Tiles and kitchen

It's going to be busy trying to keep up to date with everything going on for the next few weeks and fun seeing the final finishes come together.

The stairs are now in place. The open risers and glass balustrades should keep a light feel to the space.

Old carpet wrapped on the steps to protect them. Just the glass to go in now. In our earlier designs we had a slide running down the side of the stairs. In the end the earth wall needed to be 50cm thick so this ate up the space for the slide. There will be a board running down between the wall and the stairs but it's now only 20cm wide - it will house some feature lights for the wall but it's not wide enough for bottoms. boo! The rectangle space under the stairs is waiting for us to re-establish our medieval cobble yard. 

LOVING the look of the reclaimed tiles. Had another hiccup when we ran out of the white tiles needed to finish the utility room - a misjudgement by the reclaim yard but they were very helpful in dropping some more off that very evening. This rich finish makes all that cleaning worth while. 

The service trench coming into the house. All the services connect from the other side of the road. The utilities companies bring it across the road and brilliantly it's impossible to get them to co-operate to use the same trench - they all have to come and do their own route across the road and patch it up again after.  Today is gas.

Walnut Grove is the new development immediately opposite us on the High Street. There's 5 new houses. 3 set back from the road and you can see the 2 semi detached on the street front in the picture above. They're looking pretty much finished so I expect they'll all be full by the time were finished in a month or 2. 

Neville sent us this snap of the kitchen nearly finished. Made from old roof beams it has a lovely finish. We really like to be able to see how it's all put together - the craftsmanship - however, with maple floor boards and most likely a walnut work surface we are going to paint the cupboards. Not sure that Neville approves but we thought it would be one too many wooden features in the kitchen. Not sure on colour yet. I think we'll probably use the red tiles we have at our current place again so something that goes with that. 

The wonders of reclaiming

The main theme of our house activity this week has been reclaim. I was on site Wednesday to receive delivery of our reclaimed floorboards and quarry tiles. Julian, the chap from Morways, and his dog arrived after lunch with a lorry onto which the floor boards appeared to have been randomly hurled!! He told me the lads loading the lorry had been left unsupervised and it would normally be much more organised. I suspect unloading may have been a bit of a mission even with the boards nicely stacked but the crazed nature of the loading added an interesting aspect to it all. It took us the best part of 4 hours to get it all unloaded and stacked. Phew.

From the lorry into the playroom. That's a bit under half of it stacked below. We have oak boards for the two smaller rooms we are boarding and maple for the main living area. 

The utility and boiler room are being tiled tomorrow so we had to get the tiles cleaned up today. Even Jasper is joining in here but Dad and Rachel (my sister, ducking behind dad here) were our main helpers - thank you to them. Some of the tiles were lovely and clean and just needed the dust and dirt brushing off but a lot had big chunks of mortar stuck to them and were a real pain to get cleaned up. They should be laid close together - with just a couple of mm gap. We certainly didn't manage to get all the mortar off them and also found that there are several batches, some which differ in size by 2-3mm, so I'm slightly worried about what the tiler will make of them. Guess we'll find out tomorrow - Nick and I will be back on site to get a few more cleaned up to make sure they have enough for the 2 rooms. 

We still have about half the total amount of tiles to clean up and quite a lot of the floor boards will need the tongue and groove cleaning so all in all a few days activity left on all this. The reclaim materials seem to be a similar sort of price to new but are certainly causing us a lot more work. Hey ho. We get instant character and a virtuous feeling for all our efforts. 

Otherwise on site we have the beginnings of our greenhouse/conservatory in place and the stairs have arrived. The scaffolding at the front of the house has come down and the final door and windows have been installed at the rear of the hallway. The house was bathed in light this afternoon - the amount of light that comes inside is amazing. It also felt rather nice and warm in there. Fab.

Made from yellow pine the stairs have a gorgeous pale colour and grain.

The first paint on the walls - the boiler room on the right here needs a floor and paint early so the services, boiler and thermal store (water tank) can be put in place. We get gas on the 23rd and electricity March 1st.

