Not everything always goes right!
I always seem to make mistakes because I rush things but usually I am able to recover without too many problems! To show that things do not always go as you expect here are some of my mistakes or problems in building my extension.
Whoops! I cut the haunches to deep - they should have been flush the pencil line not the rebate shown at the back.
I should have completed just one joint and checked everything was OK before cutting the other three - but I didn't!
Luckily, I had plenty of length available so I could just cut the joint back and correct the mistake!
I was nearly finished routing the rebates on the window frame and bang, My expensive router bit broke in half.
This happened just after smoke came out of my trusty 20 year old router and it ground to a halt.
Taking it apart, I discovered that a coil in the RFI (radio frequency interference) filter had burnt out. I reconnected it and I was up and away again.
I had to throw away 6 short pieces of lead came on this one.
I used two lengths of the 16mm edge lead came in the centre instead of the narrower 10mm lead. This necessitated a restart. I really swore at this
one.
I managed to break the handle of my pickaxe trying to lift the flagstones.
I won't show you the bruises I got when I fell over onto a pile of brick debris!
The Building Control Surveyor rang back to say that he would be happy if I used the other piece of steel mesh as well - as long it was keying
into the wall.
So this is what I have done.
Whoops, on the first joist - I cut the notch in the wrong place!
Halfway along the roof the wall indents by 130mm. This means that the joists are longer and ride by around 60mm in that depth. However, I've placed the wall plate at the same height which is wrong.
I need to raise the wall plate here by 60mm and replace the joists. What a pain!
Whoops! While tiling the roof I dropped a piece of wood and broke one of the kitchen windows...
Hindsight is a marvellous thing! Maybe I should have installed the
insulation from the outside before I tiled. I could have just laid the sheets of insulation across the joists. The I could have marked the distance between the joists onto the insulation
quite easily.
Doing it from the inside has proved to be quite difficult. The insulation has no 'give' at all in it so the insulation has to be precisely cut or just will not fit.
This is very difficult to do, so I ended up up resorting to using a sharp carving knife to trim the insulation as I fitted each piece. Not easy!
The result is not as neat as I would like but as it will not be seen I'm won't lose too much sleep worrying about it.
Well, this is a bit of a screw up! I realised that could not connect the drainage from the washing machine and the shower to the same point
as water from the machine will bubble up through the shower plug hole!
I need to connect them separately to the soil pipe.
Wednesday, 18th July: Well what a disaster! I was refilling the central heating system after painting the cladding and found that water
was spraying everywhere!
Yes, I had made the classic mistake of putting a nail through my nice new copper piping.
After a lot of panicking, I managed to cut out the damaged piece of pipe and and use a compression joint to reconnect the pipe. Panic over!
Tuesday, 21st August: Well, my biggest cock up throughout the whole of the extension
build happened today.
I went to pick up my double glazing units and found them to be the wrong size.
I had written down 609mm rather than 909mm. I've no idea how this happened as I checked all three windows and wrote the sizes down on a piece of paper at the time.
What a pain!
Oh yes, I've ordered some more. This mess cost me 100...
Sunday, 26th August: Another cock up!
I carefully cut the tiles for the inspection cover and then discovered I had not aligned the tile edges in the horizontal axis - doh!