Six months on, no splashback

Nothing much to report on the house front. Teia was due to come back this week and do the splashback and make a start on the cabinet but is still tied up on his other job. Two colleagues of mine have had extensive building work start and finish on their homes the last few months... while our job is in limbo, waiting for those last few days of work to happen.

The main problem is that our job hasn't been effectively project managed from the get go. The general day-to-day issues Teia took care of himself, but the architect would normally oversee things to ensure the job ran smoothly. As our budget was under £80K (ie peanuts to most architects) we didn't really benefit from any useful input after the drawings were done, except for a few emails to suppliers.

If I was to do this project again I wouldn't engage an architect in the same way as it was an ineffectual use of our money. If you have less than £100K to spend you're better off buying the drawings from the architect then paying for hourly sessions when you need them. It's extremely unlikely this would add up to 15.5%-20% of your budget (most architects charge this as their fee). I was told this advice before we started this project and chose to ignore it.

Also, the drawings and costings weren't foolproof - the lighting was left off (quite a major oversight) and a sliding door was drawn into a load bearing wall which meant we had to redesign how it worked. We naively thought that using an architect would mean the entire job would be costed accurately and there'd be a tiny margin of error, and it would get done in a set time frame.

Hindsight is a marvellous thing isn't it?