More windows

The upstairs windows are now in and we're starting on the ground floor, which are bigger - most of them need three people. Being as how I am temporarily disabled, we are inviting friends and relations to window-fitting parties - the latest was yesterday and we put in five windows. Eric came all day and Kate and Ali in the afternoon. When the timber frame is exactly the right size, the windows slot in so easily. Or sometimes a certain amount of planing down of the window opening is needed. But mostly, with three or four people, it's a joy.

The plan at the moment is to get the exterior done before the winter sets in. Which means: windows and doors, battens, render board and render, also the guttering. The renderer is coming a week tomorrow which means that we are hoping for good weather this week. R doesn't have to get all the battens and render board on before he comes because he's going to be here for a couple of weeks. There's a lot of stuff to order: window brackets, expanding foam, battens, render board, special screws for render board, special washers for render board, special cement for RB, render, beading, bell drips (whatever they are), window sills, door thresholds, etc etc. R spends a lot of time with a pencil in one hand and a calculator in the other.

My main job at the moment is to get more work so R can be full-time on the house. I got a job as a mobile library manager but had to give it up owing to stupid shoulders - I have two interviews coming up - one as an immobile library manager and one in the Communications Department at the University of East Anglia. Fingers crossed.

The windows are in the house - that is to say some of them are in the window frames and some of them are in the hall waiting to be installed. They're lovely! Ready painted and just needing to be slid into their sockets. They arrived yesterday (Monday).

They came on a ship from Lithuania to Felixstowe then on an artic to the Green Building Store in Yorkshire, who import them, because our drive is too small for an artic. Then they came all the way back down here in a small lorry. Listers of Halifax, no less. The driver was a very nice Yorkshire lad who didn't have many other drops so he kindly helped to unload. It needed four strong men: R, the roofer (who has now finished heroically clipping the tiles) the lorry driver and our friend Eric from Rendlesham, who stayed on afterwards to help Russell put the first windows in.
The first window!

They started on the smaller windows on the top floor cos they're smaller and easier, and R's friend Ali came today to help finish the rest of the top floor.

R and Eric


Ali


The ground floor windows will need a bit more muscle though - they are a lot bigger. R says it'll be a few days. But there's plenty to do to get ready for the plasterer. Battens to hammer onto the walls (and it turns out that the upstairs of the timber frame is a different size from the downstairs so we need two sizes of battens) and Heraklith render board to put on top of the battens. So that'll keep R off the streets for a few days.

My shoulders have been a source of despair and despondency 'cos I thought it was genuine frozen shoulder which can last for many months, or indeed a year or two. But I saw a brilliant physio today who seemed to think that it wasn't primary FS but caused by the garage-demolition setting up a vicious cycle of muscle spasms and stiffening, and she thinks that with gentle exercise and a TENS machine and some other stuff she can have me as fit as a flea in a matter of a few weeks or months. So that's a great relief. Also it's great to have something to do to make a difference - I was feeling a bit hopeless and helpless. I'll let you know how it goes.

The windows are in the country! Having made their way across the sea from Lithuania. Let's hope they fit - it's a long way to send them back. We are assembling muscle for next week. Lee the plasterer came this week to talk about battens and beading and other esoteric plastery matters. He can start about October 1st - on the render which will define the look of the outside of the house.

The result of all this sudden activity is that R gets himself released from the tyranny of The Wall for a couple of weeks, while he gets wooden battens on the outside of the walls and lightweight render board (Heraklith) fixed to the battens, for Lee to plaster on top of. Look out for exciting window-going-in-photos. The doors are coming at the same time as the windows so then we'll have a weather-tight house.

You'll have to talk amongst yourselves for a while - there is stuff happening but nothing worth getting excited about. R is about 1500 bricks short of a wall - my mum says he must be getting bored up the wall, but R says he's just impatient to get on with the house. Has not affected the excellent quality of the brickwork.

I have come down with what appears to be an unexpected case of two frozen shoulders. Very boring. Almost all work on the house has stopped for me - some taping may be possible. So I focus on earning the dosh so he can do the house. I am learning to be ladylike - that would be a first - asking people to get things off the top shelf in the supermarket and open doors and all that.

The plasterer came today and will come back in about two weeks, by which time we need to have got the windows in. If anyone would like to come for a day or two to help, now would be a great time! When the windows come we'll need four strong(ish) men. I will provide wonderful food and we have a three-bedroom, eight-berth caravan. Plus we need to get the battening and render board up before the plasterer comes.

Windows will be coming at the end of next week - yikes! It won't half look different though.

So watch this space.

Sinks and Seals

I dunno – you wait two weeks for a blog and then three come along at once.

Point one: cheap stuff. This has been a bargain week – two sinks, two toilets, a washbasin and two sets of taps: all at knock down prices, which is the kind of prices we like.

It all started when I went to London for my birthday the week before last. While I was down that way, I went to the IKEA in Lakeside, Essex, where I found a very fine kitchen mixer tap for a tenner and two wooden loo seats for £2 each. This sparked a tour of the IKEA Bargain Corners of the Midlands and North, in the course of visiting family and friends.

The net result was two sinks, which I loaded into my car along with all the other paraphernalia I always carry on these trips. I was hoping that someone would say to me, “You’ve got everything but the kitchen sink in there” so I could put them straight.


This is an IKEA showroom picture. We bought one just like this - what I call a ceramic sink and my mum calls a pot sink - she doesn't like them!

Then last Friday, I was on my way back from work Mildenhall way and I drove past an Aldi, so I dropped in just in case, and they were selling toilets for £50 and washbasins for £40. So I came home and dragged Russell out to buy them, in case there were dozens of other people all clamouring for discount loos. Plus an added bonus mixer tap.


The next point on the agenda is the making of the house airtight, which I am sure I have mentioned before. Obsessed or what – but I thought you’d like to see some photos of it. It’s done through a combination of gunk, tape and membranes. The gunk is Orcon and I have put it, so far, between the ground floor panels to stop air coming into the insulation down there. I got the guys to put it in as they were assembling the floor – it went on like lines of bright green toothpaste. The wall panels are taped with bright blue tape where they come together. And a membrane goes around the outside of the first floor panel and is then taped to the inside face of the top of the ground floor panels and the bottom of the first floor panels.


Ground floor panels with Orcon



The top of the walls - the checked stuff is Pro Clima's Intello - it wraps right around the outside of the first floor beams, which sit on top of the ground floor walls. The blue stuff is the Tescon tape - both stretchy and very sticky.


The bottom of the wall. The black stuff is the damp proof membrane which wraps right around the outside of the ground floor panels.


Now the stairs are in I can leap up to the first floor with tools in hand to do up there. I still haven’t quite worked out how the roof will go but I’ll let you know as soon as I do. It's a lot more complicated up there what with the roof and all; and also I seem to have come down with a couple of unexpected frozen shoulders - R says I'm just showing off as most people settle for one - so that's going to be interesting.

It's another sunny Saturday morning and R has just laid the first forty bricks of the day, and I'm off to Norwich to get these blasted tile clips.

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.