Got the lamp back this week with its two new panes. Even bought it some new bulbs on amazon. I toyed with the idea of polishing it up back to its original copper, and you can see a little test piece where I gave it a go under the sign-hanging bit int he photos where it looks more brown. But Stephen says just to clean the dirt off it and polish it with beeswax. So that’s what we’ll do. Now just to fit it when the electrical guys are ready, or better yet, just ask them to install it before they forget.
The electrical control gear arrived, but there was a bit of an information gap of how to wire it up. It looks very nice and should be a little bit like plug-and-play since the hard part was planning the system and choosing which circuits would be set up to be controlled before the first fix. The easy bit is fitting the units, but the hard bit might be programming. It will be all installed nicely in the cupboard and will be finished once all the lights are on, the units are commissioned by the manufacturer, and the wires tidied away.
Smoke alarms were fitted with blue bag covers while the decorating continues.
And other rooms are starting to be fitted with their arrays of LEDs dangling from the ceilings.
We’ve got some really fancy lights in the floor and skirting, and these are going in carefully and gingerly so they don’t mess up Mike’s paintwork, Rich’s tiling, or Josh’s joinery.
Terry and Josh installed the new less fussy oak cladding in the master bedroom. Neil had dropped off some whoppers of replacement beams the week previously–they were so big that it was impossible to lift, much less finesse into place. So Neil kindly took them back to deepest Sussex to shave a bunch of weight off and make them more manageable, but with still leaving enough meat for the beams to join in the middle and cover the steel along the ridge-line. Even without the extra weight it was a job and a half to fit these large beams, up on the tower, in the middle of May, while the heating is being tested. Terry and Josh get all the fun jobs.
Bathrooms are coming on and the tiling looks great. The tilers have a bunch of criteria they use to line up the tiles. Mostly they like to centre on specific things like fittings and windows. But sometimes decisions have to be made to un-align tiles; one of these was maintaining a non-cut edge around the shower trays on both wall and floor tiles. This is to ensure a good seal around anywhere water might sneak in. If you don’t cut these edges, the porcelain finish remains intact and it reduces the possibility of water getting inside the actual tile. This is good. But sometimes the resulting wall tiles that are aligned with windows then don’t line up with the joins in the floor. This may be perceived as a little un-good. But I’d much rather have structural integrity be the focus, and we’ve chosen a colour for the grout so the lines kinda disappear anyway. I’m sure that when we see the finished product with all the furniture and vanity units in, it will be amazing.
Some other nice bits percolated through this week.
The priority is to get the inside of the building all completely finished, cleaned and sorted. But tiny jobs outside can be attended to in between.
Next week is a big outdoor week with the return of the grounds guys with the lovely big noisy machinery again.