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. 

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.

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 :-)

Shingles

We were on site Thursday and the cladding on the front of the house was nearly finished. Most exciting though was the shingles being hung on the two straight sides of the house (boarding on the gable ends, shingles on the sides). It's all looking rather fabulous in my opinion.

The boarding will all be painted but the shingles will stay untreated and should weather to a pleasant grey colour. I talked in an earlier post about the paint mix. This greenish colour was pinched from university building in Cambridge. We got the paint details and instructions for the finish (which involved several coats) but failed to note that the paint is meant to be 'one coat' only - designed to show the grain of the wood through the colour. The effect on the main boarded areas is lovely but we used the white that formed part of the colour mix on the window surrounds and soffits/facias etc and a washed out look is not so good here. It proved difficult to apply extra coats as it's only designed for one coat (not helped by very cold conditions) so we still need to sort out a decent solid colour for the white areas. 

Peeking out of the study oriel window (upstairs bay). They make an interesting alcove in the room and have small side lights only so we can get some light, but not overlook the lawn at number 1. Outside you can see the shingles being hung and further along the master bedroom oriel.

The offset angle of the two sides of the house make an interesting view from the master bedroom through to the bedroom on the other side of the landing (and in the other direction).