1st fix and appendix

I started a blog last weekend but the computer got stuck trying to upload pictures so I gave up. It's now been a couple of weeks since i've posted anything during which time Nick has parted company with his appendix! The useless appendage started giving him some trouble a few weeks ago and was finally removed last Saturday. Recovery is going well.

Quite a lot has happened with the house. On the exterior JoJu have completed the roofing system that goes under the panels and much of the house has been battened. All the windows that fit are in! We seem to have lost a few centimeters in the centre section so the 1st story windows here won't fit without some adjustments. Ian should be contacting SIPs UK to discuss, well find out progress this afternoon when he meets Nick.

Inside, plumbing and electrics 1st fix (bits to go in before plasterboarding) are mostly finished and the 1st floor underfloor heating pipes are installed.

Hospital admission for your birthday? Yes, please!

The small living area windows looking out towards the pond/tennis court. Front door stacked on the right. 

And from the outside ... it's a bit hard to see from the pictures but there is a sort of reverse bay here. The middle section is set back into the house creating corner window seats on the inside and a central recess for a seat on the outiside. 

Upstairs a reflective membrane on the floor will reflect the heat from the under floor heating pipes upwards. On the left you can see the clerestory windows that run the length of the house at the front. 

Gotta go xmas shopping now. Hope you're all looking forwards to festivities? I'm off work. Can't wait :-)

Windows delivery

Today saw the arrival of our windows. Very exciting!

It seems like a long time ago when we did our windows shopping. We priced up some of the more expensive elements of the house about a year ago to try and get a handle on the budget, so got a load of windows quotes in and chose a company we liked way back then ...

We wanted (and have got) timber, triple glazed windows. British built would have been nice but doubled the price so Greensteps is the company we have used in the end. Their price was very good, the product and hardware seemed good quality when Nick paid them a visit and they have been very responsive and helpful to all our enquiries. The windows are inwards opening, which is usual in northern Europe, and apparently gives a better seal - it will be interesting to see how we go with those. They are made in Latvia I think, or Lithuania. I was just looking on their website to see which and found a 'making of' video. Doesn't seem to say were the factory is though :-/

Windows! It's dark inside the house at the moment because it's all wrapped up - including the window openings. You can see the blue internal membrane behind the windows, for airtightness. 

Our big sliding doors that will look out the back of the family/living room.

We have another large opening between the main living room and the green house where we have sliding/folding doors - something Greensteps don't do. They are much less airtight (as Greensteps rightly pointed out) but we felt we could afford slightly reduced performance here as the greenhouse will buffer these windows from the elements. So we have splashed the cash and ordered some swanky double glazed doors that will open right out. Should make a lovely big space in the summer. Still awaiting delivery of these. 

Membranes

The end of this week saw the house wrapped in a breather membrane and work on the plumbing and cladding begin. Nick's been working from Girton so he's around for questions and to keep an eye on things. Our shopping quest continues. 

Regal have been round the whole building with an expanding foam gun - getting in all the gaps, and Nick and I spent a few hours today doing the same. We have specified an airtightness target of 3 air changes per hour. To give that some perspective building regs set the standard for domestic dwellings at maximum of 10 and best practice at 5 so we want to better that but will be lucky to get to Passivhaus Standards which require less than 0.6. Ian will be fitting an airtight membrane internally which should be taped and sealed everywhere but after scrabbling around in the roof today trying to get at some of the fiddly bits in the central section and around the oriel windows and balcony I don't envy him the job! 

Reclaim

Last week I was getting on with some of the shopping we've got to do. I've been collecting kitchen magazines and visited Magnet and some very expensive kitchen shops. We're also going to see a local carpenter who builds kitchens out of reclaimed pine. Great if we can afford it - will have to see.

I visited a reclamation yard out towards Bedford (Prigmores - brilliantly jumbley with staff that looked like steptoe and son) and Solopark (nr to Cambridge, very neat and notoriously expensive) and then on Saturday Nick and I both visited Morways, a reclaim yard near to Attleborough that we visited a few months ago. By far the best one we've found. It was a successful shopping trip and we are negotiating on strip flooring, either oak or canadian maple (which is what they use for gym floors) for both the living areas and the study upstairs, 7 victorian doors and quarry tiles for ground floor utility areas. I'm sure we'll be back there at some point and in the meanwhile it's great to have ticked a few things off the list. Kitchen, bathrooms and light fittings now top of the shopping list.

A roof!

The roof structure is fairly complex so it's taken Regal a few more days than they had originally planned but it's now all up with just the house wrap (waterproofing membrane) and snagging (we check for problems - they fix) to finish.

