It has been some time since my last post…
Last post we had the boat in the water, so now you’re expecting a ‘heres it with an engine and me out fishing’ photo…. nah that’d be too simple.
A new boat engine is expensive, about £100 per 1hp, thats quite an expense. As much as I wish it was my largest priority it is not, so I’ve been withholding spending the money while I do some other fun stuff. Cue… massive blog story.
Priorities:-
- Convert the garage attic into home office
- Move Daughter to current study
- Build a shed for the boat/man cave
- Boat Engine
- Turn garage into a home gym
We lived in a house in Lisburn, we detested the area, flags, bigotry and people you generally wouldn’t to live near, we loved the area near our kids school and the people who lived out in the countryside were nice people, I might not agree with their religious views but their morals and ethics are generally positive, sound and they were the sort of people I’d be happy letting my kids associate with.. Its a lot easier to ignore kids talking about religion from a well meaning god squad than listening to kids become little bigots and scumbags… so we moved house.. and that was great. It also meant I could have a massive old shed to work on the boat.
There was one snag, if we had only two kids we’d have been perfect.. one study, two kids rooms and a parents bedroom. But we had three kids, so two had to share.. turns out girls hate sharing. Luckily when we got the survey done before we learned that the space above the garage was huge and just asking to be converted into an officelike area.
Its a 36m2 room that would have been a perfect place to have a home office, somewhat separate from the rest of the house and gave the ability to just close the door at 5pm and not interact with work stuff after that point… If in the future we don’t work from home then it would make a pretty awesome cinema room and a third living room area. Sounds a bit pretentious having three of them, but when you have three kids, you are a gamer yourself and your wife isn’t, its rare that we’re all 5 in the same room at the same time consuming the same entertainment.
I had long planned since buying the house that it would be a good investment in the house to add another large area and perhaps re-do some of the garage. When my parents house sold I thought it was a good time to start working on the project rather than just buying a guitar, amp and probably an arcade machine. I’d read that it would help to increase the value by quite some bit, of little concern to me, I’d long ago decided the only way I’m leaving this place is if they carry me out in a box.. but it makes the loan to value of the mortgage a bit more favourable and would make the mortgage payments lower in time.
I was lucky to have had a few builders pass through doing other work and I always asked their opinions, none too committal on the prices and costs but most were vaguely confident it wouldn’t be too expensive since the roof beams were already in place.
So I set about doing a bunch of prep work, much like with working in IT, I don’t much like handing over the reigns to architects who are parachuted in to a project, I’d rather design the place to the regulations, design through ‘planning’ and tweak the overall design to add in some bells and whistles while keeping things ‘just so’.
First thing was to get the original plans for the house, but the house was designed in 1993 so I was only able to get the building control supplied drawings from the council, was interesting to see just how they had planned the house and what actually happened, I thought it was shoddy building but turns out we did the exact same thing while retaining the core elements of the design.
I quickly learned, through the ‘your home and planning permission’ that I could get away without planning permission provided I didnt go too nuts, the layout of our house on the original plans had front and rear elevations listed.. which were the important ones.. its a lot harder to have veluxes on side elevations.. What appears like a side elevations are not quite in our case. Which is handy as development has taken place behind our house that wasn’t the case in original specs.
Another item that both disappointed me and surprised me was that the roof beams in the attic were not strong enough to support the floor, luckily I got quickly familiar with Span tables and worked out that I would be able to get away with a single steel beam in the middle of the garage, however there was a window at the back of the garage, so a T structure would be required.. what surprised me was just how cheap steel is. a 6M beam, and a 2M T-top joined, bolted, primed, shot blasted and fully prepared for heat treatment paint was £400. I had expected £1000’s.
After planning, came the building regs.. its not just as simple as do whatever you want, it has to meet some design standards that are there to protect life and property.. for example you need to have a means of fire escape, you have very specific regulations for what format stairs can be. Any stair case must have a ‘landing’ area at the bottom and cant just be met by a door. There are other regs around materials and energy efficiency that are more technical than I’m capable of doing justice to, but generally the regulations are there to ensure that you, the ignorant, arent getting screwed.. so they’re a good thing. I spent a lot of time downloading specific booklets and other interesting facts from an open file share on their website which helped me immeasurably, shame they don’t publish them.
Next came the graph paper… for the month of December 2022 I tried to plan out regulation meeting designs and put a bit of imagineering into what I actually wanted. I consulted with my wife occasionally but generally spent a lot of time being head down in file paper. On occasion of a builders visit I explained my plans to him and he laughed at me for my staircase location.. ‘sure your garage is such a mess you’d never find the stairs’ Which i have to agree was quite true.. I’d based the stair case design on another house I’d loved when we were house hunting… so another change was needed.
I had a problem that you must have at least 2m of headroom above every step, but we had two huge steel beams that were holding up the roof and were at about 1.29m above the proposed floor.. so the stairs had to come ‘into’ the office, altering my design.
So I wanted my stairs near the existing utility room door, they had to go up at a certain height, they had to have clearance and i didnt want them dividing the room too much into two spaces. Working with the regs in mind I was able to work out the pitch, rising, going, number of steps and work out that a turn a few stairs in would be the right thing to do.
About this time we got a new family member, meet Astro, frequently known a ‘Arse-tro’
It was about this time my wife came up with the singularly most genius Idea ever had by anyone, better than the wheel, sliced bread and buying cars online so you don’t haggle. Her idea was that instead of trying to come up with a minimal landing to put a door in, why not just brick up one of the garage ports and make a boot room/landing. Simple, genius. She never has to think again, and she’ll still be the smartest person in our house.
