Most of the action this week occurred behind the scenes. Lots of planning and sorting and choosing more than cutting, sticking and building. We’ve chosen a fireplace, paid bills, decided on tiles, placed thermostats, chased electrics, considered ironmongery and built-in furniture, and we started thinking about wardrobe build-ups, kitchen pendants, sofas and curtains. I thought we were doing well with box-ticking until Tim asked for confirmation of colour choice for the paintwork. I think I need a lie-down….
Spencer is pretty much done with the roof, and now he and Jackson are on to the more decorative bits. One of these is the scalloped lead-work around the windows. There are 16 downstairs and 10 upstairs runs of this lead, all of varying length. There is nothing at all normal or even and symmetrical about this house. The lead was installed when the oak subframes were put in. It serves a very useful function in keeping the brickwork section underneath waterproof, but it’s an artisanal job to make it look pretty.
It starts with a scored out scallop.
a satisfying OCD momentJackson and his compass
Then the scallops are cut with actual scissors to make the shapes.
Spencer practicing his cutting out skills
Each cut-out is rolled up and hammered into place.
The guys wear gloves because of the chemicals in the lead. Working with this stuff all day is toxic–lead poisoning is a real thing, and the preservatives on the surface are well-yucky.
ooooo……ahhhh
We’ve opted to keep a layer of PVC on the course between the plinth and the vertical brickwork to protect the plinth from stuff dropping on it from above. All it takes is a stanley knife to remove it later on.
Plastering is the name of the game in other areas of the house. And in the few rooms where they are not working, Terry and Josh can get on with the window boards. Must say, they look lovely next to the subframes. They’re both treated with this Osmo oil which will bed in and soften in colour over time. We’re putting the stuff everywhere on all the oak except the huge structural pieces–architrave, door linings, the lot. We’ll even slap it on the oak underside of the first floor overhang outside. James hates it only slightly less than the black stain on the soffit boards.
window board
Another interesting piece is the brick inlay panels. They’re not herringbone, but everyone calls them The Herringbone Panels–even us. Actually, with my Pedant Hat on, they’re Askew. But this is alright with me! (Sorry). Clive painstakingly sliced each brick to a skinny sort of depth, and we’ve bought this fancy adhesive for them to stick them on. Like the oak cladding last week, this is not quite functional, well, not at all, but it looks awesome. They’re doing a brilliant job setting, pinning, gluing, and mortaring them into place.
There are fifteen panels to make: 5 across each apex front and back, 5 across each paired square below them, and 5 below the windows in the hallway. That’s a lot of work, and I feel somewhat guilty just writing this in all the time they’re spending making the panels, but they are taking enormous pride in how it’s turning out. They took a day off the scaffolding when storm Doris blew through, the front and some of the back are mostly done.
I don’t usually go on about it, but I take great pride in looking at other houses with this similar non-herringbone brickwork, whose designers have decided to use a different brick from the rest of the house because it can be bought in, and thinking that our guys have simply taken the time and made the effort to do a brilliant job. Anyone with eyes can see that it’s a total pain to have spent days and days cutting these really thin slices to carefully stick on the boards, which is what James and the guys have done. But the finished effect will be seamless with the brickwork in the rest of the house because it’s exactly the same brick. It’s a bespoke house that everyone onsite is on board with to make it as good as it possible can be. And THAT is the bit that’s amazing.
New Year, new resolve, ….. we WILL be living in this house before this year is out. Having seen the potential of this place in 1999 and bought it and moved in by Feb 2000, we’re finally going to have this noose around our necks lifted. We’ve hemmed and hawed for so long about the most cost effective way to renovate or fix or whatever, and we’ve lived in such an ambiguous state for so many years, that it’s quite incredible to think that it will ever be FINISHED. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s finished, Finished and FINISHED, but just to have a house that doesn’t leak and looks half way decent will be a huge improvement on previous years. After all, the kids know nothing else!
