More on the architect saga

The other week I finally heard that the architect I have engaged has started working on the project and I rolled out the Carlton Dance for the first time on this blog.

I did express concern about being premature with this celebration and, as things are moving forwards, I thought a quick update post would be useful to record this progress and what is going on at the moment. Suffice to say Carlton will not be making an appearance this time.

The elevations for the school

The ground floor of the school

The first floor of the school

First of all the good news. The architect has drawn up the plans for the current "status quo" and sent me the pdfs of these via my contact. This is excellent as it is the first concrete sign of progress from her and I am very pleased to have received them. I am feeling so much calmer about everything since things unblocked and, despite the negative news below, I am not panicking like I was. It's amazing just how much of the stress was the "not knowing" not the "thinking I might be delayed".

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The other good news is that she is on with getting the experts who will contribute to the project arranged. Maybe I should just go through this part of the process again to explain. The architect manages and pulls together a large set of documents called a Project which is submitted to the council for the planning permission. The Project contains architectural drawings of what the end result of the building is going to be but, alongside that, you need plans from various specialist individuals. This includes a plumbing plan, the electricians plan, agreement from any utilities you need for the property and a survey of the property in it's relative position to other buildings.

All of this needs to be put together before anything can go to the council for approval.

The chief architect is a very important person in this process and this is where the first of my bits of bad news hits. Apparently (and this is quoting verbatim from my communication with my contact)

What's worse is that the chief architect has placed demands on it to give you a building permit. But Veselka said that would be fine with that. Will fulfill these requirements and will provide everything you need to chief arc.

I have requested some clarification on this but it looks like the chief architect has made some additional requests and requirements than previously expected. Fingers firmly crossed here that these are not too onerous.

The other slightly (very?) negative is that apparently the nice man at the Obshtina who said "yeah fine you go ahead and make your roof safe, even if it does mean replacing the wood, just make sure you don't change any of the angles" has actually told Veselka "no they can't do that I didn't understand them". Which is a bit of a shock to be honest and also, as you can understand, quite a set back to my plans for getting the roof done before snow.

This roof is NOT going to last another winter

I am obviously waiting at the moment to see how quickly Veselka moves to get the Project finished and into approval. If this looks like it will not get done in time I will probably have to cut my losses and ask Bekir and Sally to make the roof safe for the winter, however that is achieved, to ensure that the rest of the building does not suffer from an uncontrolled and potentially damaging further collapse.

So, as everyone would have guessed and I was aware, things are not going as smoothly as they could but at least they are moving forwards now.

Here's to my next "architects update" being a slightly happier one.