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. 

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 31...

... has just come to an end with a day of tile scrubbing. We're back onto the tiles for the greenhouse and now have one last push to finish them off. At last the pile looks small!

Cam Tile have finished the shingles at the back of the house and are nearly done at the front. The final bits of shingles are inside the greenhouse and the draft lobby by the front door. There is glass in the greenhouse windows with the roof still to finish.

Saturday morning the plasterers were in screeding the greenhouse floor and finishing off a few small areas of plastering. We arrived early to use some of the screed to create our cobbled yard. The stones are all found on site during the archeaological dig. They are river stones not local to this area. When we dug them up there was lots of broken pottery and quern stones mixed in with the cobbles. The stones still need a good clean and we might look at using some sort of sealant to bring out the colours (when wet they're very varied in colour - not all grey as they look here)

Nick spent Saturday fiddling around with all our reclaimed door knobs and all the upstairs doors are now fully functioning. It's an eclectic collection of knobs and the debate of whether to paint the doors white or leave the wood finish goes on. You can see the electrical fittings here with one of the room temperature monitors fixed next to the light switch. Our under floor heating is adjustable in each room.

The stairs have most of their glass in. It looks great but the long bannisters going up the stairs and along the landing are a bit wobbly - builders and architects are not too worried but i'm inclined to agree with Nick that they're just a bit too wobbly for comfort and we'll probably ask Ian to put another upright midway along the long lengths. I don't think they'll ever be completely solid.  

Our very own little Pompidou Centre! All connected and functioning. Lots of little expansion tanks attached to the various systems. Dan will come back at some point to tell us how it all works and how to use the controls. We have a touch screen pad to control the heating zones and timings - ain't we all modern!

Juliet has been here helping for a second weekend so special thanks to sister Jules. 

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. 

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. 

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 :-)

Plumbing extra ...

Plumbing news from my meeting on site yesterday: 

We looked at the sanitary ware we have so far ... a sink and pedestal from the reclamation yard, another old sink that's been in the undergrowth in mum and dads garden for quite some time and 2 old belfast sinks that'll go in the utility and greenhouse. I showed them the art deco reclaimed taps I bought the other day which turned out to be useless as the threaded pipe has been cut off too short on one of them so back to the reclaimers they go. We also bought a reclaimed towel rail which should fit in the main bathroom. The plumbing men were very underwhelmed and certainly didn't want to contemplate adjusting a similar reclaimed towel rail for the en suite. We may end up with new ones after all!

They are going to lag (insulate) all the pipe work for us - hot and cold. I also have to speak to our other plumber (!! - fitting the heating system) to make sure he does the same and especially ensures all the pipes are protected from the beams they run past - we don't want any knocking/creaking and at the moment he has a hot water pipe touching one of our steel beams. 

The rainwater harvester chucked up a couple of problems ... the header tank is a bit big for the space we have for it in the loft (despite Nick's phone call to them with our dimensions) so it may be going on top of the earth wall. yoiks! And also the outside taps need a special large diameter pipe and they should come direct from pump in the underground tank rather than the header tank so they have decent pressure. 

Plenty of plumbing dilemmas to keep us busy.

Plasterboarding

I've just paid the site a visit and it's a hive of activity today which is nice to see. I was working over the weekend but Nick's been on site sorting out a gap underneath the oriel windows (bay windows but upstairs) and braces for the earth wall.

Last week we both visited a build project Ian completed 6 months ago to look at the conservatory he did there. This is it below - we thought it looked great so we've given him the go ahead to use the same system and framework for ours so it will look similar (minus any brick work of course). He'd renovated several rooms in the house here and the finishes were all excellent - definitely made us feel really good about his work and excited about getting to that finishing stage.

Plasterboard! The master bedroom taking shape. The boarding has made the space look smaller I think. 

All the doors now have frames.

Well. They're not subtle but I do think they look neat and the slate border looks great.

Our reclaimed slates - instant character.

Our rainwater tank has been delivered. It will be buried at the back of the house.

Ian, Paul and Steve

Ian (our main contractor) has two guys working more or less full time on our house - Paul and Steve. They have loads of experience and get on with the job, no fuss. Lovely.

We had a long meeting with Ian yesterday afternoon. He's finished his other projects before Christmas so we're it now and he's wanting to be finished by the middle to end of March. Seems like a lot to fit in in the next 2 months but we'll be very happy indeed if it all comes together. We talked about door architraves (frames), window cills/boards (outside/inside), stairs, greenhouse, kitchen, loft hatch etc, etc.

Today I visited site to walk around the house with all three of the guys and voice/look at our airtightness concerns (I should really say obsession here). It's not something Ian has much experience in so we're trying to stay on the ball with this. I've had a happy afternoon sorting out the cobbles from the architectural dig and looking at thousands of kitchen sinks!

Our solar panels are up and we were hoping some of the slate roofing would be completed by now but the team doing the roofing were on site for a day on Thursday and have been unwell since!

20 x 190w Sharp panels making up a 3.8kw system. Shame the government has reduced the feed in tariff last month (incentive scheme where they pay us for energy we produce from our system) so we won't be making so much wonga, but we still feel its a good investment: We make lots of nice free non carbon producing electricity, our estimated pay back period although extended is still only around 10 years after which we get 15 years of earning (if the govt stick to their promises). 

Battens and counter battens ready for the slates.

Our reclaimed doors. All victorian 4 panel doors. They've been dipped to strip the paint. In need of some minor repairs and a coat of paint. 

Happy new year!

There goes another Christmas. Lots of family and food - all good :-)

Nick and I visited the reclamation yard again the week before xmas and picked out a sink, some door handles and picked up the doors so we can get measured up and frames can be built to suit each door. A successful visit except that we think it was probably a bit too active for Nick after his appendix op and the next day the op site became quite rigid and painful. So close to xmas the doc sent him straight back to hospital for another scan. All clear and home the next day with some antibiotics. phew. 

Creative Christmas cake decorating has become part of the xmas tradition at Girton with a rather grizzly theme developing!! Last year santa was involved in a horrific accident and was being rescued by ambulance. This year he was on the operating table as a nod to Nick's ordeal. 

Back to the house ... the solar panels were fitted just before xmas, along with the flat roof. The slates should be going on this week, or next (somewhat dependent on the gale force winds i'm sure). Inside plasterboard is the next major task. I think the floor downstairs must be happening quite soon as well. It's currently just the concrete slab which will eventually be outside the thermal envelope - insulation and then a layer of screed with the underfloor heating pipes in it are to go down bringing the floor level up by about 200mm. We're meeting Ian on Monday to talk about the schedule going forwards as we still haven't really nailed it down again following the delay cause by the earth wall. I'll get some pics of the solar panels to post then. 

Samples of the quarry tiles we've picked out for the wet/utility areas downstairs.

Tomorrow we are picking up a shed Nick's bought off ebay - we're planning on setting it up on the car port so we have somewhere to store things that we buy for the house.