And of course, it will be way better than half way decent. You can see from the time-lapses that there is a bunch of activity onsite these days: electricians, carpenters, flooring, heating, windows….. It’s starting to really crack on.
The window guys started on 9 Jan, so all the oak subframes had to be installed beforehand.
family roomthey will eventually fade to grey
James has kept a bit of celotex on the sills to protect them once they’re in.
shocking weatherdoor frames being built and getting installed
Terry and Josh have been quietly getting on with wardrobes upstairs and kitchen framing downstairs.
kitchen studs
The window guys arrived en masse in a team of four or five depending on the day. The last time we saw this gear was up North, and it’s weird to see the frames and glass in the house at long last.
test pane
One of the guys was a specialist pointer: each of the windows has a silicone bead running around the frame between it and the oak and another between the frame and the glass. I’ll get a macro shot of the beading next week, but there is a precise technique and the finished product is gorgeous.
waiting patiently for installationmaster bedroommaster panebrave man with a hammer
master bedroom from inside
There are still loads of things to do around and about. The roof tiles should arrive this month, but since it’s a stand-alone piece outside the Critical Path, it kind of doesn’t matter when they go on. The building will look very different when it’s got its hat on.
roofline
The first floor is being covered with celotex insulation prior to the underfloor heating next week. Wednesday is screed day, and this works perfectly with the windows guys because they’re awaiting delivery of more gear from Grantham which arrives the following week, so they’ll take a little break from this job while the floor sets. All very time-dependent and complicated.
bathroom
We had a stairs meeting this week with Tony the Blacksmith and Colin and Gary from the joinery company. The goal was to sign off on the plans and get into production which is 10 – 12 weeks from sign to installation. Tony brought models of his spindles and had a great conversation with the joiners. In a total Goldilocks moment, we’ve decided to use the middle sized section of spindle. Plans were signed, and production lines confirmed, so we’re looking at end of March to see these in real life. Tony says he’s making progress with the lantern as well.
oodles of spindles
It also snowed this week.
disgusting weatherfrozen camera housingsnow on scaffold through the new windowsdoor handlesfront bay–with windows (most of them…)
Tim said early on not to worry and that the Christmas lights would be on. And they are! We’ve got a tree with lights–what’s the problem?! The roofing guys even built us a present out of battening to go under the tree.
Tim’s present
Despite the amended programme, this has been a big chunky cracking-on kind of week. First of all, the saga about the levels not quite matching up in the first floor between the front oak structural frame and the rest of the house came to a close. The fix was debated (for five weeks) around our architect and structural engineer, the warranty company (mostly the warranty company) and the oak structural engineer, and finally, they reached an agreement on how it was to be built. James and the guys have built and sealed shuttering around what will be a slab of concrete set in situ. The metal mesh that gives it structure arrived today, James has bound all the intersections with little bits of wire, and now all that’s left is to pour and set over the Christmas break.
pre-pour
Masses of celotex is being laid to insulate the ground floor. On Monday (Tuesday?) next week this will have a web of underfloor heating rods wound round and round, and before we break for Christmas, the screed will be poured.
each piece is cut to shape with a teensy power sawkitchen spacewipe your feet first
They’ve removed the scaffolding in the hallway and you can see from the floor right up to the rafters. Terry’s done a marvellous job making it safe with a designer hand rail.
Josh and celotexTerry’s fancy banisterBen and Keith chatting about the concrete slab
The electricians have wired up most of the upstairs, and now there is a web of grey cable run round the rafters. There has been some discussion about where the shaver sockets will go in the bathrooms, and I’m sure this is just the first of many decisions that will be made on the hoof. (We decided in cabinets in the kids’ bathrooms and on the wall above the tile in ours in case you’re wondering.) They’ve even got a sweepstakes on how many times I’ll change my mind on socket locations in the house. Five was the first guess, three was another, and even a very optimistic zero was mentioned. We’ll see. Just don’t want the whole place looking like Swiss cheese so I’m trying my best not to dither. One of the jobs on the weekend is to run round with a can of spray-paint and set the locations of sockets and switches.
