Sunday, 29 April 2012

Mud and Landscaping

It's been raining for weeks but fortunately the slippy clay mud has been replaced by a layer of compressed hardcore which makes getting round on site a lot easier and cleaner. It's possible to imagine the final drive and paths now - they're going to look great.



The house has been shut up all week with just a few electrical bits to fit, but Ian is waiting on us - we have an outside light on order that still hasn't come and luckily Nick tried the hob out last week and discovered I've bought the wrong one so that needs changing too!! The electric ceramic hobs look just the same as the induction hobs and the model numbers are all very similar. Not much of an excuse really as I managed to ignore a confirmation e-mail clearly saying electric ceramic hob. but hey.

Nick is trying to sort out our buildings warranty with a company called Buildzone which involves a survey and giving them lots of information about the structure/finishes etc. I have been mostly working although I was on site yesterday - I bought another hob, a fridge and spent the afternoon scrubbing floors!!

The balcony rail is pretty much finished and the greenhouse floor now looks lovely and clean and the cobbles have had another going over with the brick acid so they are ready to seal/oil.



Stairs and landing looking all finished and nice. 




Friday, 20 April 2012

Project cam time lapse videos and extra pics ...

Nick got the time lapse pictures working and has posted on you tube:

Movie 01 - Slab.
Aug 30 - Sept 11, 3 hr intervals. 0:27 mins.
Piles already in: clay board laid, steel work assembled, shuttering assembled, slab poured.

Movie 02 - Rammed earth wall mark 1.
Sep 14 - Sep 27. 3 hr then 1 hr intervals. 1:48 mins.
Glass foam base fitted, shuttering assembled, ramming, scaffolding assembled, more shuttering, more ramming, shuttering comes off, wall falls down, earth cleared.

Movie 03 - Rammed earth wall mark 2, SIPs construction.
Oct 14 - Nov 5, 1 hr then 30 min intervals. 3:04 mins.
REW2 shuttering & scaffolding in place, ramming of 1st 2.7 metres, scaffolding for SIPs assembled, REW2 pt 1 shuttering removed, ground floor SIPs and 1st storey floor and gable ends assembled, REW2 pt 2 shuttering and ramming.

Movie 04 - Cladding.
Jan 9 - Feb 9, 30 min intervals. 2:41 mins.
Breather membranes, battening, slate roof and western red cedar boards.

These are just some extra pics as it's been a couple of weeks since the last post.






April showers

Today (and most of this week) has been april showers and very claggy clay on site as Ian gets going on the landscaping.


Hardcore arrives for the driveway and paths around the house. Steve is sealing the windows ... in the rain, up a ladder. Yucky.


Paul constructing the balcony railing - made from Iroko wood it will match the juliet balcony on the right. The shutters on the SW facing bedroom windows have been fitted and look really good.


Green tiles have been added to the yellow kitchen, the hallway floor is done and you can see the shingles in the draught lobby in the background. Nearly there!


These are the jute carpets going in the bedroom. It's a natural fibre therefore recyclable, biodegradable etc and is quite soft under foot. I'm slightly underwhelmed by the beige colour (seemed nicer in small sample, looks flatter - the colour that is - than I thought it would in a larger area) but I think they'll go well with the theme of the house - natural browns against the white walls. Our stuff is going to add a lot of colour. We have sisal carpet for the landing, a coarser fibre - hardwearing and a slightly richer colour. Can't wait to see it all in place.


And finally here, the bathrooms are complete. Showers and fancy mirrors in. We got rather attached to the idea of demisting mirrors following a hotel stay recently and found these ones online encorporating LED lights too. Not sure they match the reclaimed sinks but we're not overly bothered about everything matching (as you've probably noticed). 

Last bits

We had a great break in Scotland last week :-)

And so back to business this week with the great journey of the last bits underway. Showers and kitchen are in, the carpets have been laid upstairs and balcony rail is almost finished. Nick and I sanded our last floor on tuesday so the interior is almost, mostly, more or less finished! We still have tile floors to clean, reclaimed doors to paint, cobbled floor to sort out but these and lots of other smaller tasks not in the contract for the builders to do will no doubt go on for quite some time.

The landscaping is outside our main contract so that will pootle on over the next few weeks, but we are looking to get the house signed off and the main contract completed soon. To get building control sign off we need certificates for gas and electrics, the (wheelchair accessible) ramp to the front door has to be in place and we must provide a screen on one side of our balcony so we don't overlook mum and dad's lawn (part of our planning conditions).

