Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Floor plans

Well I've been meaning to get our floor plans scanned in for some time, but with one thing or another, plus the fact that we haven't figured out how to scan on our all-in-one printer gizmo, well, it's sort of dragged on a little longer than one would have hoped.

Still, we're there now as one of my nice team members has done the scanning for me. Almost worth popping into the office for during the Christmas break. Almost...

So, without any further ado, let me introduce yer to the inner gubbins of our Huf Haus...


As stated a couple of times in previous posts, our house is a mildly modified 3.09.30, which loosely translates as a 3-axis house, each axis 30cm wide, and it's the model number 09. Now most of the mods are on the ground floor layout, so it's just as well that it's the logical place to start with.

Just to the left of that table and chair combination you'd normally find what's known as an Erker in German, but you and I'd know it better as a bay window. But not one of those 1930s semi-circular bay windows. It's a sort of oblong extension three of those segments long, and about a segment wide. Well, to cut a long story short, said bay window thingy would have pushed our living area too close to the external boundary on that side of the house, so it had been wiped off the floor plan before we took over the project. Oh, and we got a credit for the saved material cost from those lovely Huf Haus peeps.

The next mod was the removal of a few bits of solid and glass interior walling that the standard house has here and there to 'shield' the living room areas from the horrors of the main entrance. Can't have too much space, we felt, and going by feedback from a few Huf Haus owners, we did the right thing.

The last significant mod is a bit subtle on the surface, but somewhat significant under the hood. The standard kitchen area (marked Kochen on the plan) for this house has two parallel solid walls running three segment steps in. This leaves yer a fairly narrow kitchen, which plenty of owners struggle to make some kind of sense of. When Claudia and I visited Hartenfels, we naturally took a big interest in the 3.09.30 show house that would be a close analogue to what we would be building... only mirror reversed and sans Erker. It's the grey 3-axis house, and if you'd been there you'd likely remember it. Anyways, that house had been modified so that the parallel walls only ran two segments into the house. This liberates some space betwixt kitchen and the gallery area, which is a nifty place for a cooking island. However, it also means that one of the main cross beams that holds up the entire house on a windy day has to be moved one segment step towards the entrance side of the house. A major modification behind the scenes which would normally require much sucking of pencils to implement. The great thing is that all we had to do is to ask the nice Huf Haus people to copy 'n' paste the show house solution, which they did at no extra cost... and of course all the structural due diligence had already been done. Or so one assumes, as the show house didn't show any signs of toppling over.

Oh and we replaced the usual lounge exterior door with a whopping big 3m sliding door. As, inevitably, does everyone else, so leave some budget aside for this.

That's it for the ground floor, so upstairs we go...


...where we find an almost standard floor layout.

One of the balconies has been deleted due to its proximity to the outside parking area. The official reason was that it would have cut out daylight. However, I well remember my own childhood, and therefore cannot imagine my wee lads resisting the temptation to leap from balcony to parking area and vice versa. Nah, it had to go.

The open gallery is slightly smaller due to the deletion of the Erker down below, but believe me it's still a soddin' big gaping maw that might give the vertigious amongst us something to think about when pausing for breath at the top of the stairs. One would consider a safety net, if one wasn't sure that the lads would use it as a trampoline.

Up above the landing we have a couple of skylights cut into the very top of the roof. One last minute change was to ensure that these could be electrically opened and shut from down down down below. A bit pricy, but essential for anyone without an extra long pogo stick. Or jet pack.

Lastly, (and contrary to the floor plan) we reversed the sense of the door to the little cubby hole next to the stairs so that it opens outwards not inwards. More storage space that way, right.

And that's all folks, so down to the Keller...


...via the 'optional' Keller stairs. Believe it or not, the continuation of the main stairs down to the Keller are not standard. One imagines that many a Huf Haus client goes bananas when they first find this out, but we (like yourself now, so no excuse) had been prewarned and therefore took it better than most. Cannot remember the exact cost, but it's lots and lots. Seems some owners would prefer to use a ladder or parachute or that jet pack to descend/ascend to their wine cellar... well, to be honest I cannot see an earthly reason why such an essential component of any Huf Haus could be optional. Nuff said on the matter.

Ignore the various waste water pipes on the floor plan. They'll be happily channelling away waste water safely out of eye and mind for many decades to come.

