The blockwork plinth walls started yesterday and today (Tuesday) they are almost finished. An heroic effort by Justin and his blokes, as this was the middle of the Great Rainstorm. The first two pictures were taken yesterday - you can't see the water, but it was like a swimming pool out there when we woke up at 6am - I thought they might not come or if they did we would have to hire a pump. In the end all sorts of other things went wrong in the way of deliveries, but the guys were amazing. They worked with brushes and buckets and cleared out the water, then carried on through the worst that the weather could throw at them.




So we now have our plinth walls almost finished. Two different makes of blocks owing to the aforementioned delivery problems, giving a fetching two-tone effect. The holes you can see in the back wall on the left are where the services go through the walls. What you can see in the picture above is a double skin of higher blocks, which is the double wall that the timber frame will sit on, and a lower skin of blocks which will be the base for the bricks that will be the visible lowest part of the walls.

It has occurred to me that the reading public doesn't know what our house will look like, so here are a couple of pictures. They are not totally accurate - the most up to date plans are only on paper - but will give an idea.

........................15 minutes later - sorry folks, will try again tomorrow - these images all need converting to the right format and it's past 10 at night and the blokes start at about 7am so I'll have another go in the morning. Tomorrow is a big accounts and cash flow analysis day so I shall need some light relief.

Aargghhh! It's getting close.

Tuesday evening:
last minute adjustments,
staying up late, thunder and lightning outside the caravan,
bricklayer coming Monday, stuff to order tomorrow,
how big are the blocks on the internal walls? - must ask the timber frame company,
the floor plate needs to be a few mm wider because we changed the sheathing board on the walls so the thickness of the frame changes,
we need weldable damp proof course and we haven't researched it yet.....

and so on and so on!!

General chaos, not quite major panic.

R is amazing - brilliant at all these fine changes.

Our bricklayer seems like a nice bloke and on Monday he's coming early so R has a chance to talk him through what needs doing. John put four nails, one in each corner, but these represent the outer corners of the base of the plinth, so the dimensions have to be adjusted as the actual concrete blocks are going underneath the walls and the plinth sticks out a bit from there.

Must order a Portaloo (mmmm... I wonder who cleans it??)

Tiny, tiny fiddly details - thank heavens one of us (R) has an eye for minutiae. He's sorting out our electrical system at the moment - taking a break from building The Wall. Only 16 days till the frame comes. Another meeting with the Building Control Officer, our new best friend, tomorrow.

I am sending letters and emails - sorting out a mortgage, the final final (ha!) specification, the last details of the frame design to the manufacturers, and making sure the bricklayer has all the stuff he needs for a week tomorrow when (God willing) he arrives on site with his trowel and assistant.

Airtightness is still at the top of the agenda but I am getting a lot of help from fellow members of the Association of Environmentally Conscious Building (AECB) which has a great forum.

Friday morning and I'm off to London to see me girls. It's the end of Em's four years at Imperial and so we are having a girly afternoon tea-for-three in a Posh Hotel- fulfilling a promise made to Em four years ago.

On the way I'm delivering what I hope will be the final changes to the timber frame drawings. I have taken to getting into London by driving to Epping, which is at the end of the Central Line, and Tubing it in from there. Our frame makers are on the way to Epping, next to the M11 in Saffron Walden.

This finalising of the frame drawings is a big milestone. To get them right we have to have not only the full dimensions of the house, inner and outer, heights and all, but also the positions of all the service entries to the house, exact sizes of windows and positions of things like the woodburning stoves. All done!

We also have dates: 25th is the bricklayer doing the plinth, 29th the scaffolder, and the 3rd of July the frame arrives. Yes!!

R is building the massive garden wall - he was making a very small trial wall yesterday evening to compare different colours of mortar, over which we bickered amiably.

I am still bogged down in airtightness and now have the equivalent of a fair-sized book downloaded from the internet, printed out and ready to read. Good job it's a long Tube journey.

Sunday evening, and another week of trying to sort out the minutiae of the specification, especially Airtightness. I shall be dreaming about the gap between the windows and the walls soon. We now have more figures and I have started a master list of all the costs, divided into five types: already paid, definite quotation, best quotation so far, estimate and guess! Not too many guesses but we need to sort out plumbing soon.

This is because Building Control wants our SAP rating ASAP. This is a measure of the energy efficiency of a house and all new houses have to have at least an idea of it before they get built and then a realistic evaluation once they are built. To get a SAP rating you have to say what sort of heating system you will have. To know for certain that we can do without a central heating system we need to know about Airtightness - this word is capitalised on purpose because of its looming importance in the scheme of things. A super-insulated house doesn't lose much heat through the walls, so heat loss through the cracks between elements is concomitantly more significant. And unless we can be sure that we won't lose a lot of heat through the gaps and cracks, we need to make provisions for a (central) heating system. The mantra is 'Build tight, ventilate right'. So we make a tight cosy frame then put in controlled ventilation to keep the air fresh. Most houses in this country ventilate themselves in an uncontrolled way through accidental gaps. The governement wants all new houses to be 'zero carbon' by 2016, which means that we'll soon all hear a lot more about Airtightness (and its close relation Thermal Bridging).

For timber frame, the Canadians know how to do this best. There are a lot of 'passive houses' in Germany and Austria, meaning houses which do not need extra heating except for the normal activity in a house: cooking, washing, fridges, body heat; but these are mainly masonry based. All new timber framed Canadian houses achieve better airtightness than the vast majority of UK houses and those built to the Canadian R2000 standard are extremely airtight. So I have been researching on Google Canada, also the UK's Building Research Establishment publications, and we had a long discussion with the timber frame company. Definitely a case of the devil (or the angel) in the details.

We may put just the pipework for a central heating system in so that if the worst comes to the worst and we get cold over the winter we can attach a boiler at one end and radiators at the other. Problem is, we haven't got natural gas, and bottled gas and oil are expensive. Also all fossil fuels of course. A bloke came to see us who is an expert in biomass, in this case woodchip boilers, so we could always go down that road, but they are quite expensive and we'd like to see if we can do it the passive house way first.

I have talked to so many people about this issue over the last couple of weeks. But there have been other developments. We've chosen the brickie to put in the plinth walls. We've also had a lot of quotes for windows and I think we can go up to triple-glazed with argon fill and still stay in budget. And we've got three quotes for all the timber for the house, having measured what we need. And R is a whizz with thinking through the tiny details and making lovely drawings of them. I think he dreams about staircase nosings and whether a wheelchair can get past the bottom of the stairs (long story).

I said that I would talk about Maharishi Sthapatya Veda in this blog, but I don't think that I can do better than the official sites, so here are a couple of links:
www.sthapatyaveda.com
vedicarchitecture.org
The house styles on these sites are definitely American, but MSV allows for all building styles and materials specifications so there is a great variety. The best site for UK homes is:
www.msvhomes.co.uk

I've been told by my dad to post blogs more often, so, as I always do what I'm told, expect them more frequently in future! More pics soon as the house starts going up (approx end of June).