Demolition and Shopping

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bathroom, bedroom, beds, caesar stone, decking, demolition, flooring, furniture, granite, Home, House, Israel, Kitchen, parquet, showers, tiles

This has also been a productive week, but I am going to assume that we will be slowing down a little for now.

This week Yaniv started on the demolition. All the other contractors quoted 3-4 weeks of work. Yaniv started on Tuesday (it took 3 days to get insurance) and is planning on finishing tomorrow. If he doesn’t succeed it will be on Thursday. Having seen (and being amazed) at how quickly and relatively cleanly the guys have been working I expect this will be completed tomorrow. We will then have a two month gap until we start to rebuild the property.

So why are we having this gap? There are many reasons. The two personal ones are that we wanted to get started on the work and that once the demolition work has been completed we can finalise the design without any unexpected surprises. There was a surprise but it will not be causing us any issues. One of the basement walls was thicker than expected (and made of proper brick) making the builders decide that this is probably a supporting wall. This was a surprise but not the end of the world as we were planning to rebuild the same wall in the same place. It is the wall for my mum’s bedroom.
The other two reasons for the delay are also simple. It gives us more time to complete the design without worrying about having a very close deadline. It also gives us lots of time to complete the shopping, although we are doing fine on the shopping as you will see a little later on.
The arbitrary start date of August 6 makes sense when you realise that this is the end of Ramadan just making it a lot easier for the builders. I personally wouldn’t like to do heavy building work day in, day out in the height of a desert summer day in Israel. This week we have constantly been in temperatures above 30C (pushing 90F) and I have heard that the temperature will be up 40C this Thursday (over 100F). Could you do physical labour in temperatures that are over 40C/104F without any water for over 12 hours??? We couldn’t and we wouldn’t like to force anyone to do this for us. WE will let the workers do less energetic building work on other sites so that they will be able to work more efficiently on my house when they get to us. We have also now paid Yaniv for this section of work.

Design – We have made a few minor changes. We have decided that we would probably use a shower much more than a bath – and so in our en-suite we are changing the bath to a shower. We are also swapping round the study/guest room with Natanel’s room. This will allow us to give Natanel a desk under his bed as he wanted. It will also allow us to make the doors to the balcony (mirpeset) open inwards which will be easier with the alarm system. We are hoping that this will stop Yaakov from banging on Natanel’s wall to get his attention.

Shopping – During the week, Hermetix stated that they were not able to deliver the interior doors that we required. This was because we wanted the doors to have a relatively deep interior panel. They can however do a shallow panel and moulding to make the panel appear to be deeper, which is acceptable to us.
We have confirmed all our tiles, but still wish to look at a parquet floor that we are debating for the sunken lounge. We have made decisions on all the windows in the house (Anderson) and have come close to a final decision on our sofa (there is a specific design that we are planning to import from the states).
We have also looked in more detail at tables, kitchen cabinets and decking. The table will probably be designed for us by Tamar and then we will get it made for us by either one of Tamar’s contacts or a friend of ours that has done carpentry for us before in the uk. The kitchen cabinets are likely to be white with a middle panel and we were looking at appropriate caesar stone tops and have a possible option. The negative on this top is that there is a very slight sparkle in it which we would prefer wasn’t there. We are also going to look at granite tops and if we find one that we particularly like we will compare the prices and probably choose the cheapest one.

That is about all for now. We need to start looking at curtains, lighting, beds, furnishings and the other systems that we are interested in (Alarm, Air conditioning, underfloor heating, Grey water, secondary circulation (a method of having hot water on tap), etc.

Adam & Joelle

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Gathering momentum

Tags

bathroom, Buy home, caesar stone, grout, Home, House, Israel, Kitchen, lawyer, legal, property, showers, taps, tiles

Hi all,
Things are finally starting to move quickly.
With respect to the house. As you know, last motsei Shabbat we got the keys. On Wednesday I met with Chezi at the Iriya and changed over the Arnona (council/house tax) to our name. I also filled in a form which will give us half price arnona for 6 months as nobody will be living there. The rubbish has also gone (I told Chezi that according to the contract this is his responsibility and that our builder is quoting 5000NIS to clear it up. It would be cheaper if he did it himself – which he did by putting it all on the street and letting the dustmen (garbage workers) clear it away.)
The last thing that we needed to sort out with Chezi was the post box which he insisted was his. We spoke to the post office and showed them the contract and they have changed the lock for us. This service cost about 45NIS and takes 3 days. We still do not know the number of the box – but we can find out from the sorting office without too much difficulty.

On to contractors. We went to see the cheaper contractor’s work and were not impressed. We then spent a lot of time chatting to many of one of the contractors English-speaking clients who were all spoke very highly of him and his work. We also went to see his work in two of his clients in Modiin and agreed that his work was excellent. Everyone says that he stands by his work and that he will come back to fix any issues without any difficulty. This is hard enough to find in the UK – let alone in Israel. Therefore in the end we decided to choose him (Yaniv Smadar) and his details will be in the support page. He has ordered the insurance (which takes up to 3 days to come through) and after that he will start the demolition work (probably on Monday or Tuesday) and will take 3-4 weeks.

On the shopping front. After getting another quote we have ended up with the Hermetix doors. There was an added dimension that was initially hidden from us. Tamar and Moti (manager at the shop we are getting our tiles/plumbing goods) arranged for the Hermetix contact to meet us in Moti’s store in Tel Aviv on Friday – but he refused as he doesn’t work on Fridays. they then tried to arrange to meet in Yerushalyim next week but he won’t travel to Jerusalem except for measuring exact door sizes. Both Tamar and Moti complained (Moti is a Hermetix retailer and Tamar obviously orders a lot of doors for her clients) late on Thursday night and this is ended up with one of the top bosses in Hermetix who took over as the sales rep for us and said he would meet us on Friday. In the end he apologised profusely as he couldn’t cancel a family commitment and therefore couldn’t come. We are meeting him next week probably in Tel Aviv when shopping there anyway. In addition to this, they realised that the quotes given were 600NIS less that the correct quote per interior door. This is a nice saving for us of over 6000NIS as they are keeping to the original quote. Supposedly the person that miscalculates our doors did the exact same error with another of Tamar’s client. We haven’t yet seen how good the doors are in the house (obviously) but we are definitely happy that they are keeping to their word.

We have now chosen all our floor and bathroom wall tiles. We have also chosen all our sinks, baths, showers, taps and toilets. All Tamar needs to do now is work out how much we need of each tile so we can get a final amount. On top of this we have selected the appropriate grout colours and ceasar stone which is going to be used for all finishing touches and shelving in the bathrooms.

We have also started to work on our kitchen design. We have the floor tiles decided, we have chosen a possible splashback and have almost definitely decided on a 100cm Ilve Range Oven. We are also going to go with European style 60x60cm fridge and freezer as this basically gives more space (and looks better in our view) that the American style fridges. It is funny that when we were in the UK Adam always wanted an American fridge but now that we have had one for 4 years we are happy to return back to our old style appliances.
We have started to look at the cabinet doors. The options are formica, polymer or wood. We are definitely not doing formica (this is the cheapest and strongest option – but is not very customisable). Polymer is in the middle in cost, strength and ability to customise and wood is the most expensive and least durable. We like the wood the most – but have to decide if approximately a 20% premium on the doors is a worthwhile cost. We are going to spend a lot of time this evening looking at many different designs on-line (houzz.com) and hopefully moving on in this aspect of our house.

We think this a lot for just a week as we have also paid our lawyer and a deposit on the doors.
The only thing planned for next week is the start of work next week and some design research on-line.
Bye for now.

Adam & Joelle.