Mid - February 2015

Mid - February 2015 - Plaster, Insulation and wires

The house is moving on quickly now and at last is starting to actually look like a house! The trouble is there are lots of little bits being completed so there are lots of photos here.

Also, because of the number of little things and due to lack of time on my part, i have only managed to do one entry in the whole of february!

So lets start at the top...

The stairs have taken shape with the balustrading being put together.

Upstairs the plastering is almost finished too. Richard the plasterer has done a great job. Claire and i have been impressed with how smooth he has made the walls. I know it's been a big job for him but the results are great.

the guest ensuite looks great now too. (and yes, Claire got her 'alcove' in this bathroom!)

In the girls bathroom the bath and shower are now in place. Both look good.

Our bathroom curved wall is looking really great. We are so glad we did this as it really helps with the flow into the bedroom and creates a feeling of space.

 

inside our bathroom not much has changed this month. the basics are in place but now it's on hold until the balcony is fitted as we need access to the eaves spaces beside the toilet to get the steel work in place.

So, the remaining bathroom equipment (if that's what you call it) is waiting to be fitted.

Downstairs the hallway and games room are looking good. I just hope Neil the electrician knows what each of these wires is for!

We have decided to build a cupboard around the pipes and wires in the games room - this will help extend the short wall and give us a little bit more storage.

in the kitchen the first fix electrics are now in place and the room is ready to plaster.

The ceiling space has been stuffed with insulation to attempt to deaden the sound and limit noise up to the bedrooms above.

The cold larder has been built out of block work in the utility room. this will create a nice cool space for storage.

And finally today... the thing that i wasn't too sure about when we ordered it... but now think is great... the sun tunnel into the downstairs toilet. it lets in loads of light and gives the room a great open feel considering how small it is.

Wind, Rain, Snow and Cold

Wind, Rain, Snow and Cold

That pretty much describes the last week. Today it is snowing. Yesterday it was cold, raining and windy.

The builders are doing a great job in the house. They now have a small electric fan heater to put some heat in to the building.

During the week we had an amazing wind 'storm'. Parts of the UK had tornadoes and we just just had some very windy days.

Sleeping in the caravan at night was an experience. It was like being on / in a boat. the caravan was rocking all night as it was buffeted by the wind. While the rain hammered on the roof.

Surprisingly, despite waking up during the night to the noise Claire and I actually slept OK. Life in the caravan is not that bad.

We have a oil filled electric radiator that comes on about 1 hour before we go to bed. This gets the heat up pretty quickly. One night last week I went in to find the temperature, before the heater came on to be -2.4 degrees!

I m also now a fan of our electric blanket! Something i didn't ever think i would say! we turn that on for an hour before we get into bed and often leave it on low over night!

During the night it does feel pretty chilly on your face but the temperature with us in the caravan is normally well above freezing!!!

Only 4 more months to go and at least the weather is warming up now... honestly!

Stairs, walls, bathrooms and plaster...

Stairs, walls and plaster...

Since Christmas 2014 the builders have been busy!!!

Loads has happened. Firstly the stairs were put in - they are fairly basic at the moment but it allows us to get up and down easily. They arrived as a flat pack assembly from a company in Lincolnshire somewhere...

The builders then put them in place against the wall.

the banister rail is also in the pack but for now we are going with the 'rustic version made up of scaffold planks and left over timber. I quite like it actually!

These are views in to the 'secret' cupboards in the girl's bedrooms.

This is the space between the two rooms

In the girls bathroom the parts have all now been delivered and the stud work put in for the bath and the toilet.

and also the plasterer, Richard, has made a good start on most of the rooms. This is the girls bathroom looking at the toilet surround.

Richard has also completed the majority of each room - he does one wall at a time.

These are the two Velux windows - one in the hall and the other above the stairs

Once all the roof had been put in place there was one bit that hadn't been assessed. Outside the back door there was a covered area that was boarded over with a fibre board. I removed it one day, long after the roof was complete, and found a concrete lintel. It looked like it had been formed in place when the house was built. Although in general it looked OK there were some cracks running from the bottom to the top. We decided that they looked like they could one day get worse, and although they were really carrying any weight we took the decision to chop the beam up and put in a  new steel. Jason was very quick at chopping it out and the new beam went in pretty quickly too.

The plumbers, Chris (and occasionally Brian) have been busy getting the pipe work in place.

Neil the electrician has been busy - i can't quite believe how much wiring we have. This is the view into the playroom where the wires all come together.

The house is looking really great now.

The Completed Roofing.

The Completed Roofing.

These are just a few pics of the completed slate work - I have put them here as a record of how good i think it all looks. 

We have fitted two sun pipes - one into the guest ensuite and one to the downstairs loo.

Nice lead work on the valley!

and the ridge looks good too.

Even if the solar panels detract from the beauty of the slate work I still think it looks great!

The front porch works really well with the slate and the oak together.

(It's strange what you find looks good these days!)

The Roofing is COMPLETE!

I originally wrote this post in mid December - around 16th to be precise. But then we had a few internet issues... I'll explain more later.

The point of the post originally was that - At Last, After 11 weeks in total the slate roof is finished. It looks beautiful. I now know why we chose to go down the slate roof route. It complements the woodwork and windows perfectly.

I was pretty excited about that at the time! But then we had the internet issues. So what happened? 

Well, firstly our phone line was rigged up by the electrician so we had phone and internet in the caravan/ office. This worked fine as Neil had tensioned the line across from the pole by tying it to the scaffold. All was well while we had scaffold! Then the scaffolders (at last) came to remove the final bits of scaffold. They removed everything including untying the phone wire and letting it hang loose. What they hadn't realised is that it hung loose over the road. So one night the internet worked and the following morning it didn't. All we can assume is that a vehicle had hit the line overnight and broken it. Luckily it didn't cause any more harm than breaking the line.

To get it fixed took quite a while! The first BT engineer came out pretty quickly -the same day the 'fault' was reported in fact. When he realised what had happened he took great joy in telling me the implications of 'us' tampering with phone lines and the risks we caused by letting the line hang across the road. He also told me that our supply pole was 'too short' as it didn't reach the required 5.9 meters! His words to me were "You've opened up a can of worms here!"

I thought to myself how long is this going to take and who is going to pay for it?  

What the engineer did that was useful though was to tell me what i needed to ask for and then he closed the job so according to BT systems the fault was fixed - which effectively meant we weren't liable for the line breaking at that time.

I then called BT up and after speaking to 9 people and taking 2 hours I got through to some one who understood what a 'Line Plant Rearrangement' actually was. (It simply meant that our line needed to fixed to a new pole, or buried under ground and then re affixed to the house - simple eh?).

The Surveyor was booked to come out to check what we needed for the following day. He arrived and surveyed the job and told Claire it was too late in the day to complete it and also that he needed two men to do it. He said they'd be back tomorrow.

The next engineer arrived the following day -Christmas Eve - late in the afternoon and alone. He checked the job and told me.... 'Sorry mate, i can't do the job alone and also it's too late in the day. You'll have to ring BT to reschedule it!!'

So, after three visits we still weren't fixed. I called BT and eventually found some one who got a commitment to do it by 31st December.

Eventually we had two guys turn up on 30th December, early in the day, to fix it. They simply wired us up to the next pole in the street and connected the line to the opposite end of the house, so the wire was higher across the road. It took them a couple of hours to complete but at last we were back online.

It's funny how being without internet causes so much frustration. We realised how much we rely on it for everything we do - even listening to music now meant we had to find CDs!

So, it's now the 4th January and we are just getting back on top of this blog stuff. Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year!