Sparkys’ debate
The leadwork is starting to be installed around the window frames. The large frames in the kitchen and family room won’t be in until the new year because the floor screed needs to dry out and we don’t want to damage them.
leadwork before it’s scalloped
I usually get time to visit site in the afternoon, and since sunset starts around 2:30 in what’s now mid-December, the light is usually really good for a while. It’s obvious that the oak frame and the widows are pretty special and make this build unique, and that the quality of the workmanship is excellent. This quality issue partly accounts for why it’s gone over schedule. But sometimes I’m amazed at just how gorgeous the whole thing is, and it’s quite humbling to just sit and have a look. I’m sure the builders think I’m nuts just standing there and staring.
a glimpse of future awesomeness
James has finished the panels, and they’ll be sealed in with compriband and fixed to the frame. But they’re right in line with the sunset, so it makes the whole thing reflected a lovely pink.
The main structure is up and sorted and the building is Dry. Dry is a Big Deal. Even though there are large gaping holes where the windows will go (on 9 January), these will be boarded up over Christmas, and the rest of the structure is Dry. The guys are now finishing off the fiddly bits of the roof on the outside and putting up the frame for the ceiling on the inside.
fiddly bits and covered subframessubframes in the sitting roomone in and one not
The roof and all the subframes are attached to the concrete by these enormous brackets. Terry assures me that there will be no roof blowing off on this house. The lead will be installed in the coming weeks.
west bathroom windowswest-most bedroom
James is making up the inserts for the angled brick sections. We had a meeting with the reluctant warranty company about the design early on. They were quite rightly concerned about water ingress in the junction between all the materials sitting in the oak frame in case the structure settled. We worked then with Dave to create a multi-layered system of composite board, epoxy resin, insulation and compriband that will prevent any drips or drops from getting through. It is very complicated, and James has been pretty keen to get stuck in to building them. They look good so far!
pre-insertbrick inserts, pre-brickinserts and insulation from the inside of front gableinserts from outside
The ceiling is also complicated: the trusses go up really quickly, but then there is much time spent creating a set of noggins in between each truss to support the plasterboard ceiling that will be installed soon.
east-most bedroom: trusses & noggins, boarding & flooringceiling with loft boarding and dormer window
There are two extra guys on site this week who installed all the subframes and boarded them up. The goal is to get the building dry enough to set the underfloor heating in screed before we all disappear for Christmas. That will give the floor two weeks to set and dry.
can you spot the elf?
I think everyone is feeling buoyed up by the progress made recently. This was never going to be an easy house to build, and many of the painstaking pieces of the structure seem to be happening all at once. The guys remain cheerful onsite, they help the neighbours with heavy lifting, they’re keeping the place amazingly tidy given the freezing weather and the early nights, they joke around and it seems quite jolly. It’s got a good vibe and looks a nice place to work.
festive site
We signed off for the kitchen this week (hooray!). That will be 14 weeks. The sanitary ware has been ordered (8 weeks), the floor sourced, and the stairs being drawn up. Many more decisions to be made after our Thursday meeting–I’ve got a 14 point list of urgent items of homework for Monday, and many more pending. But we’re vaguely adhering to our modified schedule which is good. I don’t want to be the one holding up the game. A busy weekend to come….
Mid-November and it’s getting really really cold. The rental house’s main valve to the ground floor radiators decided to give up the ghost this week just to make things interesting. Not quite a frost on the inside of the windows state of affairs, but it’s certainly cold underfoot when making that first cup of tea in the morning. But this is NOTHING compared to early dark-o’clock onsite.
Walking back from the station on Monday, we decided to pop in for a look at progress and found James and Terry accumulating questions in preparation for Dave’s visit on Thursday. Much scratching of heads ensued over the valley detail at the front and considering the fallout of whether we wanted a sloping ceiling in the front bedroom. The valley is covered with lead (remember climbing on the old roof of St Annes #1 armed with a broom and a jetwash to de-leaf the flat section of roof over the tower??), but the section is long and flat lead covering a space of more than 5′ tends to shrink.
rogue beam
Much to everyone’s relief, Dave came down to site on Thursday as part of his new and improved double-time for this job, and he and Terry figured out a way to ditch the long beam, sort out the lead, and start designing a flat ceiling for more storage in the front bedroom. After these tweaks, it’s full steam ahead with the roof.
