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. 

Electricity outage

We had arranged to meet Neville who's making our kitchen this afternoon and then Ian and Jeremy (architect) afterwards to talk about the window cladding detail. In fact, I had a call from Ian at around 11 to say that the electricity had stopped working so Nick and I hopped in the car then to see if we could sort things out.

It was a nice day to be on site. Freezing cold but bright sunshine and loads of activity, inside and out. It was a lovely surprise to see that they had started on the cladding and we can start to see how the finish will look. Loving it so far :-)

I think it was the flat roofing folk with a heat torch that tripped the switches. We got the supply from Mum and Dad's house up and running again without too much trouble. Dad will have to sort out the supply from the playroom (large shed in garden for anyone who doesn't know 1 High St).

There are two sizes of boards - 6 inches (foreground) for the main areas and 3 inches (just visible behind the first scaffolding pole) for detailing. The timber is western red cedar which is a lovely red colour but (to the dismay of some of the woodworkers on site) we are painting the boarding the colour you can see here. It's a grey/green colour we saw on a newish building at Cripps Court, part of Magdalene College where Nick has worked. We got hold of the architects who gave us the details, it's a mix of three colours produced by Osmo. The shingles on the sides of the building will be left natural timber and should eventually weather to a nice grey colour. The idea with the paint is that it is quite close in colour to the weathered timber so we may get away with allowing it to wear off and the grey timber to come through from underneath thereby avoiding both maintenance and the first few years of weathering which, if uneven, can look very scruffy.  

Painting the edges before the boards go up. There's a 10mm gap between the boards so it's all getting a lick of colour.

The car port base is crammed with timber and insulation. Also visible at the back on the left here is yet another shed. Rescued from a pub nearby it's a bit rotten in places but with dad's help Nick re-felted the roof last weekend so it'll keep stuff we buy for the house dry for now.

The ground floor has a layer of insulation now which has brought the floor level up by 120mm. The underfloor heating pipes were going down today and the screed is due to be poured on Friday.

The last bit of Sarnafil (flat roofing membrane) going on the master bedroom balcony.

A quick site visit

Ian phoned this afternoon to say that there was a problem with the positioning of the greenhouse. The greenhouse rafters should line up with the clearstory windows above them but somewhere along the line the slab and the windows have ended up 150mm out at one end and a bit less at the other. It's enough just to make it look uneven. Nick and I were both about this afternoon so we popped over to site to discuss adjustments. I got some good pics:

From left, Steve, Ian and Nick the joiner standing where the greenhouse will be. Our new sliding folding doors look great and match the Greensteps windows nicely. They are double glazed rather than triple and bi-fold doors tend to be a bit leaky but as the greenhouse will be on the outside of this whole opening they will be protected from the elements so we thought we could afford the lower spec in this respect here. Less glazing means they are lighter and therefore easier to operate.  

Actual plaster on the walls. Wow!

The seamless guttering was going up today. This machine is in the back of a transit - you can see the black rolls of aluminium sheet which feed through the machine and come out in the profile you can see just above the yellow label. 

How many men does it take to put up some guttering? Four apparently!

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.

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.  

A roof!

The roof structure is fairly complex so it's taken Regal a few more days than they had originally planned but it's now all up with just the house wrap (waterproofing membrane) and snagging (we check for problems - they fix) to finish.

The front sloping roof being put in place. It's great to get a feel for the shape of the upstairs landing. There's so many angles (that aren't 90 degrees) that it was quite hard to imagine what it would look like. 

The roof panels have holes drilled into them so they can be lowered into place using this hook system. A good view of Girton rooftops from here. 

The regal team. There's a lot of expanding foam around the place, in the roof panel holes and any where else there's a gap!