Our granny annex top tips – No 9 Keep you site, house & garden tidy.

Keep your site tidy and clear – it might seem a bit of a strange one this, keeping a building site clean, but if you take this on board straight away trust me it will have lots of benefits, and if a tidy site/home area becomes a habit then good things will happen!

Top one is safety – if you are tidy and clean and you ask your builder [nicely] or the people working on your site, to keep the place tidy and clean the whole place will look safe, feel safer and be safer.

Be warned though that different people working on site will take your request in different ways but be polite and patient and it should pay of.

There will be less for you and any relatives living or coming onto the house to fall over or onto, there should be much less chance of anyone tripping or anyone treading on nails sticking out of pieces of wood [I have done this and it is not nice] and it should also help prevent people slipping on dirty/wet floors.

If you have your elderly relative living in the house, or visiting then this is a very important one, be clean and safe and keep them safe.

In the first fews weeks of our work, the builder demolished a double garage to make way for the extension, now out of the ground the garage whole did not look too big but broken up into bricks and scattered all over mums drive, well the mess was enormous.

Now I had not foreseen this at all, not only was it upsetting for mum seeing the distruction but everywhere was really messy, it was difficult to get around either walking and in the car and even worse the builder did not really see it as too much of a problem – its a building site they said!

Yes but its also my mums home of 35 years, so not just a building site. In order to prevent it happening again we had a number of chats and over those 2 weeks the builder really mellowed and started to see the work from mums angle, it really helped and the site, drive and garden areas were all kept much tidier.

Another thing we found out was the use of extension leads where the wires can run in all sorts of places, watch out around stairs and try to make a regular check to see that any wires and cables used are clipped either at head height out of the way or taped to the floor.

When we did lots of our work our 2 children were around and they were very fast and inquisitive so keeping the place tidy left less places for them to look around and find stuff, saws, drills, screws oh all manor of things, if its tidy it tends to mean stuff is hidden away.

One other benefit is it saves you money – people didn’t just throw stuff on the floor, waste was minimised, tidying up plasterboard or insulation for instance which would otherwise have been thrown away could be reused, lengths of timber all sorts really and if I was tidying up, then it meant it was being done for free.

In fact cleaning became a bit of a habit for me, either in the evening or at weekends, I would go to site and tidy up, and as it was done regularly it didn’t become too much of a burden, a car load could easily be taken up the tip [saving on skips,which are v expensive] and it also gave me a chance to have a good look around, you sometimes found things which could be saved or reused or areas that needed attention.

Well if you take this on board when you start I reckon you will soon see what I mean, you may even begin to enjoy it, especially the saving money part and as you progress you might even find it becoming somewhat of a habit.