Josh, hasn’t James told you it’s -5C out there?Josh and his fan club
Terry and Josh are putting up timbers for the battens to be attached next week. I can’t believe Josh is still in his shorts!! But I really like the combo of wooly hat on and legs out. They’ve been spending most of their time hand-cutting truss parts for the non-standard 50-degree angle roof and creating supports for the fiddly dormers. The game plan is to finish most of the dormers before James gets the more fun job of fitting the oak facias and stained soffits in their wake. Terry says the building will look transformed with these bits on. We’ll wait and see next week.
dormer cornerkids’ bathroom window dormer
One of the details that we’ve signed up for is the kick out on the foot of the roof. It’s a little flare right at the end and kind of a Blair Imrie/Frank Chown style point.
kick
Nice to see Mick, Johnny and Tom back to lay bricks that will live above the soffit. It will only take them a couple of days into next week to finish off. The wet mortar sits all around the kick boards. We’ve still got a pillar to build around the back, so maybe they’ll be back to do that when the garage roof is ready to go on.
We’ve had a choice of resins to use for the brick slip panels in the oak frame. The warranty company wanted us to use this stuff instead of mortar to fix the bricks to the boards and also to point them up. The idea is to limit the possibility water ingress. A sensible solution and there is all of one singular company in the whole of the UK that does this kind of thing –just a little bit niche. We’re going with ‘natural’ instead of ‘buff’ or ‘chalk’. It’s not bad and looks the real deal.
these don’t quite match…… but this one is better
I haven’t had the chance to bother James with my usual million onsite visits this week because most of work and the fact our house-time has been taken up with kitchens, tiles, stairs, wood floors, doors, sanitary ware and electricals. We’re also debating about whether to put sliding doors between the kitchen and family room. The main thing is that the normal double doors in the spec eat up a bunch of space when they get opened, so it limits the size of furniture for the room. I’ve started cutting scaled bits of paper to ‘furnish’ the room and test stuff out. Sketchup is great but it doesn’t give anyone else a chance to fiddle, so we’re going old-school. I’m sure there will be many evenings and much wine required to get this just right.
which purple bit of paper makes the best fit?the door opening in question
One day soon we’ll get around to thinking about landscaping. The hardest part of the plot to figure out is the bit on the north side of the house under the beech tree. We sadly cut down the cherry tree that we planted with such great hopes in 2000, so now there’s not much between us and next door except air. We’ll want to have something against the fence and preferably rising above it for privacy and to emphasise our house. There’s not much light or much water in the space which makes planting anything you want to keep alive problematic. Paving? Water feature? I’ve got to do some reading on suitable plants…. Allison, got any ideas?
The roof continues to grow, ungrow and regrow. Dave and Terry spent some time last week discussing the design of the dormers, and as a result the first one they built had to be rebuilt. But Terry, James and Josh worked hard despite the drop in temperature and by the end of the week, they were all there despite the rain.
truss forestsketch and trusses cut into the structural oakhand built trussesgratuitously nice shot of frameroof, scaffold and row of dormersup close and personal with a dormer
Part of the unbuilding included a set of trusses above the front bedroom. They were originally Palladian trusses, but this didn’t allow for storage. A little scratching of chins all round and we decided to switch to a cut truss. They arrived this week.
loving the storage optionsunset through the roofcomplicated cuts
The solid oak subframes arrived onsite–hooray! They have one coat of oil, and the next will be applied in situ. James and the guys had to carry each one from the road into the dry by hand. There are 72. I can’t move ONE they’re so heavy. How they did it I’ve got no idea. There are three piles in the garage and two in the kitchen, and there they’ll wait until the lid is on the house.
