It's been a week of mixed emotions, we've made good progress on site but hit our first major budget overrun.
First the good stuff, blocks got delivered on Monday. JUB will only ship them on pallets which sounds OK but in practice, but causes several problems on site. For a start we didn't have a fork lift on site and fork lifts don't tend to do well on soft ground. In the end we got in a tele-handler for which a single days hire is a significant cost. It should have been a small unit, but i
Bored of your downlighters? Why not replace them with bulbs to give a different appearance to your ceiling?
Just an idea that I happened to see in a house in Kent a couple of weeks ago.
GU10 bulbs are available in shape other than downlighters, for example candle bulbs:
It is far netter not to have done it in the first place, but at least there are ways to mitigate the damage.
(No, GU10 downlighers are not my favour
There hasn’t been much happening here since the joiner finished mid January, we started oiling the staircase and associated newels etc, we’ve had carpets laid in 3 of the 4 bedrooms, the 4th one still needs decorating but neither of us has the inclination to do it and I’ve built up a couple of things for the grandchildren’s rooms. We got a brickie out last week to look at getting the steps and ramp done but with the turn in the weather again we’ll have to wait before we can have the machine in a
And so almost another month has gone by but progress is still being made on the build and, just as importantly, hubby and I got away for a week's holiday in northern France just as the warm weather hit. After our abject failure at R&R over Christmas, it was wonderful to have a really relaxing break without illness or stress and come back refreshed for the final push on the build, which is just as well as there's a busy time to be had over the coming weeks.
In the last blog entry
Having originally planned then dropped the idea of Solar PV (a combination of budget constraints and drop in FiT rates) I recently acquired a number of Solar PV panels (a pallet bought in conjunction with @ProDave from Bimble Solar via Ebay).
Having recently collected the panels, lengths of mounting rail and various other bits and bobs @ProDave had kindly sourced, I fitted the system over the last two Saturdays.
First off was mounting the rails on my rear, SW facing garag
I uploaded my draft floor plans a while ago and I have lived with them a while and am fairly content that they will meet our needs.
We have one elderly parent left who we could easily argue needs to move in with us ( that is closer to the truth than I like to think about as it is my MIL not my own mum). That gives us the need to a downstairs bedroom and en-suite. Everything else is fairly normal but of reasonably generous proportions in line with most self builds. We hope to have
A scaffold tent is a shelter completely encompassing a build, or part of a build, to allow 'indoor' working whatever the weather.
Recently a ran across a 16C barn inside one when I was taking the scenic route from Canterbury to Lewes to buy scaffolding.
The project was a builder restoring his barn, after a Planning Process that had taken more than a decade.
Bang on schedule the raft components arrived on Monday morning. We knew it would be quite a big volume of material on a small site and getting it unloaded and put somewhere it would not get damaged or need moving was s little tricky. JUB insisted on sending the raft on pallets. Our builder was not that impressed with this as unloading the lory requires a folk lift which is something we don't have on site. So we had to hire a set of folks for the digger. With the raft safely stored at the back of
Most of the internal work to date has focused on insulating the suspended timber floor and with this completed our joiners could come back and put down the sub floor.
We considered two different materials for the subfloor:
22mm OSB or 22mm Chipboard.
We decided to use chipboard as it was 25% cheaper then OSB. Plywood would have been another option but this would have been more expensive than the chipboard as well.
To do this job we needed just over
I'm following the lead of a few others, and starting a blog on my own platform.
It is called "This New House", and will let me reuse some content from the 10,000+ posts I have on various forum sites from the last 10-12 years, and also let me comment on questions beyond the scope of Buildhub.
This is the blurb:
The new website is here, at This New House.
This week is half term in school so I have had two days at work, in splendid isolation, making the many many changes to the timetable ready for the first day back. Today we have the architect round to do a proper start on the plans and while I'm waiting for him to arrive, I started to do some batch cooking of things to last me through the next 6 weeks or so. Being in the kitchen, turned my thoughts to what I really wanted out of the new house in terms of cooking, eating and washing. This blog
Well, it’s over. The company that did our render and cladding has finished and the final bill paid so the warranties can be issued. Now I feel I can blog about what has been an up and down experience.
We started looking at companies to do the render and cladding before we had finished knocking our previous house down. The sales guy sat in our caravan in May last year. We felt we had got on top of this at an early stage.
One issue we were really concerned about was the jo
The Timber Frame company arrived on site on a very wet mid-January morning. Very quickly wagon loads of components started to arrive and before long every space around the slab and up the drive was dotted with Ikea style flat packs, assorted timber and steelwork.
The first job was to floor out over the basement to form a flat working platform for the main house erection. The original specification called for pre-stressed concrete floor panels, these were changed to Posi-joist, as thi
As the winter weather has prevented us from moving forward with the rendering and other exterior work we have been working on finishing off insulating the suspended timber floor.
We had a short wait for the plumber to install some drainage below joist level, once this was done it allowed us to finish off fitting the insulation boards. We then used expanding foam along the edges of the boards to ensure no gaps.
The next job was fitting the frametherm as the se
The firework instruction phrase "light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance" comes to mind. It's been a real baptism of fire, however our builder says it's the worst time and it should settle down now. All in all it's been a productive week and almost all work has moved us forward.
The digger arrived to dig out the raft area at 8am as requested and work got under way. We had muck lorries scheduled for Tuesday and it quickly became apparent that we did not h
I spotted this inside a local cafe this week.
Liquorice Allsort chic is not quite my taste, but the door is not as obvious as could be the case.
It is an a sample of how to incorporate an element into a stronger pattern than the outline as a means to de-emphasise it. Here it could have been further concealed by choosing a different handle, or concealed hinges.
It could also have been made full height.
Having got all of the groundwork out of the way, it was time to build the timber frame. We were carrying out a stick build, ie: we purchased the i-beams and glulams and the carpenters cut and assembled everything onsite like a huge jigsaw puzzle. We had looked into using a timber frame manufacturer, but we had a good team of carpenters who had experience of stick building a frame, so it didn't seem to make any sense changing a proven formula.
Initial jobs were to get the scaffold up
