vivienz

Sorry, I should have said Gutmann abajo. Gutmann also make the bora, I believe. Blanco are the UK distributor. Here's the brochure I got for the abajo. BLANCO_by_GUTMANN_2018_Unpriced_Key_Programme.pdf

I plan to have a Bora abajo hob and extractor. I saw it in Holland whilst staying with a friend who was looking at kitchens at the time. I have found a local kitchen company that will do supply only, so that's my planned route at the moment.

Hmm. This may warrant a new thread. Can someone tell me the value of a mastic man and why I may want one for my build? It's not something I have vome across to date.

Have sent you a PM.

Some friends recently freshened up their kitchen. They painted the kitchen doors and tiles using a small roller and it worked really well. Along with a new roller blind in the window and a new acrylic splashback, it made a big difference for not much money.

It's about 320 out at work, just north of Ringwood in Hampshire. Very, very hard water there. At the new place, its 283.

Yay! Victory - just don't tell her! Bugger - just seen the charcoal comment. NOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Stick to grey - you have agreement. Charcoal - there be fire breathing dragons. The ones that turn you into burned toast.

It's G&T #2 for me now, but I will dig out my figures from Norrsken for you tomorrow, @Vijay. I've got pretty big lift and slide going into my living area, so it should give you some idea of comparison. If I don't get back you by the end of tomorrow, PM me to give me a nudge.

I did come across that website in my initial research. I think that we'll be able to get the garage built, but long term it would be good to have those cables moved, so I will see what the wayleave officer has to say next week.

I wasn't going to visit the site today, but we've had heavy rain showers today in Dorset and I thought that would be an ideal opportunity to see how level the slab looks after its late night power floating. My reasoning was that whilst I can't identify any high spots by eye, it would be easy to look for the low ones by where the puddles were lying. Here's a photo taken from a slightly elevated viewpoint (the top of a pile of wood chippings!), looking from the south east corner where the snug will be, over towards the north west corner, where the main living area will be. Most of the puddles that you can see are barely a couple of millimetres. I'm not sure how long it had been since the shower that caused these, but it was a breezy day and not hot. The next is taken from the other end of the right hand side of the property, as seen above. Between the brown foul waste pipe and the white UFH pipes, you can just about see that there is a hole in the slab. This is meant to be there right now, but is due to a mishap yesterday. As the concrete was being transferred in the digger and poured from the bucket, the digger rocked slightly and the bucket bounced on the exposed UFH pipes. Harry from MBC reckoned that one of the pipes has been damaged as a result, and so the area around the punctured pipe has been left uncovered. My trusty plumber/UFH person will be coming early next week to fix the damaged section of pipe and make good on the concrete floor, and MBC will be covering the cost of this. Once I have the bill for the repair, I will pay it and MBC will deduct the amount from my next stage payment. This was all agreed this morning without any arguments or quibbles. So far, all the puddles in the photos have only been a couple of mm deep. The deepest is on the far north west corner of the living area, shown below. It's not easy to guage the depth of this area, but I think it's about 4mm at the deepest. The thingies are a couple of end caps that get put on the pile rebar, but the wind was blowing them towards me. You can see how they are tilting. Here's another view of the same: I don't recall the exact tolerance that the slab needs to be within off the top of my head, and I'm not going hunting for it right now as I'm one g&t into Friday evening with a couple more to follow, so no point now. However, the figure of 5mm is scratching away in the deepest recesses of my grey cells, so I think this should be acceptable. If anyone knows otherwise, please speak up! The finish on the surface overall is very nice. I had a walk over the whole thing and couldn't see anything obvious, but then apart from squishy concrete under my boots, I wouldn't know quite what to look for anyone. To my unpracticed eye, it looks pretty good. One very good think that came about from all that excess concrete being dumped all over the place yesterday is that the team spread it all out between the hard standing and the slab, so I now have an even more level and sturdy surface for the crane when it arrives with the timber frame:

MBC held all the upstands in place using giant metal staples to keep the blocks together.

Is it just for shade, or solar gain, or both? Internal or external? Prompted by an earlier thread by @lizzie I'm going to have external roller blinds to control solar gain for my south facing windows. They use a mesh fabric that allow you to see out when they're down. I had a competitive quote from this firm: External roller blinds

I lost count of the number of times Harry said today "...and it was all going so well." Poor man - he's a lovely guy and didn't deserve a day like today.