A visit to the joinery company that is doing the stairs, the oak subframes for the windows and the external doors.
Paul is our Area Manager and he’s always said to come on down and have a visit. As we’re getting to some crunch points with decisions, it sounded a great time to scoot to Andover to have a look. Today I got the chance to meet Gerald the MD, and he and Paul both took me for a tour of the factory before sitting down to talk design.
The factory is enormous. But it’s family run and has grown from a shed to a business with over 60 employees in a generation. There are 28 guys on the factory floor spread out into separate areas. There is a room for the initial cut as the laminated boards arrive from Germany, another for making tenons and mortice joints, another for windows, another for painting, another for stairs, and another for doors with CNCs, lathes, wrapped finished pieces and components all neatly placed in stacks per job. I’ve probably left out a few rooms,….but the guys were really busy as we went around, and everyone was really friendly and very patient with my picture-taking.
I was thrilled to see our job taking up (a large part of) the floor!
window subframes … and more window subframes with jointsLaminates are used for the uncut beams so there won’t be any knots. They’re cut to section size on the outside dimensions, then they’re sliced on the remaining dimension to length, and finally, the mortice and tenon joints are cut in. Gerald fitted one of our subframes all up and assembled for me to have a look; the joints are seamless and the facing sides beautiful.
our job. all three stacks with little white labels waiting to be cutThere are over 70 windows in the house, and each requires more than four bits of wood to make the subframe. Some of the larger pieces, like the sills, are made of two pieces with an air gap in between them to let them bend and settle on installation (I think?!)
We’re having clear Osmo coated frames and doors to retain the natural look of the wood, but it was still awesome to see the painting room. The windows are suspended on a series of hooks strung up to a yellow motorised track. They trundle past the guys to get a good coat of paint (150 microns a layer) and continue on to the other side of the wall to dry. Water is spritzed in to keep the paint from drying too quickly, so the room feels slightly tropical. This waterbased paint takes about 1.5 hours to dry, but our clear Osmo will go on with a brush and take 3 days to cure entirely.
the painting room some stairs (not ours yet) and CNCThe stairs will be cut on a giant laser-guided CNC machine. I got to see a partially-build curved staircase made of gorgeous walnut; Paul had wanted to check the progress on it as he’d seen it the week before and it’s great to see these things evolve. Each piece for every job is drawn up, plugged into the computer and CNC’d to fit together perfectly. This particular job was gorgeous, and the whole operation is a real engineering marvel.
I’ve come away with some samples of different sized newell posts, a picture of cross sectional balustrades, two actual balusters to think about, and a lot of information about the front door from a discussion with Paul, Gerald, and Sean the Main Technical Manager. It’s going to be a busy weekend thinking through all this.
From Andover back to base, I had a chance to climb up the scaffold and have a look at the new bedrooms.
West Wing east wing door to front bedroom back bay, pre-oakWhat was the name of the first lady to fly across the Atlantic? What was the name of her airplane? What was the name of the Japanese city that was spared the atomic bomb and why? What were the names of those bombs? We’ve already nailed the name of the plane that dropped them along with the name of the guy who broke the sound barrier. We did moon landings a few weeks ago, and I’ve overheard a discussion about the bass line in Eagles songs when the guys first came onsite. I probably need some help brushing up on general knowledge if I spend too much more time onsite….
Paul and Dave: proshttps://youtu.be/PfuIcSZRgdA
Thursday
Back to Sussex we go!
Bluebell Railway from the car parkAnother breathtakingly gorgeous drive in the time machine to visit our oak structural frame. It gets loaded on Friday and will be onsite on Monday. I will miss this drive! Neil gave me a tour of the pieces, and in particular wanted to show me the showstopper piece he sourced for us.
ta-da!
