Every day a new room...

or so it seems.

Here's a picture of Kate's room

looking very pristine.

Himself is doing all the hard work while I confine myself to taping building paper (very artistically) and painting windowsills - these are just two pieces of softwood in keeping with our policy of Keeping It Simple (i.e. cheap!)

Here's a better picture of the woodburner

People keep mentioning things like floors and curtains and what are we going to do about them, but, as I was saying to R today, just being in a big lovely house-we-built-ourselves will be fine by me!

Anyway tomorrow is the big day when Lee arrives to cover the place in a thin layer of gypsum.

Real snow this time.


Here's the new wall (and the gas bottles) looking very picturesque



Kate came to the rescue this weekend, like the cavalry but on a bike. Here she is doing high-level window sealing



and here doing the highly-skilled job of leaning-on-a-wall



while R fixes plasterboard in her room.



Here is the woodburner and its flue, newly installed

SNOWED IN



I have been to work the last two days and each evening I come back to find the house transformed!! The Warmcel guys are now Officially Finished and the house is warm and cosy. Putting all this insulation in the internal walls has made a difference to the whole feeling of the house - it was never very echoey but now it feels more solid and soft.

The stuff being grey, it also looks like grey snow going in and a whole load of concrete blocks once installed. This is the other way of installing Warmcel - instead of being pumped inside the wall, we sheath one side of the stud wall and then the insulation is sprayed against it from the open side.



The first stage: the recycled newspaper is pumped in, and at the same a fine mist of water helps to set the Warmcel into the wall.


This is the second stage - the Warmcel is rolled flat



From the landing across the top of the stairs.



Kate's sunny room


The living room ceiling with added timber beam detail. The timber beam here is becasue we didn't want a steel beam, even though that would have been hidden in the ceiling. To get the strength using timber we had a deeper beam which shows - but we think it's a design feature! You can also see the underneath of the top of the stairs, which will be covered.



This is a video of the Warmcel bloke spraying sideways (just turn your head!)

Rooms taking shape........

The piano room, aka Louise's room



Emily's room - wardrobe corner back right



Looking out of the bathroom



R, imitating those guys who sit on high girders in New York, fixing the board around the stairwell




Emily's brilliant idea - to have a big space to light the staircase naturally. This is the wall between the staircase and the hall.

The inside is taking shape....

.... with every bit of plasterboard. We have hired a nifty piece of kit to help R - cheaper and less likely to hammer nails in the wrong place than a labourer.


Here it is - you put the board onto it and wind it up to the ceiling, then start on the lower part and screw it it - voila. Himself is aiming for 16 boards a day and did 10 yesterday - not bad for the first day. Plus he has to put some bits at a slant on the sloping ceiling.

What else? we now have first fix electrics and plumbing done and most of the ventilation system, seen here
- lots of shiny pipes, very lightweight and easy to fix. I have a bit of a tic about ventilation and so I'll be monitoring indoor air quality.

Wednesday
The ceiling for one side of the first floor is now complete, together with a hole in the ceiling for loft access from Emily's room.

HAPPY MOTHERING SUNDAY TO THE BEST MUM IN THE WORLD



These are photos of the view from all sides of the house, for my mum


First floor, south window looking left




First floor, north window




First floor, north window looking left




First floor, north window looking right




Ground floor, front door (east) looking right




Ground floor, front door (east) looking left




Ground floor, north window looking left




Ground floor, west window looking left




Ground floor, south window




Ground floor, south window looking left




Ground floor, south window looking right

The plasterboard came last week - tons and tons of it - about 370 sheets in total. We shifted more than half of it into the house and then gave up cos my shoulders started to grumble as did the floor joists.


I went away on a course for a week and when I came back all sorts of exciting things were happening. The place was hung about with electric wires like lianas in the jungle - the illusion heightened by the fact that the house is getting quite warm these days, with the insulation and all. The other morning I went in there at 8.30am - it was freezing outside - ice on the cars - and 14 degrees C inside. Result!!






R is having fun - he has lots of creative things to do which are making a big difference: hanging the building paper on all the external walls, putting in the ventilation system, organising the electricians and plumber and starting to put up the plasterboard. So the house is full of subbies, ventilation pipes, electric whatnots, piles of gypsum, the flue waiting to be installed and random bits of wood. What a difference a week makes.

When I'm sealing windows

Well, we are getting ready for the Big Plasterboard Fix (hereafter known as BPF). Him Outside was away for two weeks after Christmas (the slacker) doing a professional development course for Transcendental Meditation teachers. When he came back, after a fortnight of deep rest, he was a bit slowed down for a while, as is only to be expected, but the brain was working very well and he spent almost a week sorting out the whole of the remaining build - all the materials needed and the sequence of work.

In the meantime since the last blog I started a job and finished it! I worked for two weeks as Planning Receptionist at Norwich City Council, but the work was unexpectedly heavy: big files stuffed with Decision Notices to be picked up from floor level all the time and only me to do it. I put my poor frozen shoulders back a bit and they started to seize up again after the first week. So I reluctantly handed my notice in.

Anyway, the good side of that is that I've been working with R to get all the people and stuff we need together and it's gone a lot faster with two of us. He works out the details and I run around getting the deals - quite a good team really.

To get ready for the BPF we need lots of bits and pieces:
More blue tape to seal the windows and doors
Sisalkraft paper to put on the walls before the BFP starts to up the vapour resistance
Blokes, as follows:
electrician to do first fix
plumber to finish first fix
stove and flue man to put in stove and flue
labourer to help with BPF
someone to do an air change pressure test to check airtightness
Details of the ventilation and heat recovery system
A bath, two showers and the screens
Best prices for a squillion little bits of wood for door linings, skirtings, architraves, window sills, the ramp, the vastu fence, balustrades, handrails, etc, etc....

Things like choosing the kitchen units and light fittings are going to be a doddle!

In the meantime, I'm signing up with agencies for temping, which might be better for us cos then I can get stuck in when we need stuff doing on the house. Plus we've started teaching TM, having converted the spare room into a bijou teaching room.

Anyway, we are working together on preparing the rooms for the BPF - Sealing windows, fitting sills, sealing all the holes the Warmcel went into, tidying up the floor, sealing the angle between the roof and shoving little bits of rockwool into every possible orifice, as in the next two photos:

Smile for the camera



AND he is finishing The Wall - doing the little sexy curvy bit of brickwork and the tile capping on top - and it's looking very nice. When it's finished, we'll have a celebration with the neighbours - I shall make a cake and maybe we'll break a bottle on it!

Floored.

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.