The standard cellar doors are metal horrors, by the way, so we replaced all with something more attractive.

We tinkered about with this and that wall until we ended up with four separate rooms: the laundry/heating room; the main storage cellar; the highly important and super secret wine cellar; and last, but not least, the bloody bloody bloody Bastelraum, aka The Bloody Office.

Sigh.

The two exterior windows to that The Bloody Office are decidedly non-standard, and have an exterior 'cut' into the garden to channel at least a wee bit of daylight to the pale sedentary slave below. Also non-standard is its 'civilised' heated floor and neatly plastered walls that extend to the stairs area. Also the extra electrickery wot yer need; phones, internet, TV, lights, camera, action. All in all, The Office has easily been the most contentious part of the interior, eclipsed solely by the parking area land grab for time, expense and general pain in the arseness. Consider this: our above land Huf Haus is already vast at 220 square metres and offers two rooms surplus to our immediate requirements; a coin toss could have decided which would be the spare room for visitors, leaving the loser (winner) as a perfectly functional office. But oh no, we decided to use some of the 'wasted' cellar area as the office instead. A 35 square metre area that's literally bigger than my first apartment. Hmm, one recalls a story about a baboon with its hand stuck in a hole in a tree because it refused to unclasp the fistful of nuts it had discovered there. Well, The Bloody Office is that fistful of nuts. It's an extra cost of somewhere in the region of CHF 50,000 or GBP 20,000 for an extra room we didn't need. Madness!

Still, it'll be nice when it's finished.

That's me for 2006, so wishing you and your loved ones a very happy New Year. Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Status on Christmas Eve

I popped over to the house for a wee look at lunchtime. All was quiet in the village and at the house. The temperature was down to -3 degrees C, so the ground was frozen, but little more than a slight dusting of snow about the place. Nice to be able to walk all around the house without muddy feet as the icy mud crust easily supported my weight.

I tested our new key and it worked perfectly. The key was a special arrangement with the Huf Haus people. Normally they avoid giving the owner a key too early due to (one supposes) safety reasons. If you really really want one, then really really ask for one and you'll really really get one.

As the floor hadn't had more than a couple of days to begin drying I just stood outside and looked in. The new floor looks... flat. Erm, not much more to add other than the fact that it looks a lot better than, if not as interesting as, the expanse of snaking heating pipes that were there before. When I later circled around outside of the house looking at this and that, I looked into the Keller windows and gazed down into the upstairs floor from the parking area, and was rewarded with visual proof that all interior floors were now nice and flatly cemented. Done. Good.

So where are we now?


Well, looking back on this blog I see that the first sod of turf was moved on the 19th September, and it's now the 24th December. So, just three months have passed in which our untouched green alpine meadow has been transformed into our dream Huf Haus, albeit one still awaiting a few necessities before we can move in.

The ground has been made safe from subsidence or slippage. The cellar has been built, and the small matter of a whopping big Huf Haus shoved on top of it. The first stage of landscaping completed so we have some steps to our house and the paving stones to get us to our front door. The electrics and water are in and functional, as are the interior and exterior drainage pipes. The wooden covers for various nooks and crannies that channel cables and pipes within the house are all safely nailed/bolted/glued on. The heating system and maze of underfloor heating pipes are present and correct, functional, but not to be switched on just yet. The flooring has been cemented in.


So what has still to be done in the next couple of months?

Well, the kitchen is not much more than a few pipes and wires hanging out of the wall, as are both the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms. The bath itself is on the balcony for now, as are two loo-sized boxes. The parquet floor has to be laid, and the bathroom floors tiled. The cellar walls need to be prepared, whatever that means, and the part of the cellar that we decided to have 'civilised' into a spare room/office needs plastering. Then every wall needs to be painted. One imagines that all white wooden surfaces need to be painted, but I'm really not sure if the wooden bits come prepainted from the factory, or undercoated. Whatever. Oh, and then the whole lot needs cleaning cleaning and then cleaning again. And then we're still awaiting the next phases of the landscaping to sort out the garden and parking area as the exterior looks like the aftermath of some bunker busting cruise missile.

