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It's been raining for weeks but fortunately the slippy clay mud has been replaced by a layer of compressed hardcore which makes getting round on site a lot easier and cleaner.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. 

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.

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.

Sunshine and Sanding

 Week 32 has seen the end of our scrubbing days and the beginning of our sanding marathon. We finished off cleaning the last of the tiles today (in glorious sunshine) and have also sanded and oiled our first of the wood floors. It was Nick's office - the smallest room - we did this weekend, about 10-11m2. I reckon we have about 60m2 to go! All the floors at Stanley Road have been self sanded so we are familiar with the kit and process. It's dusty, hot, noisy work but if you have all the right stuff (ear defenders, goggles, good dust mask) it's not so bad and it's such a pleasure to see the floors finished.

We've hired the kit - the main sander is a thing like a cross between a lawnmower and an upright hoover with a large sanding wheel at the front and a dust catching bag behind (I'll get a picture when we do the next lot), then there's the edging sander which is a a very heavy duty circular sander with two handles on either side. The main lawnmower sander pulls you along the floor so is relatively easy to use, the edging machine is like an angry beast that is constantly trying to get away from you and all my muscles are aching from shoving it around!

Before ... 

... and after. The second coat of oil is still wet here so all looking a bit shiny but we've chosen a matt finish so once dried it just looks like the natural wood. This room is oak, pinky biscuit browns - gorgeous. The large living area downstairs will be maple so a paler cream colour. 

Nick perched on the finished pile of quarry tiles - playing with our heating touchscreen controls. 

Looking out of the bedroom door/window at the back of the house. There'll be a juliet balcony across here so sleepwalkers/children can't hurl themselves out of this 1st story door so easily. In front of the pond the hole for the rainwater harvesting has been dug in the wrong place! Where the hole is now will be our lawn and the rainwater tank will be off to the left of this picture.

The greenhouse is still waiting for it's glass roof. The floor will be finished with the final batch of quarry tiles and the walls are to have shingles fitted.

Week 30

It's been well over a week since I last had a chance to sit down and get a post done here so there's a bit much to report in one go. I was wondering how to split the posts and settled on straight forwards time.

I reckon that we got going on the build in mid August last year so last week was week 30 and this week is week 31 of the build - I'll do a post for each.

Working out how many weeks we are into things was interesting. When we sorted out the contract initially Ian was proposing do the whole build in 20 weeks. It was an ambitious target and here we are 10 weeks over run. Around half the hold up is entirely our fault – what with the damned earth wall falling down and all. The other half seems to have been lost along the way and I have to say I’m very glad things haven’t moved any faster than they have. We’ve had so many things to choose and decide I can’t imagine having done it any quicker!

So … week 30 (last week) saw more scrubbing of floor boards - a joyous 2 days. The oak boarding was much easier to clean than the maple so we got that done fairly quickly then on the Friday got back onto blunting chisels on the mapel gak. Tom, Ian's son, Juliet, Nick's sister and Rob, my friend all helped out on the Friday. Many thanks. There was still a lot left to do after and Nick and I both working this week so Tom and his friend Alfie (whom it turns out Nick used to teach at Long Rd 6th form) worked their way through the rest of the boards this week. It was well worth the money to get them on the case and they got hold of some very heavy duty scrapers that seemed to get through it all a bit quicker than blunted chisels.

The wood is all now stacked inside the house with space around the boards for the air to get to them. The heating has been on and it is getting used to its new atmosphere before fitting next week.

The slate tiles went up in our en suite. After trapsing round all the local tile shops and deciding on slate I had a look on line and thought the colour and pattern of these looked good on the pictures. I'm glad to say that the pictures were accurate (phew) and I really love the rusty coloured patterns.

Family bathroom tiles going up. These are handmade from Mexico (through a london based co. called Milagros). The red tiles in our kitchen at Stanley road are Mexican - they do such vibrant colours and I fell in love with this green although one of the builders thought it looked avacado! humph. 80 retro cool perhaps?

Boxing for the bogs is now done.

On the roof with Ian and Nick. Discovering here that the extract vent cowl for our whole house extraction system from passivent needs an upstand built. Air is extracted from the wet rooms through ducting via a single extract fan in the loft space so there is only one exhaust pipe from the building - therefore less holes in the thermal envelope. Each extract and inlet has a hygroscopic shutter i.e. a shutter operated by a strip that expands or contracts depending on the air humidity. There is a minimal background ventilation all the time and when one of the wet rooms becomes humid the extract automatically opens, the system detects the drop in pressure and steps up the amount extracted. Likewise it automatically closes when the humidity drops. I could go on about ventilation a lot more but Nick says this bit is already boring so give me a call if you want to know more about my thoughts on it!

O.M.G.

urgh! The gak that needs removing from the tongues and grooves of our reclaimed floorboards turns out to be industrial strength stuff. We fondly thought a few friends and a days work with a wire brush would get us through most of the boards but not even close - these are even worse to clean than the tiles were!! We have thurs/fri aside for more scraping, chiseling and chipping and are hiring some man power from Ian.

Lucky Rachel back for more reclaiming, lucky Charlotte visiting for the weekend and roped into a day's work and lucky Hellen whom I happened to see last week and nobbled for some time and effort. It was a freezing cold day with constant rain which only stopped for about an hour during which it snowed. The scraping was difficult and slow progress was made on the large stack of wood. A big thanks from us for helping with what I can only describe as a grueling task :-)

Alison visited last week and really was the luckiest of all because she didn't have to do any helping! Behind Alison's right shoulder you can see the sliding door partially closed across the main living area/hallway gap. This door is hidden in the wall when closed. Nearly everywhere is plastered now - the hallway and larder have been done since this pic.

We thought we were going to be able to fit our thermal store and gas boiler in the corner of the boiler room where Dan (heating engineer) is working but it turns out we can't so the tank has migrated over to the other side of the room leaving a trail of copper pipes in it's path. These have to stay exposed in case of gas leaks but luckily this room was designed to be the 'engine' room so we don't mind seeing how it all works in here. We have chosen an Ecocat thermal store from Chelmer Heating.

You can see the two sets of solar thermal panels fitted to the central roof section here. They sit up quite high off the roof and look a bit startling at the moment with their white plastic wrapping. Hopefully they'll blend a little better when it's just the black tubes. You can get either evacuated tubes, or flat panels to collect solar thermal energy. There are pro's and cons to both with the evacuated tubes reportedly performing better in cooler weather so should give a longer heating season.

You may also notice that the large blue site hut has turned into a small blue portaloo! 

Men at work!

The family bathroom starts to take shape. Tiling for the showers will go up later this week. 

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 :-)

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.