The undertaker
Entrepreneur. It’s a word of French origin, coming from the
French word entreprendre – to
undertake*. So an entrepreneur is an undertaker of sorts!
Here in Belgium the word entrepreneur
has two meanings. The first is a business person, like in the UK. The second is
a builder. You might scratch your head at that, but it probably makes
sense given the combination of risk taking, creative solution finding and
financial juggling which builders have to do (notice I didn’t mention the quick
buck attitude that exists in some quarters too. Oh, ooops I just mentioned
it...)
 |
| The shadowy figure is one of the undertakers we met back in December (and before we covered those lovely tiles in protective black plastic..) |
I’m talking about entrepreneurs because the heavy artillery
you saw at the bottom of the last post was our builder’s.
 |
| He's downed his tools already! Oh, end of day... |
Two of the biggest decisions you have to make during a
renovation are:
1.
How much will we do ourselves?
2.
Who will we hire to do what we won’t do?
No beating about the bush, the stakes are high. For most of
us a house is the most expensive thing we’ll ever buy, it certainly is for us. And the builder(s) will probably be recipient of the single largest amount of money you’ll
ever give to one person.
Looking at those two questions for us:
1. How much will we do ourselves?
For most people, this seems to be determined by a combination
of money, willingness and time, generally in that order. And that’s certainly
the case for us. From the starting point that (1) our main motivation for
buying a fight club house was that we couldn’t afford a real place, and (2)
we’ve had an extended crash course in house renovation, Kenyan style (the old
blog) – which was kind of like being thrown in a pool when you can’t swim - we’re
willing to try our hand at a fair bit. But time is also of the essence as we
are paying rent and mortgage at the same time. So in short, we’ve hired someone
to do all the technical installation (elec, water, heating) and structural repairs,
plus some basic finishing downstairs so it can be semi-liveable. But we’ll do
most of the finishing (flooring installation, door and skirting fixing, stair
repairs, painting, and maybe even a bit of tiling and plastering if I’m
allowed). And obviously we did the wallpaper stripping and prep work for
demolition too.
2. Who will we hire?
Now this is the really hard part. There is no shortage of
horror stories with builders everywhere in the world; Belgium is no different;
and there are no guarantees, whoever you hire. Some people like to hire
different people for different jobs (e.g. one for plumbing, one for electrics
etc) but our previous experience hinted that this leads to delays and a massive
blame game. So we set our sights on one guy to do all our outsourced works.
It might seem nuts but we started looking for builders
before the ink was dry on the sales agreement. We met four in December and a
further three in February, using a combination of personal recommendations and
a free service in Belgium which links you up with builders called Batibouw.
Seven turned out to be about the right number: we received 4.5 quotes from that
lot (the 0.5 being a text message light on details). It gave us enough to
compare without being overwhelmed. And to be honest from the seven we met, we
quickly agreed on which two gave us the best feeling – both recommendations. One
of them was unable to commit full time, leaving the other one. We agreed with
him in early March – which meant he was free and not committed elsewhere once
we were ready for him to start last week.
 |
| There used to be a poorly constructed lean to here with a shower in it (!)... |
 |
| ... and now it is here. |
 |
| Radiators out, sanitary fittings and pipes out. Some horrors lurking behind those radiators. |
So our undertaker is taking things down at the moment. So far so good – he’s made massive progress in just a week. We hope the good relationship will continue – our challenge now is to make sure it does. Maybe there’ll be a blog post on communication in the future.
 |
| He's not only tearing things down. First water and drainage lines. |
 |
| Also passing up and along to the future bathroom. Along some suspect tiles, which will be the subject of a later post. |
Comments
Post a Comment