The front sloping roof being put in place. It's great to get a feel for the shape of the upstairs landing. There's so many angles (that aren't 90 degrees) that it was quite hard to imagine what it would look like. 

The roof panels have holes drilled into them so they can be lowered into place using this hook system. A good view of Girton rooftops from here. 

The regal team. There's a lot of expanding foam around the place, in the roof panel holes and any where else there's a gap! 

SIPs - the last stretch

We've had a good sociable and food filled weekend :-) The house is at a really good stage for tours - the walls are up and rooms all laid out. The rammed earth wall - aptly re-named by Dad as the damned earth wall - was uncovered during all the weekend sunshine and the roof still off so a fun open air feel to it all. There was a birthday gathering for mum on Saturday so everyone got a look round and Lawrence and Iris have climbed all over everything (except the earth wall which Nick vetoed!). I've just been over to meet Meg and Frank (Nick's mum and partner) for a look round. Regal have started fitting the roof today so they are on the final straight and we will have a complete shell in a day or two.

The full height wall in situ. 

View from the SE corner of the 1st floor - earth wall in the background. Standing in a bedroom and looking through to the bathroom and another bedroom. 

Nick in the living area. Looking towards the kitchen end. The far right corner has SIPs panels internally to make up our larder. The window inside this will be louvered - so no glass/open to the elements. The larder walls and doors are all insulated creating a cool storage area. 

Another wall pic - it's soooo tall :-)

The roof panels are stored on the tennis court. The crane reaches all the way over from the road to pick them up and deliver them to the roof. 

A panel on it's way to the roof. 

And the view from the road. This bit of roof is were the solar panels will be fitted. 

taa daaaah!

It's up. It's stayed up :-)

Brought to you by: Nick, Kate, Michael and Neil (and featuring the Gumtree boys: KC and MJ). Made possible by generous volunteering of time from Stelios, Simon, Bob, Ben J, Chris, Ben W, Dan, Rob and Juliet. Thanks to all.

The shuttering starts to come off.

The archaeology layer is uncovered. Just above the line you can see where we swapped from stabilised to unstabilised earth. We used up all our cement, toyed with getting more for the last bit but decided not to. The cement was phased out over a few layers - it will be interesting to see the difference when it's all dry. 

You can see the horse shoe here - in need of a bit of uncovering (a most satisfying job).

The stairs will run up this side of the wall. You can see the lighter line of the dry wall disappearing down to the ground floor. It's huge. 

Wall, work, weather ...

What else is there to life? I can hardly remember!!

We rammed our last ram yesterday. Come what may the wall is finished! It's been a damp few days work. We lost Friday morning to rain but otherwise have been getting on with things through the drizzle. Simon, who has spent a couple of summers working for AC Architects and is now looking for a placement year, has been helping every day since thursday so a special thanks to him.

We are taking shuttering off today so hopefully I can post good news re a finished and upright wall and pics later or tomorrow. The bottom of the wall is still uncovered and seems to be doing fine so [fingers crossed] the top should be fine.

Here's a few pics from the week.

Oh Yeah! Go Rob! 

The latest hoist set up to get the earth to the top of the shuttering.

A soggy interior to our ground floor after heavy rain Thursday night. The bottom half of the wall is a little damp but otherwise looks great.

Ben and Simon. Friday helpers.

Late afternoon. It's dark at 4.30pm now. 

With a little help from our friends

We've been working on the wall(s) since mid September and have had LOADS of help from our lovely friends. I'll publish a full list of credits when it's done!

This weekend we had Ben W over on Saturday helping Nick get some soil sieved while I refurbished the shuttering. Jules (Nick's sister) stopped by on Monday for a nosey and helped me finish the varnishing. Today big Bob has kindly leant a hand and we have Ben J, Rob K and Simon (from AC architects) all giving up their time later this week.

THANKS TO YOU ALL :-)

REW2 - the final lift begins

Regal have put up some of the 1st floor walls and one of the ridge beams today so we can get a feel for the total mass of the house. They're off site now for a few days for us to get the wall finished.

The picture below shows the beam in place. The 1st story floors are down and this afternoon was spent setting up shuttering and the hoist so we can get going with the ramming tomorrow. 

We've chickened out of going unstabilised for the last bit. I'm sure it would be ok if we did but our jangling nerves have got the better of us. I'm sorry that this element has lost some of it's eco credentials and it's moisture control properties but on the bright side it should look amazing and will still work as thermal mass and all being well we get to hold on to our sanity! 

Structurally Insulated Panels

I haven't had a chance to post anything here this week. There's been a lot of change!

