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Thanks @PeterW. We live in a very hard water area, so rimless was recommended as a way of making it easier to clean. I will check out the V&B Architectura range, but sounds expensive. Any other more affordable options? I need four of them!

I’m looking for a toilet with the following characterics: - contemporary styling - rimless - wall hung - spacious so that one’s dangly bits don’t touch the inside of the bowl when sitting on it (I never thought this would be an issue , but the rental where we are living in at the moment has this issue and it’s horrible); - good flush strength. With many places being closed due to the pandemic, this is a bit of a challenge. Any recommendations?

You are probably right @joe90, although at the time I thought 3 trial holes against 3 different walls was a pretty reasonable exploration. Oh well.

This actually made me smile, which goes to show that getting all of this off my chest has helped me (as has half a bottle of Malbec).

I should clarify a few things for everybody so we can have a more informed discussion: Many months before the builder was even hired, I took up the floor in the back half of my ground floor to understand how much space was beneath the floorboards to see whether we could actually achieve a condition that had been imposed on us by planning - namely to sink our extension into the ground by about 40cm, without compromising our design objective which was to have most of ground floor all on one level. I provided this info to the structural engineer and he designed a provisional structure that would not have required underpinning. The very first day the builder was on the job, I gave him a diagram that showed him where the structural engineer had asked for him to dig trial pits to expose the corbels for the engineer to come and inspect them to check they were in accordance with what he had expected and designed for. The builder dug these up and when the engineer inspected we were all surprised by three revelations: lots of water, shallower corbels than expected and a mismatch in corbel heights. We have fixed the water issue (it wasn't actually such a big issue) but I think at the time this distracted me the most and started worrying me (unnecessarily as it turns out) about damp problem. On reflection, it's probably that worry which caused me to overlook the fact that the mismatch in corbel heights, being unusual, implied that the corbels should be exposed everywhere immediately in case there were further surprises. I guess maybe the structural engineer should have realised that as well (I will call this the "Engineer's Minor Oversight"). But nobody did and so the design was quickly altered to allow for these surprises. No underpinning was required as part of those changes - as i explain below the underpinning has nothing to do with the loading of the house as originally conceived in our original plans. A few weeks later as the builder is progressing the works we notice that the other corbels on parts of the house (not the ones that had been previously exposed) are even shallower. This is really bizarre. It's a 1920s/1930s house, built on a very very slight incline (probably no more than 4 degrees) and yet the corbels have about 4 or 5 different heights and there is little rhyme or reason to it. It was at this point that the architect realised that these higher corbels would make our interior problematic from an aesthetic perspective as the corbels would show when the floor level was reduced and even the ones that wouldn't show would interfere with plans for insulation, underfloor heating etc (although that was a minor consideration). It was also at this stage that the builder had started removing the horrible grey pebbledash we have covering the house and discovered some wall cracking underneath it due to settlement. It is the combination of this aesthetic issue and the settlement that pushed the engineer to recommend some shallow underpinning on two external walls, as this would allow us to remove some of the corbels internally that would otherwise show, and also ensure we'd not have any further issues with settlement. We aren't touching the corbels under the party wall and are instead going to conceal most of them within wooden cabinets/credenzas. So up until this point, whilst I was annoyed the corbels weren't as expected, this was not anybody's fault and so apart form the Engineer's Minor Oversight, I didn't have anybody to blame other than the builder/engineer who built this house in the late 1920s. I guess he/she is dead now. That was about 4 weeks ago and it was then that the engineer should have started on the underpinning design. But we only got it two days ago (I will call this the "Engineer is lazy issue"). Who knows, maybe the engineer has had to be home schooling his kids due to the pandemic.

We have a very detailed RIBA contract yes. But, and I say this as a professional specialising in contractual disputes, the law is not perfect and even if it was, enforcing the letter of the contract is not always going to help me achieve a practical solution to some problems. E.g. I could have forced him to rectify the mistake, but it was such an expensive mistake to rectify I decided the risk that he would end up skimping elsewhere or rushing the job, in a way that would be harder to police through the contract wasn’t worth it. Rectification would also have been incredibly noisy (lots of concrete to cut out) and would have bothered the neighbours even more than they have already been bothered.

Thanks for sticking up for me @ETC ! I thought I was going completely mad.