The final windows to go in. Look at all that light :-)

Shingles

We were on site Thursday and the cladding on the front of the house was nearly finished. Most exciting though was the shingles being hung on the two straight sides of the house (boarding on the gable ends, shingles on the sides). It's all looking rather fabulous in my opinion.

The boarding will all be painted but the shingles will stay untreated and should weather to a pleasant grey colour. I talked in an earlier post about the paint mix. This greenish colour was pinched from university building in Cambridge. We got the paint details and instructions for the finish (which involved several coats) but failed to note that the paint is meant to be 'one coat' only - designed to show the grain of the wood through the colour. The effect on the main boarded areas is lovely but we used the white that formed part of the colour mix on the window surrounds and soffits/facias etc and a washed out look is not so good here. It proved difficult to apply extra coats as it's only designed for one coat (not helped by very cold conditions) so we still need to sort out a decent solid colour for the white areas. 

Peeking out of the study oriel window (upstairs bay). They make an interesting alcove in the room and have small side lights only so we can get some light, but not overlook the lawn at number 1. Outside you can see the shingles being hung and further along the master bedroom oriel.

The offset angle of the two sides of the house make an interesting view from the master bedroom through to the bedroom on the other side of the landing (and in the other direction). 

Screeeeeed

Friday saw the screed go down. I had imagined a process similar to that of pouring the concrete slab, but in fact the screed is quite different. It looks more like our earth mix for the wall than concrete. It was mixed on site, and moved into the house in wheelbarrows, then levelled using wood battens.

It's made a massive difference to the look of the ground floor and the proportions of the rooms. The floor level is now just a few centimeters below it's final finish. There's a layer of chip board/ply to go down and then the reclaimed boards.

Saturday evening saw the arrival of 4 inches of snow - perfect for snow men and we even saw quite a few igloos. We managed to brave the roads to make it over to Girton and it was fun to see everything with a fresh white covering.

Number 1 with it's newest neighbour.

Electricity outage

We had arranged to meet Neville who's making our kitchen this afternoon and then Ian and Jeremy (architect) afterwards to talk about the window cladding detail. In fact, I had a call from Ian at around 11 to say that the electricity had stopped working so Nick and I hopped in the car then to see if we could sort things out.

It was a nice day to be on site. Freezing cold but bright sunshine and loads of activity, inside and out. It was a lovely surprise to see that they had started on the cladding and we can start to see how the finish will look. Loving it so far :-)

I think it was the flat roofing folk with a heat torch that tripped the switches. We got the supply from Mum and Dad's house up and running again without too much trouble. Dad will have to sort out the supply from the playroom (large shed in garden for anyone who doesn't know 1 High St).

There are two sizes of boards - 6 inches (foreground) for the main areas and 3 inches (just visible behind the first scaffolding pole) for detailing. The timber is western red cedar which is a lovely red colour but (to the dismay of some of the woodworkers on site) we are painting the boarding the colour you can see here. It's a grey/green colour we saw on a newish building at Cripps Court, part of Magdalene College where Nick has worked. We got hold of the architects who gave us the details, it's a mix of three colours produced by Osmo. The shingles on the sides of the building will be left natural timber and should eventually weather to a nice grey colour. The idea with the paint is that it is quite close in colour to the weathered timber so we may get away with allowing it to wear off and the grey timber to come through from underneath thereby avoiding both maintenance and the first few years of weathering which, if uneven, can look very scruffy.  

Painting the edges before the boards go up. There's a 10mm gap between the boards so it's all getting a lick of colour.

The car port base is crammed with timber and insulation. Also visible at the back on the left here is yet another shed. Rescued from a pub nearby it's a bit rotten in places but with dad's help Nick re-felted the roof last weekend so it'll keep stuff we buy for the house dry for now.

The ground floor has a layer of insulation now which has brought the floor level up by 120mm. The underfloor heating pipes were going down today and the screed is due to be poured on Friday.

The last bit of Sarnafil (flat roofing membrane) going on the master bedroom balcony.