We decided quite early on that we'd like to build using Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs). They have excellent insulation properties, by nature they make for an airtight structure and they are manufactured in a factory and then assembled on site = very quick build time.

Our panels have been manufactured by SIPs UK in Northants. Using the architectural drawings they sketched the house in 3D and designed the panels from this.

3D view from the back of the house.

Nick paid the factory a visit in August. This is the boss man, Nigel, and some panels. They are constructed using two boards of OSB (oriented strand board - looks a bit like chip board to me) - these go in a gig and a polyurethane foam core is blown in between. Some sort of magic goes on and the foam bonds to the board. No glue required apparently. And there you have it: a strong, light, insulating, board and foam sandwich. 

The fitting company, Regal, came on site on Monday and have been fitting all this week. There's been a couple of small snags meaning they're a day behind but they've been hard at it and we now have some ground floor walls! It's been brilliant this weekend wandering around the spaces - able to really get a feel for the dimensions of it all.

The Kato crane!

Pesky earth wall dressed in blue.

Most of the joists are in place for the 1st floor. Through the window opening you can see the big pile of bean bag things. They'll be strategically placed when the team are fitting the roof, the idea being if anyone falls off the house/scaffolding they'll have a soft landing!

Work on the second part of the earth wall starts again on Tuesday. It's been lovely to have a break from it this week and not really looking forwards to the last bit - too many anxieties about it all. But ... the first bit went well, looks great and is drying nicely so we're carrying on for the full 5 metres. 

Half way there ...

Shuttering came off the first lift of the new wall on Friday. It's now Sunday and it's still standing ... phew! Nick, Neil and Michael were the ramming team Thursday and Friday. Everything went well and we have been admiring our wall as it starts to dry out over the weekend. This afternoon we are building it some protection. Next week the scaffolding round it comes down and the walls and 1st story joists of the house go up - so lots of large objects being moved around the place. We definitely don't want any dings.

Nick and I both have a heavy working week next week and then the 2nd part of the wall begins again on the 31st.

Neil and Michael working on the last layer.

Fresh out of the shuttering.

The wall bathed in sunshine on Saturday morning. It looks a lovely warm yellow colour, the layers and textures showing up nicely.

Scaffolding is now up around the perimeter of the house ready for Regal to start fitting the SIPs panels next week. Our middle bit of scaffolding will come down on Monday. 

Onwards and upwards

Nick tells me my Testing Times post is very boring! Heh heh - sorry about that - was having a nice time talking about crush test results and trying to explain some of our decision making ...

Short version: We're adding cement to the bottom half of our wall. Once it's had a chance to dry it's much stronger (obvious really!)

Tuesday: A reasonable day's ramming. The scabbler broke, and took an hour or so to fix and spent some time in the afternoon putting up the next layer of shuttering. Nick caught up with wayfinding work in the afternoon so just me, Neil and Michael then. 3 people worked ok. Sore hands and shoulders for me though. Progress around 70cm.

Wednesday: Unfortunately I'm back at work the rest of this week. There was a manpower shortage yesterday - Michael wasn't around either. Nick had posted an add in Gum Tree for someone to help (paid) last week which generated several calls. Working on a 1st come 1st serve basis we had a chap lined up. He had sounded ok over the phone but texted first thing to say he wasn't coming. Why, oh why, couldn't he have called the day before? Useless (insert own word here). So a bad start for Nick but he carried on down his list of responders and found someone with nothing better planned for the day!! Progress around 70-80cm.

The wall going up really does look the same as last time. So i'm posting pictures of the wall fallen down instead:

All that work ... in a heap.

Jeremy, our architect, helping Nick dig the next day.

Where the wall gave.

Testing times

This weekend has been all about the numbers. 


After the collapse we sent off a sample of our earth to ESG a company that do materials testing amongst other things. They have run tests for other REW projects so knew what we were looking for. The results came back on Friday and I was able to talk these through with Rowland Keable (builder of many unstabilised REW). It's all been very educational and interesting.


ESG did 3 tests for us. The results are as follows:

Sample 1: Tested at As Recieved Moisture, without Drying (therefore no Shrinkage)

Compressive Strength:  0.18 N/mm2

Sample 2: Tested as Oven Dried

Compressive Strength: 1.8 N/mm2

Shrinkage: 1.3%

Sample 3: Oven Dried, with 7% cement.  6% water added to achieve drop test criteria

Compressive Strength: 0.48 N/mm2

N = Newton (wikipedia def) 

Sample 1: The earth cannot dry in shuttering so when the shuttering comes off the wet rammed earth has to have the strength to support the wall. This strength is what let us down. Interestingly the 7m unstabilised rammed earth walls at the CAT centre in Wales have the same width and were built in the same way as ours (all in one go). Their rammed earth had a wet compressive strength of 0.5 N/mm2. So we would have been ok up to about 3 metres with ours. 

