Week ending 5th May 2012

Early start last Sunday with an emergency call out to a house in  London where builders (I’m using the word ‘builder’ very loosely here!) have, over the past months, have been excavating beneath a mid-terraced house in order to form a basement. Due to inadequate propping, disregard of the engineers design and lack of accounting for the recent weather conditions the building was in a rather precarious state! After managing to pacify the HSE and the Local Authority Enforcement Officer a scheme of remedial works is now in hand. In the meantime, solicitors and party wall surveyors are having a field day – no doubt on hourly rates.

This is actually how they have propped it!!!

One of our clients had the misfortune to have a fire at his home a couple of weeks ago which resulted in the loss of his roof and the scaffold we designed to provide the covering is now well on the way.

Phone call with a contractor in Portugal on Thursday has now got us involved in the design of a winch system for a chandelier. The winch itself costs £8k so goodness knows how much the chandelier itself is costing.

Finally the revised drawings of the new Synagogue in Clopton Rd London have been issued by the Architect after 4 months of ‘design by committee’ which seemed to revolve about the number and position of the toilets. The client will probably start chasing us Monday wondering if the structural design is completed. In a similar vein, the design for the Synagogue in Pagett Road, which we thought was ‘fixed’, is back on the drawing board for amendments. There again, I suppose it is better to get it right at this stage than when it is actually on site.

Press Corporation in at our London CMT Office on Tuesday interviewing and filming Jim and his model of the underwater diving observatory due to be built off the coast of Turkey. Interview is to be broadcast peak time on Saturday across the Middle East – unfortunately it was all in Turkish so I didn’t have a clue what was being said!

Green light given to our Marketing Company approving the brief for the new web-site. Hopefully the new site will bring us into the 21^st Century.

A site inspection of the balancing lagoon for the new 20,000 ft2 industrial unit at Gt Blakenham following this week’s unprecedented rain showed it full to the brim more or less exactly as predicted by the computer analysis – which is a relief.