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.