Yep, a lot more to do, but believe me, our cups are half full. We really couldn't be happier with the progress of the last three months.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Small delay to the flooring

We received a call from Herr Arkitekt (he of the bowtie) regarding the flooring situation. Seems that there's been a week or so delay in the Huf Haus people getting the flooring put on top of the floor heating pipes. And this delay will have a knock on effect on the overall schedule.

Some background...

The Dastardly Bob Salmon refers to something called screed which might be what all this is about, but one feels it's tacky to learn such vulgar blue collar construction words. However, what I do know is that some stone chip-type stuff gets put on top and all around the floor heating pipes, and then when it's all looking nice and level, cement (or it may be concrete) gets poured over the lot.

Yer then got to wait a week until this sets enough to bear the weight of the Swiss heating engineer and Huf Haus something or other engineer wot have to clump clump clump across said floor, descend down to the Keller area, walk across some more newly laid floor, and then switch on the bloody heating system. Heating system then hums for another week or so, thereby completing the two week floor drying exercise.

Now Huf Haus have a Christmas shut down period of two weeks. Very civilised way of doing business, one feels, that many companies around the world should think about implementing. The idea was to take advantage of this shutdown period by ensuring the bloody heating system is on before everyone ups tools and buggahs off to their traditional German christmas haggis dinners. As the floor needs a week to set before the heating goes on, that meant the floor had to have been down by last Friday 15th December.

Unfortunately, we've just heard the floor went down yesterday.

So, to truncate an already longish story, we have to figure out a way to coax out the local Swiss heating engineer sometime during the Christmas break. Possible, but perhaps unpopular as the company is located in an entirely different Kanton.

Even worse, we have to persuade the equivalent Huf Haus engineer to climb into his BMW, drive the 800km or so down to our house, even though his fellow German workers are all tucked up in their highland crofts watching telly. Even worse that worse, one feels that the Huf Haus engineer has only a bit of switch flicking to do, which is hardly an inspiring reason to make a 1,600km round trip. However, engineers being engineers, one can quite imagine that said job must only be done by a qualified Huf Haus engineer with a black-belt in switch flicking, and it'd be an unheard of precedent for him to give the instructions over the phone to someone a little closer to the ground.

In summary: we're delayed at least a week. And wot with that Dastardly Bob Salmon hitting a purple patch, one fears the tide has turned against us in the race to the finish.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Terra-forming II

Quick lunch time trip to the house today, just to see what's what. Well, actually to see what state our grinds are in now that the landscaping chappy and his merry band of diggers have very likely packed up until spring.

Sooooo, instead of my usual wordy blog, I thought I'd do a photo intensive post today. Ok with you lot? Then I'll begin...


Here's the view of the Zurich lake we get when taking the autobahn towards the village where we're building our Huf Haus. Please note the blue waters, radiant blue skies, sun drenched houses, and then dismiss the lot entirely. This is December 13th, so the weather is simply a continuation of the fluke Autumn we've been lucky enough to have this year. Normally December through to February are three months of continuous grey skies, with the odd, and I mean odd sunny day to relieve the monotony. And delay the suicides.


Which is why the Zurich residents escape to the mountains at the drop of a hat. It just so happens that the Autobahn trip to our new home also gives yer a dynamite Alp view.

Oh, the hardship.


Then, after a meandering road through the moraine lands above the lake we get our first glimpse of the village, and, if you look very carefully, our house.

Hmm, now's the time to give the snowline an anxious look. Ooerr, looks to be about 850m. Another couple of degrees off the average temperature, plus a snowy day, and we're up to our necks in it.


And then we arrive. Here's the rather tight and steep cul-de-sac down to our house. One will soon be able to report just how passable this is going to be during the winter months. Ooerr again.


So, here's where the landscaping chappies got to before dropping tools. We have a nice flight of main steps, plus the paving stones are down. Great stuff.


So down the steps for a closer butchers...


...still plenty of view from here...


...ahh, they left a decent gap of earth betwix paving stones and wall. Hmm, wot d'yer reckon? Ferns or moss? Or both? Let's see it from the other side...


...ok, I'm happy.

Hang on? The door's locked and nobody home. Where are the Huf Haus peeps? Probably at lunch somewhere eh? Or back in Germany? Ah well, we're talking about Huf Haus, so I don't have to police the hairy-arsed workers like those poor unfortunates that choose not to build a Huf Haus.

