Ray over to quote
Ray and his grandson Damon came over today to give my loft another lookie over before starting on the work next week.
I knew it was going to be a bit more than we’d thought but I’m still not too sure of how much it’ll be.
I’d been busy that morning and I’d just knocked up some lunch when they arrived so I left them to get on with it.
Basically after a bit of an inspection they told me that the whole of the spanning beam was bending down seriously into the structure of the house and that it was all pretty serious and along with the planned lintel it would need bracing to support the beam where it was bending and where it had been notched out too – someone had cut out a large lump in this structural beam. Ray explained it all to me and didn’t seem too phased but he did say that I’d been pretty lucky that it hadn’t all come down on my head one night as I slept directly underneath it. If I’d knocked out the bowing doorframe in the bedroom then it would have probably all come tumbling down, roof and all.
Anyway I asked Ray for a revised quotation and asked him to move the attic hatch while he was at it, but basically again he didn’t seem to phased by it all.
There was a lovely bit though when I was chatting with Ray and he pulled out a newspaper to catch the shavings from his pencil he was sharpening. He then emptied the shavings into his pockets and David his grandson turned to me and gave me a “good grief” eyebrow raise. I really liked this little gesture, it feels right that someone with that care to detail is doing this really important work on my home.
While they were here too I asked if he’d give me an idea of what it would cost to put in a new garage where the workshop currently was. The idea is to raise the roof of the workshop, deepen it and use the shared wall of the garage that’s already there. I could then fix the garage roof in an in for a penny in for a pound type of exercise. I said how do you feel about £5k, he said £5k sounded right.
They left to order the steels and I felt a bit better about how the project was progressing, Ray intending to make a start early next week.
They phoned later to inform me that that lintels were going to be a bit of a special order and that it might take until midweek to get them delivered.