We also have to provide our air tightness test info (house closed up and put under pressure - leakage measured). I talked about this in an earlier post: For regs we must achieve less than 10 air changes per hour, best practice is to get under 5 and we were aiming for less than 3. The SIPs construction is by nature airtight but there are still plenty of opportunities for gaps at all the junctions and we found quite a few gaps in the shell to plug so we weren't sure what we'd get. Our specification stipulated less than 3 and Nick and I have stayed on the case doing a final round of the SIPs shell with the expanding foam as well as pointing out (harping on about) where we think there are weaknesses. Ian has installed a separate air tightness membrane inside the shell and it's all paid off because we got the test back at 2.4 which is a very good level. Hazzah!


Rear left: Paul. Front from left: Graham, Ian, Tom (Ian jnr), Steve. This is the core team who have been on the job throughout. All very lovely people. There's been a few other regular faces - Mike the decorator, Steve and Gareth on flooring, Daniel the heating engineer, Shaun and Paul the plumbers and Trevor the sparky.

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Still a month to go!

We thought we might be done for the end of March but not quite. Actually it shouldn't be another month for the house interior - there really isn't much left to do.

It's the Huxley family annual excursion next week (Scotland, Ullapool - yaaaay) and we're hopeful we can think about moving when we get back. We've agreed with Ian that the landscaping will be completed after the contract and house has been signed off.


Paul turning his hand to hanging shingles. Camtile did the roof and shingles outside but Paul is doing the last bits in the greenhouse and the draught lobby.


New shingles arrived a couple of days ago. They had run out just before the outside was completed. You can see here the last bit at the top left is newly completed and the change in colour from the rest of the facade which has had just a few weeks of weathering.


The ditches and pipes at the back of the house are starting to look a bit more organised. The rainwater tank has been commissioned and is working. The overflow has had to go round the pond to a soak away at the bottom of the garden. 


The utility room getting a frame for a work surface and some cupboards and shelves. The toilet behind the door is working using from the rainwater tank (although the water in there at the moment is actually from the well at number 1)

Nick and I have both been very busy trying to choose and buy all the remaining bits needed for the house. Nick has been on lighting, which is no small task, and I've been trying to get everything in for the kitchen. I think we're mostly there although we probably could have done with getting the online orders in a couple of weeks earlier to allow for any problems. 

Floors

Flooring is definitely the flavour of the week so it's getting it's own post. Nick and I have been working hard getting the wood floors sanded and finished - last one to do tomorrow. The quarry tiles are all down now and the bathrooms have had the cork laid. The carpets will only go down when everything else is done.

The reclaimed materials caused us yet another headache when it became clear we didn't have enough of the maple to finish the hallway. The reclaim yard were a complete pain in the bum and tried to charge us for more even though they had short changed us on the amount so I managed to find another source (determined not to give Morways more money) and we should be ok to finish. To anyone thinking of using reclaimed stuff remember to stock up on time and patience before you do!


We sanded the main room floor on Friday. All the wood floors are being finished with a couple of coats of Osmo hardwax oil which is very easy to apply and nice natural stuff. It's been useful having the flooring guys around whilst we do all this as they've given us lots of tips on how it should all be done. They mentioned that some professionals use a squeegee to apply the oil and since we had a large area to do we got ourselves a squeegee. It leaves behind swoosh marks and the odd blob if your not careful but I think i've got the hang of it now. It gets the job done really quickly and the main room floor is looking very lovely (or it was before the workmen moved back in and made it all dusty and dirty again!)


Quarry tiles in the greenhouse. I've cleaned the quarries in the utility room with brick acid which removes morter marks and tough stains. They've come up nicely so I'll do the same in here at some point. There's no underfloor heating out here - we had darker tiles put in with the idea that they'll catch the heat of the sun better warming the space and therefore preheating the air before it comes into our house via a wall vent. 


Cork feels a bit retro to me as a look (to go with our avacado tiles!!) but it's good stuff. Sustainable by it's very nature, requiring little processing with a lovely warm colour and very pleasant feel under foot. 


As promised, a picture of the sanding kit. Nick working the horrid little edging sander. You have to keep your finger pressed on the go button otherwise it automatically stops which means it's quite hard to get comfortable when shoving it around. It's surprisingly heavy and always pulls in one direction. Yuck. 

Photosynth

I've been having a fun time photographing spaces in the house using a new app on my phone: Photosynth (thank you Jeremy). It lets you take a lot of pictures of one space and then automatically stitches them together to make a panorama.

The upstairs landing.

View from the greenhouse through the main living area to the hallway and stairs.

Paul hanging shingles in the greenhouse, Graham and Tom tiling in the kitchen and Gareth and Steve (or half of Steve here in the picture!) fitting the hallway flooring.