Old post finally published.

Written on May 18th:

Nick and I are on site today for the first time this week. The landscaping is looking good with the paths around the house finished - the driveway is taking shape and the patio at the back of the house is just waiting for us to supply some more paving slabs. 

The levels around the front of the house have been a bit tricky to sort out because we have to be careful to keep the finished level well below the wood structure. Not a problem at the rear where the ground falls away from the house but here, at the front the level is higher.

Nick sorting out a light shade I bought from a antique shop last year - it has a sprung pulley thing so you can lower the light. The table has been donated to us from my grandfather - it was the table in his office at Trinity college, we can either have it as a small round table as it is here or extend it with a central section to seat 10! Behind Nick on the left you can see the new induction hob in it's box and on the right the huge fridge. Nearly there. 

All our pictures are at the house and I have been putting them around the place trying to decide where they will go. Good fun!

The sand goes down for the driveway. It's a great shape - I love the island with the pear tree in it.

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.

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.