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Week 6 The walls are up and the lintels on. It doesn't look as wonky as this in real-life! View from inside. Work has also started on the internal cavity wall for the garage. Now, if you have been following this blog closely, you may be thinking should there should be steels and not...

Unfortunately, the garage door needs to be replaced. The motor was wearing out and it sits where the new internal wall will be so needs to be resized and reinstalled with an upgraded safety cut-off. The cost of which is very similar to a new door. A temporary door is now in place to allow space...

Week 5 Progress has been hampered this week by heavy rain and a flu bug. But more of the wall has gone up, and some internal blockwork.. Note the openings for the French doors and the utility window (who would have thought of having a window there? Eh Kev!?). We are going to reuse the...

DPC Membrane and oversite in. The wall is going up! The bricks are a bit bright, but hopefully they will mellow in over time. The sample bricks were a good match to the existing so we shall wait and see. Worse case scenario, I can render and paint the extension to create a contrast.

Thanks. I found out from the planning department that it is known as a "catslide" roof: "A catslide roof is a roof that continues down below the main eaves height and allows you to have a greater depth of building without increasing your ridge height."

Bricks and blocks delivered today. The wonders of HIAB... There is a small lane that runs up the back of our house which were able to get the delivery lorry up, and reach over the fence with the HIAB.

Week 4 More concrete - to underpin the garage pillar. And proof that J made it out of the trench. But where's Kev....?

It's good to see the build finally move upwards instead of down. We have reached DPC level.

Work has also started inside the garage, on the foundations and pit for the lift shaft. There used to be steps there. This is the footprint of the lift...

Week 3 WTF !? (Where's The Footing !?) We knew there was a problem with the foundations from a trial pit we had excavated some years ago. But not expected to be quite as bad as this. So we dug down 1.4 m to firm ground so that the garage pillar can be underpinned with a concrete pour. J...

The new drains went in on Thursday. Not quite up to Building Regs ! But my thanks to the builders for keeping the sink and washing machine usable with the temporary drains. And then finished on Friday. They are raised out of the ground to DPC level so that the patio can be raised to door...

The footings for the rear extension went in today. The guys did a brilliant job and barrowed in nearly 6 cubic meters of concrete; 1 and 1/2 lorry loads; 12 tonnes, in 3 hours. Hard graft. At least that's how it looked from were I was sitting! The footings complete and the rain started...

Work has also started inside the garage to prepare the pad footings for the steelwork. The building inspector wanted pad foundations 1m x 1m x 1m deep. But the excavations actually uncovered very good footings already in place for the garage wall. We are going to see if we can use these as...

Week 2. The back corner of the existing house has been removed to make way for new footings. The building inspector wanted the footings deeper than the 1m already dug so that the footings sit on virgin clay. The footings at the far end are now 1.3 m deep. New foul water drainage will be...

And this is where the rear extension will sit..

And, so it begins..... Whoaa! Where's the patio gone? Easy boy, it will be put back, but a bit higher to make it easier for disabled access. It will be at DPC level, with a French drain all around.

I mentioned in a previous post that I discovered a significant error in the structural calculations. The sort of error that can lead to a house falling down, and that is no exaggeration. For some reason, just a gut feeling, I have always been uncomfortable with the supporting steelwork as...

I have received some good suggestions regarding how to tackle the problem of the pitched roof over the porch obscuring the picture window. So, thanks for that. I think my preferred solution is to put a recessed flat roof behind the pitch along the whole front of the main house. Like this...

Thanks Geoff for the comments. When I was originally working out the concept for this extension I investigated the approach you suggest, and other variations. Something along these lines: However, this evolved into the current arrangement. The reasons for this are: Because our house is on...

We have now moved from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to Builders Site Time (BST). By my calculations BST is approximately 2 weeks behind GMT. Basically the builders haven't started yet. The good news is they are actually finishing off another job, so hopefully the same rules will apply when it...