Sample 2: The dry rammed earth number looks better and would be absolutely fine for our wall.

Sample 3: This number was unexpected and sent us into a right quandary on Friday. Unfortunately ESG had left this test til last so it only had 3 days to dry before testing leaving it weaker than the unstabilised dried sample. 

The poor stabilised number didn't make sense and even though we know cement should make things stronger we wanted proper numbers to compare and contrast and know exactly where we stand. So, Saturday morning we drove down to ESG in Uxbridge and dropped in a stabilised block we'd made 11 days ago. They tested it for us first thing this morning. 

We had decided over the weekend that if the number was still less than the dry unstabilised we'd build unstabilised and figure out how/if to do the top half of the wall later, if the number was good we could stick to our (revised) time plan building the first half stabilised this week and the top half unstabilised in a couple of weeks. 

It was a tense wait ... to cement, or not to cement ... but the number came back good: 2.8 N/mm2. And so, we will have cement at the base of our wall. 

We're relieved. We could have gone for a 2 stage unstabilised build but ... we didn't know how effective 2 weeks drying out at this time of year would really be. We probably could have figured out a way to build the top half later - once the house was up - but the house design means there wouldn't have been much headspace to work in at the top which would have made things really tricky. And in the end there isn't a huge margin of error to play with here so we didn't have the stomach for it.

deja vu

REW2 - day 1!!!

Nick and I sat looking at the beginnings of a rammed earth wall just now pondering our experience of the last few weeks. We're on the up - the trauma is fading and we're feeling good about things again.

This morning was spent waiting for test results and then we got going this afternoon only to be foiled by the compressor we hired to run the scabbler (rammer). We fiddled around, rammed the first layer by hand, phoned the plant hire co. and then Michael headed off home. The plant hire man arrived and showed us the button we should have pressed (@*!^) and Nick and I finished another layer after. So ... we're a whole 10cm off the ground!! Not to worry - we have 4 days to get to 3 metres which should be ok, and we can work Saturday morning if we need to.

Neil's joining the team again tomorrow. I'll try to take a picture or two to post although they're going to look very similar to those taken 3 weeks ago but a bit less sunny!

REW2 ... looking hopeful

Plans are on track so far to start the wall rebuild next week.

The earth was collected, taken about 5 miles away to a local company who put it through their big grindy sieving machine and then delivered it back ... all for £300. Seems like a bargain when we think of how long it would have taken to break it all up and put it through Nick's sieving machine!

The foam glass base got a bit chipped when the earth was shoveled away from it. Probably would have been fine but we decided to start fresh, so it's been removed and a new base ordered.

We've made a couple more test blocks to see if there is any point in paying extra for white cement - does it effect the colour? The blocks have yet to dry but it certainly didn't seem to make much difference to the wet colour.

The shuttering has been refurbished by Michael. We have sanded where needed and varnished again. It's going to have a bit more texture than it originally did. The wall loses some texture when the cement is added but it will gain some from the boarding. Should be interesting.

As well as adding cement we are also now hoping to build in 2 stages. This means we can take the shuttering off the bottom half of the wall and give it a couple of weeks to dry while the SIPs co put up the shell of the house. They say they should be able to leave us space to build the top half of the wall and they will then finish the last bit of house/roof around it when we're done.

Our builder is back from his holiday today and Nick is meeting with him tomorrow to talk about the new plan.

Wall woes

So, I was thinking of changing or deleting my last post because we got it a bit wrong. I'm leaving it there for posterity.

Jeremy our architect was a witness to the collapse of the wall and very kindly came along on Saturday and spent a sweltering day (29 degrees) shoveling with Nick.

It was very useful to uncover things because it turns out our mistrust of the foam glass base was unwarrented. In was entirely intact and it became obvious that it was the wall itself that had collapsed. On reflection, and having chatted today with Rowland Keable (whom has been involved with a lot of the largest REWs around including at the CAT centre), we are pretty sure our error was in failing to allow the bottom of the wall to dry before piling on the weight. So the shuttering came off and we had a damp wall trying to support 13 tonnes. Aaaah, hindsight.

It did look great though before it fell:

Lovely layers. (and cement cap)

Archaeology layer.

Majestic. Sigh.

Can't quite bring myself to post the post fall pics just yet. But we are getting over the shock of it all and steeling ourselves for another build. Lots of phone calls today and getting our heads around the cost implications and task ahead. It is a house building rule to have a 10% contingency fund. We thought we might spend it on the garage if we managed to be disciplined enough through the build. But no, we've gone and done a grand designs style disaster ...