With that sheer genius move in mind, the downstairs of the garage changed into a bit of a boot room, stairs, and storage areas.
From where I was able to construct my initial ideas on graph paper… to scale and with the regs in mind.. well most of them.
Having battled with this one for a month, It was time to get an actual architect involved.. I know I’m not good enough for submitting to building control.
Found a good local architect and at this point it was a slow process, getting drawings, measurements, then the architect put us in contact with a structural engineer who figured out the best way to overcome the various load constraints of the beams and cutting off some of the floor joists.
Plans were submitted to building control, whose turnaround time was 4 weeks. At 5mins to go on the 4wk SLA they rejected the plans. Because we didnt state the required load the bolts on the balcony should withstand.
Seems a lot of building control work is being anally retentive about silly things, the way to overcome it is to copy/paste the regulations into the planning docs. It was resubmitted in such a way to keep building control happy and eventually passed.
Next we chose to work with a builder who had performed the work on our Kitchen and Utility room, always did a very high quality of work and knew enough guys that it would be the case that i didnt need to find other suppliers. The only exception was that I needed to find someone to supply and fit air conditioning. I should probably comment on some of my design choices.
Design choices/requirements
The heating system in my house has wires and pipes buried under the floor, the heating clock has three zones, downstairs, upstairs and hot water. The return journey from the hot water tank somehow heats up radiators in the rest of the house… so I cannot leave my hot water ‘on’ constantly. Until recently you had to have the downstairs zone ‘on’ before upstairs would work.
Thats 14 downstairs radiators before you can heat the ones upstairs. We had 6 radiators in the upstairs, when the hot water went upstairs, 50% of it went straight into the Bathroom radiator and then back to the boiler. Next it went to the bathroom towel radiator where 50% went back downstairs.. Out to the landing where 50% went left to the landing and main bedroom, 50% went right to the kids rooms.
It’ll come as no surprise that the radiators in the kids rooms never got above 40’c when the radiator in the utility room hit 70’c.
We resolved this problem in a number of ways, firstly, removed one bathroom radiator, choked down the others and then disconnected the upstairs from the main house supply and took a feed from the hot-water feed, just before the electro-mechanical valve, meaning the upstairs could independently fire the boiler and ignore 14 other radiators.. way more efficient. Oh yeah, replacing an 18 year old oil boiler with a 40kw natural gas boiler and an 8m pump really helped too. Instead of waiting an hour and a half, the radiators would warm up in 10mins.
I did not want to be in the situation where I was having to heat 14 radiators to heat the office. My options where to re-do the heating system or do something different… given the room faces south and the house is like an oven in the summer, I figured HVAC would be a better solution… heating and cooling to give a good working environment all year round.
Another design choice was windows.
We inherited a huge bedroom for our daughters, but the window cant have been bigger than a 27″ Monitor. The design for this stems from the original deisgn of the house, that area was supposed to be a store room… later expanded to be a huge bedroom.. right decision but dumb not to put in lots of light.
We had a ‘huge’ (we thought) window put into the room and the bedroom changed into a really nice happy light and airy space.
When I had the opportunity to replace a tiny window in our upstairs landing with a 1mx1m window, with solar opening and a solar blind, it was amazing, again transforming the house.
With this I had no intention of skimping on light. The Velux marketing suggests 15% of floor area should be windows/glass. at its broadest the room was 6mx6m, so 36×0.15 or 5.4m2 of window. challenge accepted….
I picked UK04 windows, four of them and then decided that since I had a tiny CK02 window left over from the work on the main house i’d stick it in there too… so I added that to the design, which gave us about 5m2 of light… of course the balcony doors add nicely.. and the fact the floor is smaller than 36m2.
When the building work started, the builder pointed out that we’d be cutting almost all of the roof rafters, he suggested windows a little more portrait – UK06. I agreed and then also decided to just get a new CK02 window rather than replacing it with a 20 year old window… The place is going to be light!
OK, where were we.. about April ’23.
By this stage, I’d had everyone tell me the windows were too big, but I stuck with it, then I had to move most of my stuff out of the garage, the boat got a lot of fishing gear, the current study looks like B&Q with so much stuff piled on shelves and the hallway has at least 4 fishboxes piled high with tools, drills, bits and bobs and a lot of junk everywhere.
Construction started with removal of the garage door and some wood stuff being done.
Slowly but surely I had to pull together an electric plan, 6 pages of it.. Our electrician made some changes to the plan, just pointing out subtly that I’d better stick to IAM work. In fact, generally speaking I was quite happy that the builders saw the ‘designs as a guideline rather than a rule. We benefited hugely from their experience and knowledge.
The only ‘odd’ request I had made was to ahve a negative wire going to the light switches so i could plug in smart kit. Everything else was ripped out from that section of the house and redone to a perfect spec. Thankfully we’d got a new circuit board/trip switch set installed earlier in the year to accommodate more circuits.
So First fix electrical was one. Our builder suggested we carry on our stud wall right to the far wall, near the boiler which would create a boiler room, easier fire stop and keep the cold barrier in a better place.. which was a fantastic plan, it meant we could use the room as a drying room or lockable tool room while still keeping the garage floor clean for gym stuff.
At this point, I think its probably easier to move to a visual reference rather than keep typing.
To 1st June 2023
Only significant change is the new windows necessitated raising the ceiling level and that meant my projector screen would need to go on the wall. Otherwise full steam ahead.
June
Things were a little slower in June, but it was amazing to watch the week that the plasterers were on site, part hard labour, part magic, part art… all looking great.
So thats the current progress, more to come..