Ok, I'll wipe that smirk off my face. Sorry.

So it's external photos only today, which I suppose is what I popped up here for anyways.


So out again to see the rest of the land around the house. Now we intend to use wooden decking for the rest of the 'paved' areas, plus judicious applications of pebbles for that mock japanese look. One imagines that some time in the future, the mock-japanese look will be just as scorned as the mock-tudor dross that's blighted the Blighty suburbia. Until then, we intend to make hay while the sun shines.


So I climb on a pile of concrete blocks that someone helpfully left here so I can get a view from what will be the westernmost corner of our garden. Not the biggest piece of land, but it does run alongside a whopping big field of grass, which'll visually extend the greenery.

The intention is to leave the boundary between the garden and pasture land as undefined as possible. It'll work well in winter as many Swiss mountain villages up their fences so that the wires don't garotte a passing cross-country skier. However, during the summer months there be moo moo cows in them thar Alps, and they'll be after me begonias they will. Actually, I have a theory that the farmer'll put up one of those electric fences anyway, although one wonders how many times my wee lads'll get zapped before they learn to eat the grass, soil and worms on our side of the fence. Oh the joys of parenthood.


And here's the view from t'other corner. Note the big sliding door in the middle of the house. Oh and the standard Huf Haus balcony, plus the dangly chains which act as drainpipes. I watched water cascade down these a couple of weeks back. Really really neat.


And then we have our twilight zone. This is the north-eastern side of the house, and I think the sunlight situation here is obvious. The gap between house, roof and slope is bigger than the photo gives it credit for, but whatever we do here, it'll be a bit compromised. The landscapers will close most of the hole up leaving a 2m by 3m slot to give some light to those Bastelraum windows yer can see down there. The rest will be more or less level. One supposes that once the plastic wrap's been removed, some sort of stepped terracing cut into the slope, and ground fixing plants put down, we'll have something nice to look at.

Claudia fancies getting plenty of pebbles and stones put into this area, and bamboos and various big grasses. Could be yet more japanification, but only if the grasses can put up with the lower levels of light that we'll have here. Shall do some research on the matter.


And here's the view from the carport area back towards the cul-de-sac. The ground was frosted enough for me not to disappear into the mud. All seems wide enough... in fact the drive way's sooooo wide that I reckon we can remove some of the upper stones from our climbing wall. Shall talk to landscaping chappy when I next see him.


And then a look back towards the carport to confirm we've enough space to drive our cars in. Yep.


I hate to finish a blog post with a photo of a mud bath without the ladies, so I thought this last image would leave a better impression on you. And me.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Second visit from the Huf Haus blokey

So we had the second official appointment with the nice Huf Haus rep chap, who had come down from Hartenfels especially to review progress thus far.

Claudia and I arrived separately, so I rather rushed in with little time to simply look at the progress. By the time I'd caught up with the party, the discussion had just about reached the Bastelraum... the hobby room that we'd arranged to be built into the Keller with a couple of extra windows down there for natural daylight. Good thing too, because in my mitts were samples of the floor laminate that I'm going to be putting down myself into about a third of the Keller area (that's the Bastelraum plus the bottom of the stairs area. Seems impossible at first, but the thin laminate board plus a sort of skinny underlay rubber stuff adds up to about 1cm in total. And thus the Huf Haus work of putting down the underfloor heating pipes, plus the stuff they put down on top of that, has to be exactly 1cm short of the final desired height.

Obvious stuff, but yer'd be amazed how many people stuff this up.




Anyways, said laminate passed the Huf Haus inspection, and I left it down there in case the rest of the Huf Haus people needed a further scratch and sniff session. It's that sort of whitewashed wood grain stuff, expertly chosen by Claudia (heh heh) to bring yet more light in and look clean and smart. Should look good, even if the bloke wot's gonna shove it down has little idea what he's doing as he works in a bank. Hmm, must be careful not to lay it down over anything bumpy, like one of the kids.

One thing that I couldn't help noticing were the snaky floor heating pipes that were, well, snaking their way all over the place. The shapes they made were interesting to look at (for a few minutes, anyway) and as always you could see the love that went into laying them down. I took a few photos for the rest of the world to peer at, so one hopes the images do the snakes some justice. Note I sneeked in a photo of the gorgeous, pouting Claudia 'cos she's far more photogenic than me. Ditto the hairy-arses doing the hard work.