Well it is tempting, but replacing a builder mid way is also not stress free. I’ve conceded 6cm of ceiling height and a bit of insulation, and basically come to terms with it. There will be a strip of my floor about 9m by 30cm which will have less insulation than the rest of the floor, but so be it - it is in an otherwise very well insulated part of the house, and will still have some insulation. After a lot of umming and arring I decided it was better to make these concessions than force the builder to swallow the cost of actually undoing and starting a major piece of structural work again. But that incident made me realise I can’t trust him to follow a diagram! Hence why I wanted him to go through the underpinnning diagrams with the engineer. Maybe I should have sacked him. But better the devil you know... right?

Yes, in an ideal world I really should have. Next life, I will do this. At least there is something that we can extrapolate from: All materials are priced separately and were QSed. And work for each line of a 70 line excel sheet was priced, so it should be fairly straightforward to extrapolate from that. But it’s now clear to me that this builder is not very straightforward, so who knows how he will price it.

No. His foreman is there everyday. The builder is there sometimes, but sometimes he’s not. And the structural engineer lives 80 miles away so isn’t going to pop in on the off chance it’s at a time the builder has chosen to be there.

Precisely, which is why I asked the builder when would be good for him for the engineer to meet with him. No reply, just ignores me and starts the underpinning.

Yes, but he's pretty much got me over a barrel. I sent him the details of the underpinning yesterday and asked him how much it woudl be and when would be convenient to diarise the meeting with the engineer to go through the drawings. He ignored my email and started working on the underpinning today. So no agreed price. I'm happy for him to make a fair profit, but an extortionate one is unreasonable.

No, you haven't got that right at all. The builder miscalculated the heights of some steels and the height of the finished flaw level by 12cm. This was after I told him an offer that the architect was happy to take a look at his measurements before he ordered the steels. The builder effectively told me to F off and said that it wasn't the architect's job to check his measurements. I thought at the time, "this is good, i have hired a very confident builder who doesn't need supervision. The builder then ordered the steels and laid the biggest one, which was about 10m long, too high in the subfloor, 12cm too high, erected the box frame onto it and then poured concrete over the 10m long beam as well as into the trenches for the footings all far too high by 12cm. Had he taken up the architect's offer to check in with him on the measurements and setting out, this would have been avoided. I could have fired him then or refused to pay him unless he removed all of it and started again from the beginning, but I knew that the reality was that if I had fired him I would have had to get somebody else to fix it, and that if I would have got him to pay for new beams and all the work of reducing the footings, it would have cut his profit and he would have clawed that back by cutting corners later on down the project. So i did the "right" thing and managed to figure out a way of mitigating the 12cm mistake by 6cm. This is a big concession on my part because it compromises on the amount of insulation above the beam and it also involves a non standard detail to the cavity wall which has taken a while to persuade the BCO is compliant and has stressed me about future damp issues no end. None of this was the structural engineer's fault or the architect fault's. It was the builder's fault for being so over confident and it was my fault for not recognising this when he told me to F off.

No, I will pay for all the extra costs of the underpinning, and the builder will make a tidy profit. All I'm asking is for him to communicate with the structural engineer about the underpinning before he does something that takes much longer to fix than it would to query it in the first place.

I don't really buy this. We are 3 months into a 10 month job. So unless he has a client booked for 7 months time... it's highly unlikely. I sent him the tender docs in August and I kept pushing him to agree a contract for months yet he didn't sign it until the day before the build started.

Thanks @nod I agree firing him is a last resort. I don’t really get the sense that demand for builders is exceeding supply, but I agree that a change of builder midway is somewhat of a nightmare. Generally, the quality of his work is good, he’s just a difficult person to deal with. The question is how to move forward from him and ensure as few misunderstandings and confrontations as possible.

This doesn’t really apply in this situation because there is plenty of other things he could be getting on with like finishing the rear extension (not affected by the underpinning which is at the front and side of the original house). He’s only built about a third of that. Then he could also install the wooden joists for the first and second floor. And he hasn’t booked a subcontractor to do the underpinning, is just his regular team. My issue really is the lack of communication. If he has issues with my instructions, why not raise them with me instead of ignoring them?

All good points. I’m really not seeking perfection, and believe me, as p*ssed off as I was about the mistake which led to a loss of 6cm of headroom and a week delay whilst the builder chipped away the excess concrete he had poured, I was actually very good about it and didn’t react the way I could have done. But underpinning seems like a big deal and if they get it wrong there are going to be issues much harder to fix than the last one. If the builder really thinks he doesn’t need supervision on it, or a site meeting to check he understands what he’s doing, he really should have responded to me email to say so, rather than just ignore it. It’s useful having the architect there because he is the one that is project managing when I’m not able to.

