A Place That Matters: Day One

The above photo might not look like much, it is after all a photo of a building site. It is however our building site, and something we are already immensely excited about.

Today we started work. The real work. We’ve already done a little bit of destruction, such as removing toilet cubicles, de-gassing the old air conditioning, carefully extracting 2 metre mirrors from the old fitness studio (and giving them away on FreeCycle) and there was that moment I accidentally took down a wall I wasn’t supposed to, but today the good stuff happened.

The builders moved in.

We spoke to a number of builders about our project, and straight away one thing was clear: there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of work around.

Some builders did a walk around and then never got back to us, some didn’t return our original calls and others wanted the entire project detailed right down to what washers we wanted in the taps before they would offer any starting guidelines. Others were just plain rude.

In the end we appointed Croft View Construction from Carlisle, who were the only company who not only understood the dynamic of the project and the team behind it, but who were also willing to make numerous trips to the site, approaching every visit with a can do attitude.

As you can see from the above pictures, there manual labour ethic matches the sales pitch. They can do and they do do. Within the space of 6 hours, Adam and Micky had demolished an interior room, checked the structure of the roof and by tea-time this evening they had removed the majority of a main dividing wall, which you might be able to see is made out of breeze blocks.

So, not bad for a days work. And I barely broke into a sweat.