Weekday job

To be fair - I took the photo while they were in the middle of pulling up three layers of old tile and while they were waiting for more rubble bags.  They did cart away the debris and also sweep inside and outside before they left for the day.

We are stuck decision wise about the top layer of flooring to go over underfloor heating and a worktop that complements that floor and white Ikea units. Either engineered wood and a wood worktop or 'real' linoleum and a compact laminate worktop.

They carefully removed the existing granite worktop after an 'expert' judged that it would cost more in labour and transport to re-cut it to work with a new layout than to start again (very likely with something else). Must be a secondary market for granite.

It might be interesting to carry on a side conversation about kitchen choices.

Before i had my own i used to fit all the different make of units at weekends the most popular was B&Q also did a lot of Ikea but i was not to keen on them because they had no service way at the back of them, by that i mean a gap behind the back panel to run pipes or cables in, they also had a hell of a lot of holes in them on the inside
But once fitted most modern units are ok as long as they are fitted properly and stand on legs as they make the units solid standing, the weakness with all units are door hinges and how the fix to the door or the unit as this is where they get the hammer
I took my kitchen in Cyprus from England and fit it there, i designed my next doors villas kitchen for them and fit it, they bought it from Ikea in Cyprus

Opening up the walls has exposed a baker's-dozen of amazingly bad practice (undersized cables to the cooker, skipping proper junction boxes, etc.) The electrician is unpicking the lot and is hoping to run a new ring with proper provision for future electric cooker.  Also the joy of finding lead piping.

Not unlike discovering stuff in an archaeology dig....

 

Yes, 8 year old carcases from Wicks. All but one door would be sagging and binding, tighten on a fortnightly basis. And then they stuck super-expensive granite on top and of course it turns out that the kind of tooling and skills needed to repurpose existing granite into a new layout has far to many digits in the price.  Hopefully I will photo-record and measure up the granite that was taken out and see if there is a secondary market....

Wish I had not used the word archaeology dig in last post....  The builder said 'here is something unexpected...".  They were pulling up another section of old tiles (3 deep) and under the bottom layer was just mud.  No foundation, no damp course, just three layers of tile over 10mm of mortar and a pond of watery earth.  That section of the house having started out as an  out-side toilet and a coal bin is still no excuse....  So a dig out, an actual foundation and damp proofing needs to be put in place.

A bit like the cottage I inherited in Babbacombe. Thick stone walls built of random stones just held by mortar and no foundation. Mortar render on the outside & no damp proof course so it tended to be permanently damp.
The 1950 solution? Add wood batons and cover with plasterboard!
By the 1960s even the wood batons were rotten and the plasterboard just disintegrated!
Just had to rip it all off and start again. Lower the outside ground level to below the inside floor level as it was originally. An injected damp proof course and water proof cement based outside render. As of 2025 it is still standing.  

Sorry for the late reply - the kitchen work has rather taken over my grey cells. And my bank decided with no notice to freeze ALL of my accounts - to the point where I could not even draw out 100 cash in person at the local branch with multiple forms of identification to by groceries, no ATM, no internet log in, no App.  It took the better part of 10 days and a half dozen hours on the phone to partly sort that generally starting each day with a nightmare wakeup at 4AM.  It could happen to you... keep a good stash of cash because those box tickers at Nationwide think they are 'small gods'. I have three formal complaints working their way through the system.

Anyway - we decided to excavate the earth down to the base clay layer and create several short supporting walls to create a suspended wood floor system matching the existing.  I was so angry with bank that I joined in with the wrecking bar and shovel to help sift quite a bit of the ~5m^3 of earth/rubble. The underfloor heating should go in tomorrow...

I think it depends on who you bank with, i found the CO OP a bit like that when i had someone on Amazon ordering goods on my accounts they would not help at all but the Halifax was totally the other way and gave me the money back, the strange thing was the goods that were ordered were sent to me and most were for ladies