As we ascended to the ground floor, and later the upstairs, it became clear that the floor heating work's been fully completed throughout... and it looked like a lot of work indeed. One believes they'll be laying some sort of gravelly stuff on top of that to fill in the spaces, before it all gets coated in a nice flat surface of (I suppose) concrete. Or is it cement? Oh lordy, I have no idea.



There was another pause in the bathroom, where we committed to have the wooden box thing that covers the sink pipes trimmed down to standard Huf Haus height. Not sure what happened, but it may be that the drawings for the non-Huf Haus sink unit that we've chosen (From some fancy bathroom company calling itself 4B. Really, 4B. Bloody pretentious name, unless yer a pencil) had an example wall box shown on it, and this was taken literally by the ever helpful Huf Haus people. They increased the height of the wall box on the assumption that's what we wanted, so it's now too high to allow us to place a mirror against the remaining wall above it. Well, maybe a mirror for giraffes would work.

Anyways, it'll be cut back down to size when the carpenter people descend on us sometime in the new year. Case (almost) closed.




There was something else I thought I'd share with you lot. Somehow the underfloor heating pipes, even if not exactly what we'll be seeing when we move it, still gave us a visual sense of scale of the interior for the first time. By golly, this is going to be a bloody big house. Yes yes yes, I'm well aware that all houses look bigger when empty of furniture, especially those with large open plan spaces, but this was on a bigger scale again. The photo above gives a sense of what I mean, but you've really got to be there, as they say. We might have to set up a semaphore system for communication. And carry mobile phones with us. And a flask of hot tea in case we get isolated from the group.

Simply huge.

Oh, and some progress in the grinds. Wassa grinds? It's a posh word for gardens, innit? Anyways, the main house steps are built and as my fingers pitter-patter on this keyboard, the last of the outside floor tiles should be going down. Some daft sod forgot to take some outside photos, didn't he. Anyway, trust me; they're down. Just in the nick of time, as the forecast's somewhat bleak as the dreaded snows descend upon us this weekend. Ooer, down to 500m and probably lower. To interpret: a sprinkling of snow happens at 500m, snows worth sweeping away at 600m, and snows worth italicising at 700m. And we're at 726m. This simply means it's highly unlikely we're going to get our parking area paved until the thaw in March.

Buggah buggah buggah.

Incidentally, yer might have heard that Switzerland's a somewhat mountainous place, and thus its weather forecasts are three dimensional. Really. "Snow down to 500m" and "Freezing above 1,000m" being familar weather items to digest and talk about over a beer or three. Makes the forecasts a tad complicated to get yer head around, but it seems to work. And as there are plenty of people in this country that really do live at altitudes higher than Ben Nevis, it's a necessity.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Update to the update on the parking situation

Email back from nice neighbour regarding the parking situation. It turns out that he's not all that fussed on retaining his secondary parking space after all, so if it's alright with us, we can forget the whole thing.

Erm, ok.

Seems he wants to use this area of his land more for pretty flowers than as a bit of extra parking, and that I think we can all empathise with. It's just a shame we didn't know a month or so earlier, as all the discussions and compromising that's been going on's pretty much delayed construction of our parking area by a couple of weeks at the very least. The landscaper chappie's dubious if he can now get this this bit finished before the winter snows inevitably descend upon us. Buggah it. But then we might be very lucky, who knows.

On a brighter note, landscaping chappie commences with the construction of our final final final main steps solution, and also with the external floor tiling around our house entrance. That means that by the end of the week we can safely get in and out of the house without crossing ankle deep patches of raw mud. That'll be a real morale boost for all concerned.

Update on that Dastardly Bob Salmon's blog: his house is up, and as usual with these Huf Haus people, nicely on time. Looks very nice too. We'll wait for him to confirm which model number it actually is, but to my untrained eye, it looks like a standardish 3.06.30. Very handsome indeed. We'll let him confirm or deny, eh?

