Yesterday the project report was handed in, this marks the end of Basil Spence for me and my peers. Oh joy.

The engineers officially finished with Basil on Monday 26th November with the last deadline of handing in their work to the architects to create a report from and handing their notebooks to the department office, with plagiarism form, which would stop us from doing more work. These last few days saw us put the document together, which was an opportunity for me to learn how to use Adobe’s InDesign.

The last 24 hours before the deadline was intense. I became delirious and saw the funny side, and was also happy to be imminently washing my hands of this project. However the others were tense at times. Tom Down and I set up shop in John and Tom’s kitchen. The hours rolled on and some stuff seemed to get done and other stuff insurmountable. 9pm 10pm 11pm 12 1am 2am 3am 4am 6am 7am 8am 9am 10am 11am 12 1pm 2pm. And with 2 hours to our deadline we got into a frenzy and did final touches to the document printed to PDF, and went to two repro-graphics shops. The shop I went to was a backup but was cheaper so we printed there. The number of errors they made trying to do the printing set us back. With 15 minutes to go (!) I ran out the shop, met the guys in a car near my flat and sat in Friday traffic. Driving up the hill we spotted missing labels and tried to fill them. We handed the report in 15 minutes late but they were okay with that.

Our report is 64 A3 pages, double spread. I was really impressed with some of the content, but make up your own mind - here is our report in full:

I am so pleased this report is over as it has completely thrown my final year, messed up my study, got me very far behind my dissertation, given me much stress and late nights. I even failed a piece of coursework in the process. However not all bad. I did enjoy working with the architects and getting a feel for how they do things and observing their passion for the subject, something sorely missing from the engineering fraternity. I suppose I am left with mixed feelings. Meh.

Ages ago I decided not to shave until I had finished Basil thinking that would have been ages ago. Now I have styled the face fuzz into a comic handle bar for my 5 minute dissertation presentation, so you get to see that on Tuesday.