I have retained a main contractor to pretty much do almost everything. The architect has prepared a very detailed drawing package and so has the structural engineer. I hired an architect who in turn hired the structural engineer on my behalf. The architect has some project management responsibilities, but basically I am the project manager delegating certain tasks to the architect as and when I need his expertise. At the outset of the project the builder, the architect and I met and agreed a schedule in writing. Part way through our works, it became apparent the foundations of the house we are converting were shallower than anticipated and so structural engineer recommended underpinning about 12m of wall. It’s only shallow underpinning, about 350mm to 550mm under most of the existing foundations, which are themselves fairly shallow, so although it was a bit scary for me to understand that this would be necessary at first, the architect has assured me is not a big deal, and builder didn’t seem phased by it at all. However, it took the structural engineer about 4 weeks to prepare the underpinning detail and in part this has affected the schedule. During this time, the builder became increasingly frustrated about the “delay” and threw his toys out the pram a few times. I finally got the structural engineer’s drawings yesterday. After checking them with my architect I realised that it was quite complex, and that the drawings although apparently technically correct are not as clear as they could be. They are fairly clear, I just would have hoped that the draftsmanship could have made them clearer. Although the builder is generally very competent and careful to get things right, he did make one assumption a few weeks back that resulted in a fairly big mistake. We’ve now addressed that mistake, but it has resulted in a loss of head height across our ground floor of about 6cm, was stressful to deal with and probably wasted a week of time for the builder to fix it (this is the other reason for the delay mentioned above). I am very keen that no big mistake like that happens again, and I’ve also lost a degree of confidence in the builder’s ability to ask when he spots a potential ambiguity on a drawing, rather than assume he knows what it might mean. I’m being kind to the builder (there was no ambiguity, he just misread the drawing). For this reason, when I forwarded the underpinning detail to the builder yesterday morning, I did so under a covering email that made it crystal clear he was not to start the underpinning work until the engineer, the architect and I met with him to talk through the drawings and make sure everyone was on the same page. I told him that just he should finish uncovering the foundations internally (as requested by the engineer) and let me know when that would be ready so that I could let the engineer know and schedule the meeting. No response to my email. Imagine my surprise when I called the builder today to ask whether he had received my email and he responds “yes, we’ve already started the underpinning “. I pointed out that I had expressly asked him not to start until we had had the meeting with all the team; he threw his toys out the pram and said that would cause more delays and I will end up paying for them. When I reminded him of the previous issue that led to a week’s delay for failing to check a point on the drawing with the architect, and how I couldn’tafford any such mistakes with the underpinning he threatened not to do the underpinning. I know I am being reasonable and he is not, but I’m not really sure how to deal with this situation. I rather not switch builders at this stage, but I am starting to get tempted as there is still at least 4 or 5 months to go, we are really only at the early stages and although I might lose a bit of money, it’s not significant in the grand scheme of things. Part of me wants to give the builder another chance but part of me thinks I’m being too nice. Thoughts?

Looks very nice. In the en-suite can you get rid of that “A/C” cupboard so that you can have a bigger shower, or is that an air con unit?

I converted a flat once where we got rid of the entrance hallway and it made it feel so much more spacious. But that was a first floor flat, so the front door opened onto a communal first floor landing rather than onto the street. If your front door opens out onto the outside world, you might want to think about building a porch, to have an intermediary area that mitigates the cold air that comes in each time you open the front door.

I couldn’t agree with you more. Hence my shock when architect thought it would look fine for the wall under the stringer to stand outside instead! we aren’t having a newel post (having a wreathed handrail that continues into the floor instead) so might be able to go to 94 internal width of staircase, plus 2 X 42mm for width of each stringer, would make 102.4cm, which would allow about 88cm, if stringer is to stand a couple of cm proud for internal depth of space for WC.

We are having new staircase built for our renovation. Architect has allowed a width of 900mm for the staircase and thought the WC underneath might be 86cm wide plus 13cm for the stud wall such that the wall would stick out by 9cm. I don’t think that would look good at all. Surely the external surface of the WC wall should be in line with the external surface of the staircase stringer, or the stringer should stand proud. If the WC wall protrudes beyond the staircase, I think it will look odd. here is a picture: How wide would you make: - the staircase - the internal width of the WC room; and - the stud wall of the WC room?

Anyone have an ArmourCast bath? Also made of 5mm lucite, and then sprayed with glass fibre apparently to make it stronger. Comes with a 25 year guarantee. Sounds like the best of both worlds, more insulating than steel, but similarly firm. Sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?

Good to know @jack. Which finish did you go for? I'm torn between unlacquered brass that develops a nice aged pattina over time, or lacquered that keeps it looking new until the lacquer eventually deteriorates at which point it looks pretty awful.