Tomorrow we have the second of our regular meets with the Huf Haus representative. Will try to listen more carefully to what he has to say, but to be honest it's hard not to get distracted gazing at stuff when yer get a wee chance to have a sniff about inside. One's been led to believe we'll be getting our own key tomorrow, so we can make our own raids at the weekend, rather than pressing our noses to cold glass windows. Good-oh.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Update on the parking situation

Regular visitors will recall that sometime in the past the original owners of my neighbours' house had 'conquered' a long triangular strip of land from the land parcel that was ultimately to be bought by ourselves. The triangle had been used to widen the neighbour's driveway to his secondary parking space (his primary parking area and garage was to the front of his house)... all this had been done using land that we'll be needing for our own driveway, ta very muchly.

Now the current owner seems to be a nice chap. All this 'liberating' had been done years before he arrived on the scene, so hardly his fault. So we'd agreed in principle that the two driveway entrance areas should be more or less at the same level, so that if his car or our car happened to put a tyre on t'other side of the boundary while negotiating the turn in (or turn out) then that would all come out in the wash. His entrance would be tricker than ours, but then ours wouldn't be easy-peasy either.

Still with me? Good...

So t'other week the Gemeinde (equivalent to a small village goverment) had turned up team-handed to review the parking area situation for both houses. They'd informed us that the main water pipe for the whole bloody village was somewhere down under our neighbour's triangle bit, and it's mandatory that at least 1.5m of earth remains over it, or it'll freeze solid during the colder winter nights. Oo-err. Other than that, they said do what you need to do but make sure you get a handshake from the neighbour. One suspects that the land grab of yesteryear was a sore point with the Gemeinde, 'cos it had happened under their noses. And this isn't exactly the largest village in Switzerland.

Anyways, by the end of last week, the heavy landscaping had resulted in a driveway-shaped terrace above our nice new retaining mega-wall, and this terrace had been widened until it had reclaimed the errant triangle. Have a butchers yerself at the photo above. You could get an aquamarine JCB digger through that gap, no problem mate. Yep, when seen in the flesh, our driveway will now be ok with or without a helpful bit of our neighbour's driveway to negotiate the corner. We're alright, Jack.

So last Saturday, with all this in mind, we meet up with said neighbour (and the landscape chappie) to discuss how we could help him with his driveway problem. Only it all went a bit strange. Read on...

He very clearly stated that whatever wall we put up between our properties to shore up his land should be a high as necessary so that his land would remain level right up to his boundary. Yes, he was very clear about this. Ok, that's his right, even if this increases our material costs dramatically. Are we clear on that? Because he'll not agree to any other solution. Erm, yes we're clear. Very. Yep. Gulp.

Next point: there's a bit of our land remaining behind our carport that seems to be unallocated on the plan. Erm, yes that's right. Could we please build this up so that it's level with his land? Erm... He would offer to plant this with some nice bushes and trees and stuff. Erm, we'll think about this... erm... erm...

Oh, and he proposes that he returns his remaining triangle of driveway back to its natural garden state. He could then plant it with nice flowers and bushes and stuff. He could then access his parking space by driving over our new driveway. Ok? Erm, erm, erm...

Well, he left us to it, and we continued our discussions with the landscaper chappie who was also looking a bit shaken. We turned our discussion to the main steps from our parking area down to our house. This has always been a contentious subject, and the steps had changed position three times since planning began. There's a 3 metres height difference betwix house and parking, so the material content of the steps was something to worry about, nevermind the practicality during those wintry months. So we moved the bloody steps once more, this time to the side of the house facing the small cul-de-sac road. Only about 1.2m elevation difference, and less of a horror when icy.

Done and dusted decision, and we're happier chappies for it.

One day in the nearish future, I'll construct two wooden staircases up either side of our mega-wall which can be used during the summer. Convenient and cheap. Might also stop our lads from scaling the 3m wall for kicks... ahh forget it, nothing can stop that.

Back to the parking area...

Just this morning we sent an email to said neighbour. No question that we'll meet his wishes with regards to the retaining wall between our properties. Damn the expense. We don't agree to his proposal to use our driveway to access his parking space, as this goes against the original idea of equal levelled entrances to ease entry/exit, (i.e. it's a bit rich to suggest to rip up yer own driveway and use ours instead). Let us know if you still want to reduce the level of your driveway entrance to match ours.

Email straight back: never that fussed about this secondary parking area anyway. Might be happier to reuse the driveway for garden, and forget the whole thing. Will get back to yer with a decision as soon as poss.

One feels this isn't the end of the subject.