Stairway to Heaven (well to the first floor anyway)


R organised the whole thing brilliantly. It went up so fast there wasn't time to photograph the actual lift.



1. Staircase waiting to be laid into it's space while they remove the wall that's in the way.




2. Staircase in place waiting to be lifted. Its bottom end is laid over two beams of wood which are the exact size of the distance between the bottom of the stairs and the opposite wall.




3. Three strong blokes lift straight up at the heavy end, and




4. E at the bottom pulling out the beams: the staircase then slides back along the floor against them, so it is exactly in place. The top end then rests against the vertical face of the first floor.



5. 30 seconds later, it's safe to walk under it




6. Et voila - R climbs the stairs one minute later - no fixings at all - held on by gravity.

It's all roof and stairs at the moment.

The roofer put the roof on in the same way as he put all other roofs on in this area - battens, counter battens, lay the tiles on top. But when the surveyor from our building warranty company came, it turned out that, in financial and insurance terms, this was wrong - they should have been installed in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions, i.e. with one tile clip per tile. Not every third tile, not the much easier nailing, but one clip each. So they all have to come off and be done again. None of the local professional builders we spoke to has ever heard of this being done before in this area.

So an insurance and financial issue, not a reality issue. But we will conform to it. And pay the extra!

Then the staircase came last week and there were errors so it had to go back and be remade. Anyway the new one came today and R is working out how to fit it in as the angle of the risers and goings in relation to the strings is not right (technical or what!). He's hoping to get it up today. An exciting photo to come!

In the meantime, here are some pictures of a couple of leprechauns who came to help with the painting!

Roof is all fixed - hooray! One heroic timber frame erector came and worked really hard for a day to get the two small walls up and the roof is now straight. So that's all right. R is a Man With a Mission, still building the wall - he reckons he is now about 25% of the way through. And I'm still taping the joints between timber frame panels to keep out every small bit of air.

We had extra help staying with us this week and here is a picture of her painting the false rafters / mini bird houses.


and, from below, the feet....


Here's a picture showing, from left to right: next door, next door's fence, the famous Wall, R with a brick, a whole load of bricks, the path, the washing, the caravan and a late rose. He did 120 bricks today, which I believe is more than Winston Churchill used to do, and is aiming for 150 a day, at which rate he could be finished in three weeks. Then he can get onto the house...

We now have a roof!! For today, anyway - turns out there are Problems with the ridge beam such that it has started to sag (a bit and you can't see it till you measure it) and the timber frame blokes are coming tomorrow to fix it. They forgot to put a couple of small but essential walls in to prop it up, so they have to come and Acrow it up from inside then put the walls in, which we hope will solve the problem.

Anyway, it looks very nice.It is finished now but I haven't been up there recently. I've been down below, on the ground floor, doing the airtightnessing - possibly that should be airtighting, airtightening - anyway it means stopping up the gaps. If I get desperate for new material, I'll put a photo of it on the blog but I think that could lose me a lot of viewers on the grounds of getting too boring. After a day's work I've done the kitchen, which is the biggest room.

The staircase is the next exciting thing to happen. This is Good Thing, for me at any rate. R can leap up the small metal ladder we have got in the place where the staircase can be but I am no mountain goat, so getting to the first floor for me means climbing the big ladder attached to the scaffolding outside, to the second lift of the scaffolding walking round the house and then scrambling in an undignified way through a first floor window (north side) and crashing onto the floor, hoping that there are no workmen there to see me. Then back again with whatever I came up to get. The plus side of this is the view from the scaffolding - treetops and fields - and a never-again-to-be-seen close-up of the roof and my little half-finished bird houses.

Roof with a View



The view through a Velux



This morning - roofers arriving. The tall ladder to the left is their lift.



The battens going on the roof



Cor blimey it was like Euston Station on that scaffolding today. Roofers on one side, R and a mate on the other and the timber frame erectors in the middle. The last filling in gaps where the roof panels met the walls. Quite big, see-the-trees-through-them gaps - now sorted.
Very professional roofers whizzing around in a rather dizzying way up and down the slopes. They have a natty device which looks like a ladder which carries tiles up. R is putting up bargeboards (the diagonal bits of wood at the edges) and fascias (the horizontal bits of wood at the edges).