The single-piece curved beam is a success. The alternative would have been to cut it out of
a very large section like he showed me in the sawdust on the floor. This would have been super expensive and not quite as nice because the grain would have made a horizontal trace to follow the growth of the original plank. The more cost effective alternative would have been to have cut two or three pieces and join them, and this is what we had specified originally. The many-pieced bends are what you see around town with other builds of this design. Ours will be the only single piece beam. Whoop whoop!
backs of brick infill bits more of our jobThere are over 60 pieces for the rear bay alone. They’ll be stuck on the back of a lorry over the weekend, then up to us on Monday early a.m. They’re all labelled (red pen for front and green pen for back), and it’s great to visualise where the bits will fit in according to Dave’s drawings.
upside-down cross piece for gable with window rebates on the top er, … a truss strutIt’s amazing how casual they are about taking these enormous beams and cutting chunks into them. They tell me that all the hard work, i.e. measuring and planning, has already been done, so this is the easy part. Very impressive!
On the way back, I put the anchors on as I passed the Bluebell Vineyard shop. A quick u-turn later and I was in the car park alongside a very Californian looking setup with tasting room and a nice few rows of well-tended vines. All was well, and then a great big tour bus from Eastbourne carrying a large number of pensioners arrived. I thought I might have just enough time to buy a bottle of their finest before they wandered in, but they were quick, and I was too late. My bottle of bubbles will have to wait until next time. And I think there just might be a next time because we’ve got designs on a nice countertop shelf for the basin in the downstairs WC. Back to Neil’s this autumn I think!
from idyllic Sussex…. … to rainy base for our Thursday site meetingPaul the electrical guy was due to arrive, but he was stuck on the M25 unable to move. Apparently a crane (nothing to do with us!) blew up into a massive fireball on the M40, and travelling anywhere near London was a bit of a no-hoper today. We look forward to meeting Paul another day.
We also welcome Claire aboard the good ship St Anne’s. She’s designed an awesome kitchen, and she was onsite this afternoon to measure up and ensure that the drawings matched reality. Apparently this isn’t always the case, but on this job the plans and the build match decisively. She’ll now make up a set of drawings for review, right down to the lights, sockets and tiling. We’re looking forward to that!
Monday
Continuity–hooray! James is back onsite overseeing everything in his first pair of consecutive weeks in the job. Things are ticking along smoothly; but the brick team is running out of vertical interior walls to keep busy before the oak frame is installed next week.
We had a massive site meeting of the minds today: Dave the Architect, Tim the Contractor, Tom the Steels guy, Neil the oak guy, Paul the joinery guy, and of course James the Site Manager, Ben the Project Manager, and me tagging along trying to learn as much poss. Today’s lesson was: What’s a padstone? For those like me who have not a clue, these are extra strong blocks (not bricks) that the steel lintels sit on. Double doors require a steel above them to support the brickwork above, for instance. The brick team need to know the dimensions of the steels so they can set these padstones in the right places. Should be fine, right? They’re on the drawings. But if the steels are still somewhere between the drawings and physical arrival, the brick team usually waits until they’re onsite to line them up or they risk unbuilding what they’d already built off plan. And as luck would have it, this part of the project coincided with the engineer’s summer holiday plans, so we’ve been delayed in getting them even on paper. We’ve been playing the game of keeping the brick team onsite doing the interior blockwork when they’d really rather be getting on with setting the padstones and building the exterior walls. Next week, hopefully.
crowded houseThere was much discussion of how the oak frame will tie into the brick work. The frame is a really special thing–it’s meant to be completely self-supporting. As in, if you put it all together in the garden, it would stand up by itself. I totally respect the integrity of the structure and think it’s really important to have it do what it looks like its doing, and not pretend. A nice part of the build. We’re all looking forward to seeing it go up, so next Monday will be an exciting day.
