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 :-)