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. 

News flash (and pics)

I am sure you will have been on tenterhooks waiting to see what would happen in the courts regarding the feed-in tariff case. Well ... you can relax, the news is just in ...

The Supreme Court has refused the government permission to launch an appeal against the Court of Appeal's decision. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17490096

So, the solar energy bods have won and the early reduction in the tariff (before the end of the public consultation) has been deemed illegal. The government cannot appeal and will have to pay according to their original promises. As we got our installation completed before March 3rd (on March 2nd!) we'll be eligible for the original tariff. This decision also makes the 25 year term of the feed-in tariffs much safer. Good news for the industry and of course us.

As this is a nice short post I'm tagging a few extra photos on the end of it: -

Drains being dug at the front of the house.

Glorious texture.

A freebee from the reclaim yard lovingly restored by Nick.

Felt like the blog has been ignoring the wall of late so here's a reminder pic.

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. 

1 month to go ...

or at least that's what we're hoping. Ian is going great guns and every day is a busy day on site at the moment. We're hoping the main build will be done at the end of the month. We have agreed with Ian that the drive and some hard paving outside will sit outside the time constraints of the contract - mostly because we can't make up our minds what we want. We specified grasscrete as we wanted something permeable and that wouldn't look overly formal but then we decided we really didn't like the look of it so may go for hopsack bricks instead. Both options can be seen here.

On site the upstairs doors have been hung. They will eventually be painted white but they were kept in a shed at the reclaim yard and have been living in the playroom since they got to Girton so we will give them a few weeks in the warm house to dry out and acclimatise before painting them.

Here they are. Nick's put up a some of his lamp shade collection - he had a fun time last year lusting after expensive spun aluminium enamelled lampshades. He's purchased a few of them, some old and some new. 

Ian has set up one of the toilets. The cistern is designed to be built in so we will need to design and build some boxing around them. We will have 3 toilets. They are Ifo cera Es4. Swedish designed and using only 4 or 2.7 litres per flush they apparently 'set the standard' for water saving bogs! They will use our saved rainwater along with the washing machine.

The electricity was connected on Tuesday and our solar panels connected and commissioned today. We are getting the feed in tariff registration in by tomorrow - the deadline if the government's early tariff reduction is overturned. They set a tariff that they said would apply until April but then just before xmas suddenly halved it. The solar panel industry has been thrown into chaos as lots of orders were cancelled but Green Peace have taken it to court and so far been successful in arguing that the early tariff reduction was illegal.

Other progress this week - solar thermal panels are on the roof, the heating engineer is fitting the thermal store and finishing off the plumbing for the heating system. We have gas. The site hut has gone. Our large sliding doors separating the family room and the hallway downstairs have been fitted. These we had to have for building regs, to separate the kitchen from the stairs. They are hidden in the walls when open. I'll get some more pics of all this tomorrow.

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.