What I would give to have the floors finally sorted out!

As I wrote before, the laminate was laid down in the dining room on Thursday. We had realised that the laminate was a slightly different colour from the original, but not too much of a difference.

On Saturday, my wife had a second look, this time comparing a sample with the laminate on the floor and we realised that we have the wrong laminate!

A whole month has gone by since my last post (well, a month and a bit). The last time I posted, we were about to get our kitchen tiles back down...

So, I guess you're curious as to the progress made in over a month; all our snags sorted? I wish!

The tiles were put down on the 10th and 11th of August, and I must say that O'Byrnes the tilers did a very good job. The floor was still not perfect, but the tiles are acceptable - indeed, if this was how the floor had been when my wife and I had moved in, we would not have complained about them.

You would be mistaken to think that, by now, we had our floors sorted out. It was four weeks ago, last Tuesday, that Persimmon Homes started lifting our wonky flooring in order to level the concrete floor underneath.

Today, the thirtieth day (30 - count 'em!), we are still not there!

So, what's happened since my last blog entry? I'm glad you asked:

The Never Ending Story

Well, I have to say I'm at the end of my tether. It is unbelievable how frustrated, stressed, and upset my wife and I have become.

My wife has already shed tears over this debacle, and I have to admit I have come very close to doing the same.

I went away on business again on Wednesday, and come back on Thursday. In the meantime, the tilers were supposed to turn up on Thursday, do some screeding in the hall and dining room, and start laying tiles in the kitchen, etc.

It's been a few (stressful) days since my last blog entry. The best thing is to give a day by day account of what has happened recently...

Thursday 27th July

The tiler was due to show up and start laying the tiles on the floors (conservatory, kitchen, utility room, and cloakroom).

He eventually turns up in the afternoon (Persimmon claimed that the tilers had called saying that their van had broken down, but the tilers knew nothing about this when they did turn up!).

So, quite a few days have passed since my last entry, although not too much has happened...

Harte, the contractor responsible for the concrete floors, have finished their job. Well, they thought they'd finished last week and simply didn't turn up on Friday.

Nobody said anything, and there we were, waiting on Friday for someone to arrive - well, I wasn't as I was away on business, but my wife was miffed at hanging around all day on the off-chance of some hard working visitors...

Nothing new to report today, after all, it is a local holiday, so...

However, I have a few images of some of the snags we've found so far...

Well, it's been a couple of days, and a few interesting developments (no pun intended) have happened.

After putting some pressure on the 'Customer Care' team, I get hold of 'Tom', their contracts manager. He seems sympathetic, but action is what I need.

He arranges for the tiler to return to lift the remaining tiles from the floor.

Well, here is day one of my new House blog.

Yup, bought a new house. It looks great (from the outside), but it remains to be seen if the builders (Persimmon Homes) sort out all of the snags we found.

So far, we have recognised 103 snags with the builder, and they have managed to fix 23.

However, by far the worst snag is the uneven floor on the ground floor.

You see, it's a concrete floor, that was badly laid by the contractors (I'm not sure who did it, but I'll post the details when I know for sure). -- Update: It was Harte Construction --

Well, seeing as I have this blog, I might as well write stuff that I'll find useful if I need to refer back to it!

I've been working on some video editing.

I have some footage shot from my digital camera at QVGA (320x240@30fps), and it is stored as an mjpeg encoded AVI.

I've cut, sliced, and diced the video into a full on 'movie' albeit only a minute or so long.

The next step is to render the movie into a format suitable for a DVD player.