Knock Out

Halfway through week six and I visited the house after the school run this morning. The decorators are due to arrive today, not because there's anything cosmetic to be done at this stage, but because they might as well get on with stripping the nasty old wallpaper from the rest of the house. Experience of stripping walls tells me this could add further expense to the job - they'll probably blow plaster and find mouldy bits and we'll end up pleading with the plasterer to help us out.

Yesterday the builders removed the back wall of the old kitchen, which has enabled them to place all that steel into the brickwork. The red joists you see in the bottom picture are the steel, and though they look like one piece, it's actually one piece over the bifold door opening (to support the pitched roof) and another one about 3.3 metres behind it, holding up the brickwork of the first floor since the back wall was removed. I'm sure it's all perfectly stable, but the fact remains that our first floor is being propped up with what look like a load of old table legs and it hardly inspires me to go jiggling about Alex's bedroom.

You'll see from the top photograph that we're close to the first floor brickwork being complete, in fact it ought to be finished before the end of this week. Next week we're due to get a roof, which throws up problems because we can't source roof tiles to match the originals in colour. We've trawled the builders' merchants and brought back samples and I've even been in touch with a salvage yard in West Sussex who are sending a sample tile via courier but the more time goes on, the more it looks like we can't match it up.

There are a few options - we can have a roof that doesn't match the original (is that really an option?) or we can can remove the tiles from the back of the existing house and place them on the front of the extension so at least it looks the same across the width of the house. This will cost us an additional £1750 in purchasing new tiles to replace the old ones on the existing house, though I'm still trying to compute that because if we provide the tiles for the extension and also pay for the tiles for the new roof, I'm pretty sure that means we've paid twice.

The alternative is to have new tiles on the existing roof. I'd love a new roof, a grey one - but finding that sort of money in our budget is tricky, especially since the bathrooms and kitchen have worked out more expensive than we thought and we've spent £2,500 on extra steelwork. I'm going over the budget with a fine toothcomb, but at this rate we'll be looking down the back of the sofa for twenty pences.