Stone Love, or how to choose your kitchen worktop

Apologies for the silence - a post seems to have gone missing somewhere. Kitchen worktop choice is fairly wide and the options seem to be as follows. Laminate - cheap but is there a place for it in a splendid new-build?? At the other end of the price scale Corian - moulded sexily to fit and include the sink etc but apparently not terribly heat resistant, and very expensive. Various cheaper Corian-alikes. Granite, somewhere in the middle price-wise. Quartz which is a tough resin composite. We thought we'd go for Quartz which very stainproof (red wine may be a particular issue in our household, although not much actually gets away!) But then.... we went and looked at the local granite suppliers and both fell head over heels in love with Ivory Fantasy granite. It has a large-scale swirly grain and is more an artwork than a worktop. Now we just have to choose the kitchen cabinet colours to match!

It looks like this...

Specification Creep

In our case it means we're creeping oh-so-slowly towards a specification... How on earth do you decide how much (how little!) you need to spend on eg a thermostatic shower unit? £300? £500? £1000? I can find the same size shower screen for anything from £96 to £576. Why on earth does a 900x300x600mm unit which is just a box of MDF without even a top surface appear to cost £504? And where on earth do you go to get impartial advice? I am ploughing my way round the various suppliers and showrooms seeing whether any of the advice overlaps. Today is lay-out-the-utility-room day. But the view from the window this morning reminds me why we're doing it:

PP and various other Ps

We have submitted our Planning application! So the clock is now ticking for a decision within two months. Next P is Progress: now we're full steam ahead to specify everything after getting the build schedules from Peter the Architect on Friday. I think we've decided on our woodburner (anyone out there use a Morso?) We fought our way round Grand Designs Live Birmingham yesterday with a particular focus on the bi-fold / lift & slide door manufacturers - although we surprised various kitchen suppliers and designers by clambering all over their stands with our measuring tape looking for elements that are the same size as our plans and seeing what they look like in the flesh... Today we've been considering the bathrooms and here for your amusement is the final P of this post.

Project timeline

Those who have not built a house may not be familiar with the various steps along the way. First you need a concept design for the house - our earlier posts explain how we went about that. If you live in a conservation area, the next stage is usually a thing known as a pre-app which gives you informal pre-planning- application advice. It's a very cut-down planning application - you supply a sketch of the house, idea of floorplan etc, list the likely materials, and in return the planners hawk it round the various departments for their initial view. It's not mandatory but a useful way of finding what the planners, tree conservation team, highways etc think of your approach. Our pre-app came back a couple of weeks ago with all parties broadly happy, however they'd missed the fact that we want to take down the huge ash tree smack in the middle of the plot (see the earliest pics). There ensued a couple of nervous weeks while we chased them up on this and the tree-man cogitated over its loss, but they've come back saying they are happy so long as we plant some sort of replacement. So while Planning are not beholden to this, their initial view is that they are ok with this approach. On this basis we've gone to the next stage which is to submit the full planning application and it went in on Friday. Pics will follow. We have been sorting out detail of the internal plans and the next step is for us specify all the materials and fittings - everything from bricks to electrical points to bathtub, doorhandles, etc etc and this week we're meeting our architect to get schedules and start on this. Meanwhile he gets on with producing the building drawings. The planning application is due to be decided in 2 months which takes us to the start of December. Once we get approval, - which hopefully will be within that timescale but who knows? - then we can put the drawings out for tender. It's over Christmas so may take a while to get quotes in, analyse them, wrangle with the suppliers/revise the design if it's over cost (big worry!) and choose our builder. Only then can we start demolition - February at the absolute earliest. Oh and of course before we swing that wrecking ball, we need to move ourselves back out of the bungalow and into... who can say?! Then it's around a 9 month build, so we should be in the new house late next year. ...we will doubtless look back at this post at some point and see what happened really ;)

Change of address!

You would think that by 2014 addresses would be fairly well laid down. But you'd be wrong to think that - and we are a case in point. The 'official' address that goes with our postcode is The Village - which takes in all of the village street except the little bit north of our road which is North Lane. However, our road is clearly signposted Rectory Hill so it's fairly clear that we are not The Village. Our council tax bill arrived addressed to us in Old Rectory Lane which is what Test Valley had down as the road name, even though they are the people who put up the sign saying Rectory Hill. I know we're in the middle of nowhere, but I didn't think it was terra so incognita! So Alan spoke to the council and the Royal Mail and eventually they concluded that we do live on Rectory Hill and that they would change the official address. We were most amused then to receive a note from them saying they were about to do this but it would require a postcode change and was that ok? So now we have our very own personal postcode - feeling a bit like royalty here! - and we can finally send you all change of address details.