After having obtained planning permission, the next step was the detailed design. The city is only concerned about the exterior geometry of the design, but before plans can go to tender, i.e., be sent out to an assortment of builders for quotes, every detail needs to be specified. This proved to be a far more intensive process than the earlier design process had been.

The very first step was appointing a structural engineer. In September, after an initial visit to the house, the engineer ordered what I thought of as a biopsy and a colonoscopy. The former involved digging small holes by the side of the rear part of the house, to see what the foundation was. The conclusion was that there wasn't much of a foundation, so the whole rear will be underpinned as part of the building process. Besides digging a hole next to the house, soil samples were also taken at a deeper level. The results, clay soil roughly a meter down, seemed to satisfy the engineer.

The colonoscopy was an exploration of the drains, with a drains company looking at the state of the connection to the sewer with a video camera. Except for the fact that it was rather clogged with silt and needed a good clean, the drains seemed to be in satisfactory shape.

The engineer produced some initial drawings of what needed to be done, and from this, several of the junior architects at Freeland Rees Roberts began to work on the detailed design. This became intensive for us. Decisions about flooring, carpets, wall tiles, choice of handles on the sink, etc. etc. etc. all had to be made, and all of these were recorded in very detailed drawings. This simply required a lot of time on our part, and for a while it was quite hard to imagine that every decision could be made and the process would finish. But it did, just before Christmas, more or less, with time in the new year taken checking everything.

We also received in the beginning of the new year extremely detailed drawings and calculations from the engineer, with pages and pages of computations concerning loads and stresses, and very detailed explanations of how some aspects of the building works should be carried out, especially the underpinning of the rear projection.

The tenders were finally sent out on the 5th of February. Typically one waits for a month for all the responses, and then with some luck, building will start soon after that!