Week 15 - UFH, screed, and render base coat
Entry posted by Benpointer in General
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As promised, I spared you a Week 14 blog due to our visit to Yorkshire for a wedding and catch-up with old friends. It was lovely to do something unrelated to the house and it made us realise how all-consuming our build has become. We will definitely try to have some more non-house time through the rest of the build.
That said, it’s back to the matter in hand:
UFH
Two weeks ago the guys were battling through laying the floor insulation in preparation for laying the UFH pipes, ahead of the screed pour which was booked for 3rd September.
In the end it was a very close-run thing - the UFH pipes were ready by 13:30 and the screed arrived 10 minutes later. Too close for comfort really: Tight project scheduling is one thing but the stress of 11 cubic metres of unusable liquid screed potentially being dumped on the site was a very uncomfortable feeling.
Screed
Once started, the screed pour itself (by Williams Walls and Floors) seemed to go very smoothly (hah!) and it looks fantastic. We have had 65mm of Cemfloor Therm liquid screed laid. Still in stressed-out mode I woke up before 4:00am the next day worrying about what would happen if the pipes floated up or the screed was laid too high (they didn’t; it wasn’t). (I helpfully woke Mrs P. too just so that she could share the experience - she seemed not to appreciate it.)
We left the house shut up for 24 hours as instructed by the screed man Rob Williams. On Friday morning I went over and opened up to find we had a sauna! All perfectly normal apparently, but the combination of heat from the screed setting reaction, the well-insulated relatively air-tight house and (presumably) 1000’s of gallons of water created an atmosphere that made Singapore seem like a desert.
Sadly, I failed to get any photos of the clouds created as the windows were opened and the saturated ‘sauna’ atmosphere hit the September morning. By the afternoon, with all the windows and doors open the inside of the house seemed perfectly normal again.
Seeing the screed poured in a few hours and reflecting on how fiddly all the underfloor insulation had been to lay, made me wish there was an option for a poured floor insulation - it would surely have been so much less effort and faster?
Edit: There is apparently - https://www.rtu.co.uk/assets/documents/RTU-Ultrabead-Brochure.pdf. I have no idea if it is any good, what the pros and cons are etc, and it is too late for us but if we were doing another build (Mrs P: “We’re not!”), I’d certainly look into it.
Render
Just to make sure we weren’t missing an opportunity to get some outside work done while the focus was on the floor, we had booked our render team (Caesar Spray-rend and Plastering) to start boarding up the 50% or so of the external walls that are to be rendered (the other 50% will be vertically clad in Brimstone Ash). So on week 14 the STS construction boards were fixed to battens and last week the base coat was sprayed and smoothed out. It already looks a lot better just for some of the shiny breather membrane walls being covered up. We now have to wait a week before the top coat can be applied. We’re using EcoRend Thincoat for anyone who is interested.
And finally…
Marcus from our super groundworks team came in on Thursday to set all the stainless steel oak post brackets in concrete on top of their support pillars, and also to lay the smoothest, tidiest concrete slab you have ever seen to rest our ASHP on.
…Which is just as well because the ASHP arrives on Monday!
Dashboard:
Contractor days on site this week: 22
Contractor days on site previous week: 16
Contractor days on site since build start: 249
Budget: Getting more challenging tbh - beginning to eat into the contingency - mainly costs I hadn't properly estimated. 😱
Plan: Still on track to move in by Easter 2026.
Issues and worries closed this week:
- UFH pipes laid.
- Screed down!
Current top issues and worries:
- Insulation - the additional ceiling insulation is still a worry - scheduled for w/c 15th September.
-
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