Well we had a couple of weeks off, but the house carried on without us. The shredded-newspaper-insulation guys were in for several days over Christmas and the house is now completely surrounded like one of those old fashioned padded envelopes that used to leak little bits of paper over the carpet when you opened them. So as soon as we finish sealing round the Velux windows in the roof, we'll have some idea whether this passive house will really work or whether we need to get a few radiators after all.
The next four things are:
choose the electrician and decide whether we can afford the extra needed for shielded cable;
order more blue tape to cover the holes through which the Warmcel went and to seal the inside of the windows;
find kraft paper to increase the vapour control on the inside of the external walls (it goes between the panels and the plasterboard so needs to go on soon) walls, to prevent interstitial condensation; and
decide about whole house heat recovery ventilation (depends partly on how well sealed the house turns out to be: see paragraph above).
Once the Warmcel installers had filled up the ground floor they could cover it with its final layer of Weyroc, like the first floor - here are a few pics. Very smooth and grey looking, but quite smart and hardwearing. It makes a real difference to the look and the feel of the house - not least because R cleared the floor area so they could put it down. The pictures show the glue between the panels which we will trim off.