I have a problem with roofs - they are complicated and fiddly, with many bits of wood stuck on apparently at random. Luckily R is quite good at fiddly things - he usually sorts them out by doing a drawing. We had a dispute about the eaves - he wanted false rafters, which are bits of wood which stick down to look like real rafters (they can't be real rafters on account of we have a panelised roof made in the factory so no rafters as such), and I don't like false anything. After a lot of wrangling we settled on false rafters as long as we could put little ledges between them for the birds to nest on. So he calls them false rafters and I call them real built-in nestboxes.

Windows are coming in September - boo! But they have to come from Lithuania. Plenty to do in the meantime I guess. We can't render till they are in and we can't do the insulation, which is blown in by machines. But we can get the battening up for the render board to go onto, also the all-important taping of the joints inside for airtightness (that word again). And the roof and the kalash and the electrics and plumbing and the guttering.........

Craning up the walls

The roof panels arriving

The house with the walls up, and the roof panels on the left

Manoeuvring the roof panels

The ridge beam being craned on. See the shape of the house.

A beam and a half!


This is R's wall, which is practically perfect and is exercising ze little grey cells!


Monday morning - the erectors were here at 7.30 and raring to go. The crane arrived simultaneously and an hour or so later the wall panels for the first floor came. The erectors had to sort out a certain amount of sogginess before they started but after that they roared along. Although I think some of the top panels were a bit tight for them and took a bit of sorting. By 3ish in the afternoon the gable ends were up and the low walls along the two long edges.

The lorry in the meantime had gone back to the factory to pick up half of the roof. It had to stand around for a couple of hours waiting for the guys to finish up top.

And then........ this enormous ridge beam went up. Really spectacular. All of a sudden you could see the shape of the house. Magic. I thought I should get a little tree and nail it to the end like the old barnraisers on the prairies.

The flappy stuff at the top is going to be wrapped around the first floor to stop air getting through.


R in the entrance to the kitchen


Looking towards the settee from the cooker.




On the roof. Next week, this will read: In the bedroom.


Through the front door.

Here are more photos. The erectors came yesterday - Monday - and finished off most of the first floor floor so the ground floor is mostly covered in. The scaffolding is all round the house and I strolled around it today feeling like the lord of all I surveyed. Have not yet summoned up the courage to get to the top. Tomorrow.

The erectors have gone back to the yard to make the roof panels, which are turning out to be quite complex, so they'll be coming back on Monday with the crane to put up both the first floor walls and the gable ends and the roof. Hooray.

Oh boy, oh boy - a real house stands outside our caravan. There's a ground floor and ground floor external walls and ground floor internal walls and even a ceiling over part of it, which also means a first floor floor. We borrowed the builders' ladder yesterday evening and went up onto the first floor floor which makes a very nice flat roof, and surveyed the neighbouring gardens and fields. Lovely.

The timber frame putter-uppers, or erectors as is the technical term, are a great bunch of blokes. Very cheerful, very happy to help. Drink enormous quantities of what my mother calls 'mill tea'. They worked yesterday and the day before around the scaffolders, who are building practically a whole other house around the house ready for the erectors to do the first floor walls and the roof, and for the roofers to put the tiles on and the Veluxes in, and for us to put up render board and the plasterer to render it. Then we can take down the scaffolding - we have booked it for 12 weeks.
So we have, from the bottom up - foundations made of concrete poured into the ground, concrete blocks, damp proof membrane, a laminated (glulam) wood plank all the way round, very thick walls made of wood studs sheathed in eco-friendly panels made of something like sawdust pressed (very hard) to make a solid panel, another wood plank lying down, another wood plank standing up all the way round to hold the first floor floorjoists in position, a layer of solid waterproof chipboard which is the first floor.

We don't have a staircase so to get to our lovely first floor /flat rooftop we borrowed the builders' ladder and sat up there.

I ordered the windows yesterday - what a palaver. A delightful palaver of course but you wouldn't believe how many variables there are. First we sent the company a list of window sizes, then we decided how many panes per window, which ones would open, whether they opened inwards or outwards, and how many panes of glass (3), then whether to have trickle vents - not necessary if we have whole house ventilation but essential if we don't, then we decide on the paint colour, colour of handles, colour of a natty little metal strip which is a drip tray at the bottom of the frame, whether to have metal or timber external sills, whereabouts in the thickness of the wall the window goes, which windows need toughened glass, which need obscured glass. And so on. Long phone calls. Hopefully mostly sorted by now but we have scheduled a polite argument about paint colours tomorrow.

I'll put some more pictures up tomorrow.

Tuesday afternoon

Later Tuesday morning

Tuesday morning!