up tricky questions such as how to include a lightswitch in a room where there are mostly windows and very few wall spaces, especially ones that can be reached easily upon entering the room (nope we didn’t consider this earlier).
Then in the rest of the house, the wiring has been reviewed and adapted for the new additional sockets that we asked for. There were a number of (already double to be fair) sockets but these appeared to be randomly spaced out in the various rooms rather than actually thought about. And this takes a serious amount of time to decide what you want now and will likely want in the future. For example we realised we’d like a socket inside the cleaning cupboard in the kitchen to plug in the iron, charge any future automated floor cleaner etc. but at first we were only considering the sockets along the work surface of the kitchen for directly relevant kitchen units.
It did mean a surprising number of new channels and exposing of old channels and rerouting of piping. So now there are cables and holes all over the house and around both the original plaster, and across the new ceiling. Hope we didn’t miss any…