This photo shows the progress after two days of work. As you can see all the nasty laminate flooring has been removed, the old kitchen is gone and the outline showing where the new walls are going to be built are on the ground. I'm really impressed with how fast the place is taking shape.
Back to our dilemma about the support beam - it costs £300 to call out an engineer, so not an insignificant sum. His advice was to replace the entire beam with a new I shaped one, as the existing one was a less sturdy C shape. Our original plan RE attaching an extension onto the existing beam wouldn't have given a satisfactory result, from an engineering perspective. The cost of a new beam to run the entire length of the house and install it is in the region of £3,000. Which we hadn't budgeted for.
As previously mentioned, lighting was left off the works schedule so this needs to be paid for out of the contingency fund too. The old advice about doubling your budget is ringing loud in my ears.
The Ikea kitchen arrived, which is a minor miracle given that the truck couldn't get to the house so the poor driver had to carry all the cabinets down our very long drive. He also brought three lengths of counter top that Rob insisted we hadn't ordered. Upon reading our receipt it turns out the counter top was on the order form, even though we'd told the friendly Australian that we definitely didn't want a counter top... he was going from the 3D model we'd made on their website, where we'd put a counter top to show how the kitchen would look. It's the cheapest, nastiest laminate you can imagine so will get us a paltry £70 back when we return it. The question is how, as it won't fit it in our car.
Also, we seem to be missing an entire cabinet... the architects drawings were out by 8cm according to Teia, but an entire cabinet is a 60cm shortfall. I'm sure once all the bits are in place we'll be able to measure exactly what the difference is and sort it out. I'm curious to see who miscalculated the most!
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