An expensive hot bowling alley

Hello, my loves,

There is a room in this house we have not been able to sit in since the day we got the keys.

It's the conservatory. In summer it is so hot you can't use it, in winter it's so cold you need a jumper, and it's all that plastic PVC, so it looks exactly as lovely as it sounds. Sam has taken to calling it an expensive hot bowling alley.

He isn't wrong.

We have asked so many people what to do with this space and nobody had an answer. So this week we stopped asking and got Neil round instead. Neil does glazing, and he has been doing it for twenty years.

Which brings me to episode two, which is up now, and to what an hour with Neil and a tape measure taught me that I wish I'd known months ago.

Ask for two quotes, not one

This is the bit worth stealing.

We asked for the job priced two ways. One, keep the existing frame and put a proper roof on it, raised and plastered. Two, do all of that and replace the side panels as well, so the whole thing comes back new.

The roof came back at £20,000. The side panels were another £4,500 on top of that.

I assumed the second one was an upsell. It wasn't. When Neil looked properly at the frame he said it's warped, and that we'd get five to seven years out of it before it needs replacing anyway. Which changes the maths completely, because doing it twice costs more than doing it once.

I should say I stood exactly where he was pointing and could not see it. Not a bit of it. But twenty years against my forty minutes of squinting at a frame is not really a contest, and that is the entire reason you get someone in.

We took the roof. Just the roof.

On paper that's the wrong answer, and I'd rather say so than dress it up. The panels are the far cheaper line, and Neil has already told us they've got five to seven years in them, so we are knowingly booking somebody to potentially come back before the end of the decade and do a £4,500 job we could have done this year.

We did it anyway, because the roof is what makes that room unusable and because £24,500 out of this stage of the project would have come straight out of a room somewhere else in the house. There's no clever way round that. You can't have all of it at once.

If you're making the same kind of choice this month, you're not doing it wrong. Almost every renovation I've been close to is a series of exactly these, and the finished photographs never show you the one where somebody ran out of money and picked.

The question I nearly didn't ask

The pitch of the roof.

Ours sits at 15 degrees. I asked whether it could go to 25, mostly because we're tall and the room feels low, and the answer was yes. That's height I didn't know was available, in a room I'd already written off as squat.

There's a trade-off and Neil was straight about it: raising the pitch means more plastering. Worth it, easily. But you have to ask, because nobody volunteers it.

Ask about timings before you fall in love

The lead time on the glazing pushes hard against everything else we've got booked, and the fit itself only takes ten days. That's the bit people get the wrong way round. The wait is what decides your programme. The install is usually the short part.

So ask for the lead time before you ask for the price, because it's the one that moves everything else.

Why the whole room is going green

Sam's verdict on colour drenching was that it sounds very on trend (cheeky sod haha). It is on trend...but that isn't why we're doing it.

The ceilings in this house are not high. When you drench a room, walls, ceiling, woodwork, all of it in one colour, the eye stops catching on the joins, and a low room reads as taller and quieter than it actually is. It's the same reason nearly every room in this house is going to get the same treatment.

Green because the entire point of that room is the garden, and I want the outside to come in rather than stop politely at the glass.

If drenching sounds like a lot, don't start here. Start with a loo or a boot room, somewhere small enough that you can undo it. It is far less frightening in practice than it is in your head.

If you're not replacing yours

Most of you are not about to take a conservatory roof off, and you don't need to in order to make that room better.

You can paint uPVC. Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3, two coats of your colour, then another coat of Zinsser over the top. The primer is doing all the work, and it's the difference between paint that stays put and paint that peels off within the year.

Order a few samples first and live with them in that room for a few days. Conservatory light is brutal, and it will show you a colour's undertone faster than any other room in the house. I wrote about why that matters in last week's issue, if you missed it.

Before you get a conservatory quote

That's seven questions and it's an hour of your life. It's the cheapest part of the whole job and it's the part that decides the rest of it.

The whole thing is going up on the channel as we go, mistakes included, of which there will be many.

I've spent more than ten years telling other people to be braver with their homes. It turns out it lands differently when it's your money, your roof, and your partner asking what the return is.

But that room has been the thing I walk past and feel a bit defeated by since we moved in. It's about to become the best room in the house, and I can already feel what that does to the rest of it.

Tash x

PS. If you missed it, episode one is the first walk round the ugliest house on the street, and there's more coming on the channel. And if you've got a conservatory you can't use either, hit reply and tell me what's wrong with it. I'm building a list.