week 22: holiday hiatus and crossed fingers...

No blog update for a few weeks because there has not been much to report. We lost most of the key team to holidays for a couple of weeks and now the weather seems to be stopping play.

The running delays now look like approximately:

1. 2 weeks on the Demolition and Groundwork package and resulting knock on effects
2. 1 week delay incurred moving windows to site
3. 1 week delay through holidays
4. Approx 1 week delay and counting on waiting for a weather window to lay the EPDM Firestone Roof.

However there is some hope in that the Roofers are booked for Thursday and the weather currently looks like it might be kind to us but is far from certain at this stage. Hence the crossed fingers.

In other news...

The cedar cladding for the first floor has arrived and is smelling great.  Can't wait to see that start to go onto the first floor.

All the windows have had protective film applied - which makes it all look pretty drab inside the house. 

The plasterboard has started to go up.

The plasterboard stops 10mm shy of the finished floor level to allow for a shadowgap as opposed to standard skirtings. Who knows how that will wear... but should look great, at least for the first few weeks :- )

This is the plastic strips that make the shadow gap work!

On the front of the house the framework is in place to take the cedar cladding around the front of the balcony.

Finally, Mark has been building the stairs in the workshop. This picture does not do justice to the quality of joinery involved. We can't wait to see the steps in place.

  

week:19 windows, pipes and cables...

The week before last (commencing 27/07) John Daniel and team from JD Electric moved in to install 1500m of cable in the "First Fix" Electrics. This basically means running all the cables for the lights, sockets, switches, cooker etc all around the house, ahead of the stud walls being covered in plasterboard and plaster. Probably due to the very tidy nature of John and team's work this all looks surprisingly modest. Maybe we should have had a few more lights after all? We actually have just shy of 100 LED down lights so that will probably not be necessary : -)

Starting the same day Chris's team from Smokless Energy started with the first fix plumbing. The provision for hot water has been the source of much agonising but on balance we went for the KISS approach and opted for a straight forward unvented (mains pressured), highly insulated, hot water cylinder which we will power up on economy 7 via 3 3Kw immersions over night until one day we can afford some PVs to heat it during the day. The length of hot water pipe work in the house was then a key factor for the PHPP calculations as it contributes further to unwanted/uncontrollable heat input into the house and also increased primary energy as it takes into account the energy that is lost when hot water sits in pipes and looses its heat energy and therefore effectively increases the amount of hot water you need.

In the end with the use of 15mm pipe where often 22mm is used and 10 where often 15mm is used we managed to keep the volume of hotwater pipe work down to about the equivalent of 45m of 15mm or approx litres. So put it another way, if you went round every hot tap in the morning and ran it till hot came through, you would get about 8 litres of water. And then if you didn't touch those taps for the rest of the day, you would loose the energy it took to heat the water now sitting in the pipes from ambient temp in mains to approx 50degrees c. Asleep yet?

It the photo below you can see where the hot water tank will go with the effective manifold above supplying approx 6 hot water feeds to various locations and roughly the same number of cold feeds.
 

Chris's team has also installed the soil and waste pipes and installed are the WC frames to hand the wall mounted pans from.  

The crazy green ducting is for the MVHR supply and extracts which are currently being threaded in by Jonathan's team.

The guys have now got all the windows in and door except for the front door. Below showing the various layers of airtighness layers and tapes used to ensure airtightness around the windows. 

Below showing the windows in the front of the 1st floor.

And the outside of the balcony on the south side.

The big lift and slide windows are now in downstairs and looking great!

And the outside of the house looks something like this...at least it does on a drab on August evening.