THE CONSERVATORY ARRIVES

The conservatory arrived this morning. We've got 10 sections of perimeter windows, 2 packs of sills etc, 32 pieces of glazing and 7 packages containing the roof and fittings for it. I'm pleased to say that everyting arrived in good condition.

It appears that all of the main parts are fully labeled for easy reference so it's just a case of following the instructions.

CONSERVATORY BASE CHOICES

When planning the conservatory, we considered using a modular conservatory base system.

The system we looked into was the Durabase system which features a suspended floor which bolts onto the house and stands on concrete pads. It does remove the need for full scale footings so it would have saved the effort of removing the tonnes of topsoil!

The dwarf walls are built on galvanised steel frames with a genuine clay brick cladding on the outside and plaster on the inside. The brick cladding is already in place and everything is pre-pointed apart from the joins between sections which need the cladding bricks finishing on site. From the adverts and video we saw the system certainly looked very straight-forward, easy and quick to install.

For our size of conservatory (4m x 3m) we were quoted around £2500 for this system onto which we would have had to add a little for the concrete for the pads on which the base stands on, so in our case the cost was higher than having a bricklayer in.

In the end we decided to have a bricklayer to build a 'traditional' wall. He tells me that another advantage of having him do it is that if in the future we decided to have an extension instead of the conservatory, the existing wall could be extended upwards to 2 storeys high as the foundations will meet current building regulations for this.

THE STORY SO FAR

31 January/ 1 February – Had the builder round to mark out the footings and got started digging the foundations and footings. Brilliant! We discovered trees stumps and roots just below the surface which took ages to remove and then on Sunday the heavens opened and we got lots of snow which curtailed progress – well actually it got us into the house by a warm fire. Still we managed to get 3 big bags of soil dug out and. That’s about 3 cubic metres and I think we only need about 5 cubic metres out.

7 & 8 February – Nice days apart from the frost so a bit hard digging to start with! Still got on really well – almost 6 big (1 cubic yard) bags of soil now removed Early Sunday afternoon we decided it looked like we’re getting there so asked the builder to come round and have a look. BAD NEWS Seems we need to go down at least another foot and more in places– possibly as much soil as we’ve already moved to still dig out and we’re running out of room with all the soil we’ve already moved plus backs and muscles are beginning to ache!

Quick re-think needed here and we decide to let the builder finish the digging out (and disposal of the rest of the soil). Only going to cost about an £250 but I think it’ll be worth it.

FIRST LESSON. I totally underestimated the amount of soil which needed to be removed. I’ve now got to move the bags of soil to get the mini digger in.
I would advise anyone not to underestimate the task of digging the footings

THE CONSERVATORY

We’ve gone for a 4m x 3m lean to conservatory, and we’re getting a local builder in to build the dwarf walls and lay the floor but we’re opting to dig the footings ourselves.
The conservatory has been sourced through Ebay from a company called Trade Price Conservatories in Dorset (cost just over £2000) and we’ve had a quote from the builder for about £1700 so all looking good so far with a total build cost of about £4000