There is a large A-shaped steel on the rear of the building between the oak frame and the brickwork that has yet to be finalised and manufactured, and this will be mainly to support the roof ridgeline. The roof is a very complicated thing, and although much of today’s meeting was spent discussing erecting the oak frame, Dave was on hand to make sure we don’t mess up the roof dimensions so that the pitch of steels matches the pitch of the oak once it’s up. Exactly. Tim wants to minimise the number of crane-days (too right, they’re bank), so it’s quite a job to line up the trades requiring cranes all on the same day/s. There are steels, oak frame and floor panels to juggle.
front gableOne decision that had to be made today concerned the bowed beam on the front porch. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the look of it right: how thick, where to place it front to back in the frame, what circumference the bend should be…. But just to make things interesting, Neil arrived today with an idea. He said that he’s very lucky in that he has the luxury of spending time (he’s been part of the job since February, so that’s a while!) sourcing pieces for his jobs from all over Europe, and that he had found the Perfect Beam for this job. The one he’s picked is bent at just the right angle across the whole of the piece so that the grain follows the bend beautifully, and the beam can therefore be made of one piece. Previous designs had two or three chops in it to achieve the right bend. Dave says the chopped approach would make the build look like a pub. St Anne’s Arms? Clearly the single piece is the better option. It will be slightly skinnier as a result of The Perfect Bend, and it will now match the width of the vertical beams between the windows rather than the chunky vertical corner pieces. I’m sure this will all make sense when it’s up, and I imagine it will look quite elegant.
Ben says it will be amusing to watch me give tours of the finished product. He reckons I’ll be waxing lyrical about the cunning oak-brick tie-ins and the effective placement of the cranked steels when really all they’ll really be interested in is the nice paintwork and some colourful vases. We’ll see if I will be able to contain myself….
In the meantime, Mick, Paul, Dave, Glen and Johnny just keep happily laying more and more bricks…..
We say goodbye to Nic and Justin and thank them very much for everything they’ve done for us. They’re great guys, keeping the build rolling along all together despite significant challenges that would flummox any mere mortal, and they still manage to make us laugh. Best of luck in the future, guys.
Welcome aboard Tim and James!
We created a test panel of roof tiles to see if a mix might be better. Generally, the panel of vertical hanging tiles is lighter than the ones on the roof on most houses, and we’ll choose these if the price is right. At the moment, we’ve got to come up with a decent percentage blend so Tim can go and have it priced.
Up until now, we’ve been trying to fit an AV system in the living room which is perfectly normal you might think, but the challenge is to wedge it in above a fireplace. We’ve stalled out over the past few weeks in trying to get advice about combustable materials and convection venting grills, and as a result we’ve kept the team from building the far wall with the chimney. We’ve now made enough decisions to let the guys crack on with the wall. But the final design is still up for grabs!
It’s awesome to see scaffolding up and steels in. The first floor planks are due to arrive in the second week of September with any luck.
Thursday and before…
Apologies for losing a few weeks in here.
distractionsteels!
The view out the family room will take some TLC…. It’s not exactly jaw-dropping at the moment and probably not good enough to prompt the kids to avert their eyes away from the TV. The garage makes a super tea-hut/meeting room, but it makes an awful window.
view out the family room
The oak frame is busy getting built in deepest Sussex and will go up at the end of September. In the meantime, the guys have finished all they can do on the porch.
the front porch is looking nice
I’ve learned a LOT about chimneys, flues, regulations and what’s on the market. We’re aiming for a cassette woodburning fire. This requires a 150 cm flue and a Class I chimney. A traditional open fire would require a 9″ flue and a much larger chimney. Given how close we are to the fence, it’s obvious that we’ve had to limit our choices in this area.
chimney is covered in insulation with the red tags.chimney fluerebuilt rear bay–notice any difference?
Paul brought a sample of the oak subframes for the bronze windows to the last meeting. It’s enormous.
The guys wear gloves because of the chemicals in the lead. Working with this stuff all day is toxic–lead poisoning is a real thing, and the preservatives on the surface are well-yucky.
Mid-November and it’s getting really really cold. The rental house’s main valve to the ground floor radiators decided to give up the ghost this week just to make things interesting. Not quite a frost on the inside of the windows state of affairs, but it’s certainly cold underfoot when making that first cup of tea in the morning. But this is NOTHING compared to early dark-o’clock onsite.
The alternative would have been to cut it out of
