Hi Guys – What a weekend we’ve had! Some really good stuff, and some really bad stuff.
Keith – thanks for looking out for me Mate, please feel free to do that anytime you see fit, two heads are always better than one.
Re: your point, I have a Mate who works on the ground work side of a national cable t.v. company, he has kindly offered to source my ducting from his stocks. It’s green heavy duty plastic tubing specifically designed to carry low voltage cables under the ground, and meets all necessary regulations.
Now for the good and bad news – here comes the update, enjoy!
Well as you can see, I definitely over-ordered on the Celotex. I also over-specified as well since this is 100mm, and the regs’ only require 75mm, so this is all being returned.
There’s a story to this shot. On Friday evening we all met up for a drink, and Phil bet Span that he wouldn’t be able to get that manhole out in one piece.
Dumb bet – it was out in 15 minutes!
Then it was straight on to the chill-out area soakaway.
Top soil backfilled behind the retaining wall, and the central ground level brought up.
Span loads me up with shingle.
Mind those patio doors Dude!
Then we’re all in such good spirits, (lovely weather, job going well etc), we decide to swap places!
Soakaway backfilled, and the adaptor to take the chill-out area downpipe is in its final position.
The front of the studio gets the backfill treatment.
Then on to relocating the storm water manhole.
I get to rod it through.
If you recall, there used to be a dwarf leylandi above that drain, there was so much debris in there, that this pipe has been blocked for years. The most boring pic of the thread, yet vitally important that this pipe is clear.
Pete gets on with prepping up the base for the new manhole in its new location.
Everything gets connected up.
Voila, all in position!
And working perfectly.
Time for yet more backfill on the new manhole.
I had to move those bloody blocks again.
This is the current patio area at the rear of the studio, as you can see it’s around two brick courses too high and so…………..yup, had to come out.
Yes, he did manage to get both machines around the back of the house!
However, not without nerves of steel. There’s safety stickers all over these machines, one of which (on this one) warns that the vehicle must not navigate inclines greater than 20 degrees – unladen, btw, I’ll let you Guys judge for yourselves.
Very little room to manoeuvre round here.
However, we now have the side and rear of the studio all the same level.
And yet more crap to get rid of!
We’ve never really been keen on the look of this, and of course it doesn’t match the retaining wall.
Guess what? You guessed it!
Introducing Span’s little brother – Jamie, who popped round to see how we were getting on.
The last bit of patio to go.
Now we have a real mountain on our drive – time for grab no 6 and probably 7 as well!
This area to the left of the studio front will, (believe it or not), become a central single width set of steps, with two gradual ramps with handrails either side. This is to allow for disabled access, and heavy amps / drum hardware cases etc, to be wheeled round to the back entrance where of course the live room will be.
At this point, we were all feeling really good. Pete, Span and me had had a great day Saturday, Span and I had a laugh talking over old times and cracking on for most of Sunday. The weather was with us again so we decided we’d do another hour and rip out the last remaining area of patio when – disaster struck.
I was driving another load in the dumper ready to tip on the pile when I looked to my right and saw an irate neighbour at the end of my drive with a look to flatten an army.
"What the bloody hell’s all this noise? It’s Sunday, we don’t need this aggravation, I’m not happy, I can’t even open my windows" etc, blah blah.
Obviously this put me in a very different mood immediately. Span said "what’s up Mate?" I told him and he said. “Ah don’t worry about it – She’s just being bloody awkward.”
Well I did worry – so I stopped both machines, sent Span home, called it a day and went over and apologised. I thought that was enough, but just to be on the safe side, Monday morning I wrote a short letter explaining our predicament with the appalling weather, budget and timescale etc, copied it to every neighbour in the close, (13 to be precise), and thought no more of it.
Well, no more at least until I had a visit from my local Environmental Heath Officer at 4.30pm Mon afternoon.
“Are you the owner of the property Sir?”
I thought, "here we go!"
“you’re building a Recording Studio aren’t you?”
Oh bollocks!
Well as it turns out he was actually a nice enough bloke and fully understood my predicament, in fact, he even told me he’d had a go at voice overs and was well aware of the way studios were insulated for isolation and absorption, so I guess that was something. However, he was of course duty bound to explain that now complaints had been received, the position was as follows:
Keith – I’m sure you’ll want to excerpt this one!
The permitted hours of (so called noisy) construction work in a residential area, are:
8.00am – 6.00pm Mon to Fri
8.00am – 1.00pm Sat
Nothing on Sun.
What this means in reality my friends, is that my whole project has come to a grinding halt! I’ve had to ‘off-hire’ the machines because there’s no point in them being sat idle, far worse still, is that last night I had to tell Span that he and Pete were now ‘off the job’ since they’re only able to help for a couple of hours in the evenings, and at the weekends. All this aggro because of one petty neighbour, and we’ve only actually worked for part of just two Sundays since the project began!
Everyone involved is gutted, this sequence of events has totally screwed me, and needless to say, driven a temporary rift into a 34 year old friendship. We
were doing so well.
I’ll update more when I’ve figured out the best way to get around this, but as I’m sure you can appreciate, I now have the annoying task of finding builders that I don’t know as well, don’t trust as much, and who certainly won’t be working as hard. Furthermore, you can bet your arse they’ll be more expensive.
Yours thoroughly ‘pissed offly’
Lou.