Soil samples are being sent for testing tomorrow. We will get a stabilised sample (7% cement added) and an unstablised sample tested for strength so we can work out how much of the wall we need to stabilise to make sure the next one stays up. We have to build quickly as delay = cost for the main build so we don't have the luxury of having a spare couple of weeks to dry bits of the wall. We are also entering into frosty season ... that's the other thing that could put pay to a damp wall no matter how strong it is. Hence, we will most likely stabilise the bottom half and leave just the top unstabilised. Still organising everything and checking costs but this is the plan at the moment.

REW1 - R.I.P.

What a week.

I've had a busy week back at work. Nick had a really good couple of days ramming Mon & Tues with friends helping and they finished on a high on Tuesday.

But ... our foam glass base has failed. We were using it as a thermal break - so the cold from the slab couldn't travel up the wall. It has massive compressive strength, but we were warned to be careful on the first few levels of ramming as it does not withstand point impact. We were careful. but ...

Nick and Michael were taking all the shuttering off yesterday and I had a lovely telephone call at lunch time - the wall looked amazing. The undulation of the layers was nicely visible, the archaeology looked great, the finish was fantastic. But it turned out that the bottom layer of shuttering and rib had been preventing the damaged base from moving and as soon as it came off the wall fell.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for Nick watching all that hard work topple. It was pretty devastating seeing the aftermath on my return.

There's a few things we're glad of:

• no one got hurt
• it happened straight away - not later
• we went unstablised so we have a pile of earth, not concrete to sort out
• it was freestanding within the house so our design and build is safe without it
• we know that the rammed earth part of our effort at least worked brilliantly

The plan at the moment is we will make a whole lot of calls on Monday and see what the implications are of holding the build up for a couple of weeks and see if we can start again. sigh. Our architects are looking into a different type of base - probably engineering blocks or similar and we will put up with the thermal bridge. And poor Nick has got up early this morning to go and start moving the earth again. 

We're both feeling the weight of disappointment and failure. I'm really hoping we can build it again in the next few weeks. The thought of all that work and stress again is awful but in the long run I think it will feel like much more of a victory. So, on we go.

Archaeology and respite

We've had a very nice weekend of catching up with sleep and life after a busy week. We're back at Girton this evening and hoping we'll be finished ramming on Tuesday. Camilla, George and Grandfather came by for tea and a tour.

This evening we've picked out some of the artifacts from our archaeological dig, giving them a good wash and deciding on an arrangement for embedding them into the wall. Got them all laid out ready.

We had to have an archaeological survey completed as part of our planning permission. It never made any sense to me that we had to pay for the pleasure, but that's the way it works. We challenged this condition as the development across the road had not had it imposed upon them but we were told that this was a cock up ... grrr. It was £1500 for the standard survey. We really didn't think we'd find a thing but we got a call to say there was a find! How exciting! Nick went down to meet Nick and Nick the archaeologists and all the Nicks had a fun time uncovering some cobbled yards and various bits of pottery, bone, ditches and post holes. No gold or jewelry unfortunately, and an extra 2 days on site to add to our bill but hey ... it's good to have some history. In amongst the cobbled yards were lots bits of quern stones (for grinding corn) made from german lava stone which would have been sent over on ships to East Anglia as ballast - wool would go on the return journey. There's a full report - if you're interested in a read let me know and i'll send it to you.

My uncle, George (see above), is an archaeologist. We thought we could take advantage of the trenches and the information supplied by the archaeology team and have a bit of fun looking for more treasures. George kindly agreed to arrange some structure for the day and a recording system - we found loads more stuff (still no gold) and had a great day. Highlights of the day: Jos and Charlotte found flint, Oscars birthday cake, Clare dissects a vole, pottery George thinks is probably roman (nearby Huntingdon rd is an old roman road). There's an online album (also in links section) - including the digger disaster of the following day.

Rammed earth wall - day 7

Had a great day today. Shuttering ready to receive and all systems go so we've had our best day yet for height, achieving 1.2 metres (ish).

My crew mate of three years, Chris, is on holiday this week so very kindly put in a day's work for us.

Chris and Nick. 

It was Stelios' last day today. If you're reading this Stelios, you were missed at the dinner table tonight! He's been a top worker and very good company all week. Thanks, Stelios.

Lunch time picture. Final layer of shuttering put up last thing. 1.5 metre's left to ram. Predicted finish day = Tuesday.

Ahhh! 

The ramming rod is a modified scabbler. Usually used to key cement surfaces - so I'm told. 

Team extreme.