...for the MBC team, and not their fault, but I have a slab. This is only down to the tenacity and incredible hard work from the MBC team who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat today following horrible equipment failure on the part of the concrete company. So, let's start at the beginning. The slab team worked like frenzy yesterday morning to get all of the EPS down, followed by the mesh which then got tied into the ring beams. After that, they put all the underfloor heating pipes in (there are several zones and many, many pipes to come into the manifold). The building control officer turned up just before 6pm last night and gave everything the okay for the pour today. Here's the slab with everything on it first thing this morning, just waiting for the concrete, at shortly after 8 this morning. On site already is the pumping lorry and one mixer of cement. Very exciting, so far, so good. They started with the furthest part first, and the first lot of cement went onto the garage area, where the chaps are standing in the above photo. Here's the pump, concrete lorry and plenty of other equipment all good to go. Except, it wasn't good to go. Well, it was, because that's what it did in the end. Go, that is. The concrete pump packed up and after a good while of trying to fix it, nothing was happening so off it went. All wasn't lost, however, as one of the drivers was also a pump operator and offered to get a fairly old pump out of retirement and use that. Brilliant! This is the ageing pump putting the concrete over to the garage. Meanwhile, several hours have passed and after a bit of grumbling earlier in the morning about the concrete lorries not turning up on time, suddenly, they're coming thick and fast and are all parked up our narrow country lane. Then the second pump got blocked and couldn't be cleared. A very large man with a very large mallet did all he could to clear it, but it wasn't working. By now, it was nearly 2pm and the slab should have been poured a good few hours ago and power floating started. Left with no other choice, Harry, who was heading up the team, got the bucket onto the whopping great digger and ALL of the rest of the cement got dumped onto the slab by digger, and then the guys had to drag it over to wherever they needed it. This was for a floor area of about 180 sq metres. Fortunately, there were 5 on the team today as they had brought in an extra guy to cover for one who was late back from holiday, but turned up straight from the airport to the site so the numbers were beefed up, and boy, did they need all of them today. The garage slab was screeded (is that actually a verb? Dunno, it is now), and was looking fine. Eventually, the rest of the concrete got where it was supposed to be and the lane finally emptied of concrete lorries - there were 5 on or around the site at one point this afternoon. Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you will realise that there are no photos of the final, powerfloated slab. This is because I pushed off at 5.30 this evening and they were only just starting on the garage; they reckon that they would just about get it finished this evening by the time the light went, so I'm afraid, dear reader, that you really will have to wait for those photos. One final photo from earlier in the day has something of interest, as it shows the shuttering that was put in place on the threshold for the lift and slide doors that are going in the living room area. Tune in soon for the next thrilling update!

You demanding divas! I'm knackered, but I have a slab. Just about. It was eventful. Now that I've whetted your appetite, I'm going to leave you hanging until tomorrow! ?

Not surprisingly, I've been pondering the dilemma of the overhead electricity lines near/over my proposed garage. I'm still waiting to hear back from MBC and I suspect my request for a call has got lost in the works somewhere, so I will chase it up. In the meantime, I've decided to take another course of action in parallel as, given the choice, I would very much prefer the overhead lines not to be there, or at least not so close. The immediate thought that comes to mind is £££££. As many of us know, anything to do with moving electricity supplies tends to be expensive. This is a slightly different case to the usual one, however, in that the overhead cables don't supply me or my property so I'm not over that particular barrel. On the deeds to my property is a copy of a fairly ancient wayleave agreement, made in 1958 between the then land owner and what was the Southern Electricity Board. The key term here is "wayleave". If it were an easement, I would really be in a spot of bother, as an easement is agreement made in perpetuity, as the legal bods like to call it. To us laypeople, that means forever. So, the fact that I have a wayleave is a good start. So what's so good about a wayleave, then? Well, I can serve notice to the electricity board that I am going to terminate it and they have 3 months to do something about it or respond in some way. That's not to say that the response will be the one I want, but it gets the ball rolling. It seems that this not an uncommon request from developers and farmers and there is a well laid out process for it so I shall get things started today - no time like the present and all that. I will update as and when, but my knowledge is sparse at the moment so I shan't go into too much detail that may be a load of rubbish. Once more unto the breech! Quick update: of course, everything has been done before on BH! Here's a link to a previous thread for Lucy Murray's build in Scotland but with English cases cited from Peter Stark. Just love this place! Burying electricity supply

I'm sure we'll get there. Directly under the wires, there was already a concrete hard standing for some sheds that disintegrated over the last couple of years. Also, the wires continue over our field and an access track for the farm next door. The farm workers regularly go scooting along the track in a JCB with loads of animal feed in the raised up bucket and I haven't seen any crispy farmers lying around, so we should be able to work something out.

If anyone wants to come along, let me know.

This is what the MBC guys used to compact the hardcore for my foundation. On the right, in case you're blinded by the rubble.

Here are the floor plans. 1120 - 103DIMS - Bagber Farm Cottage - PROPOSED GROUND FLOOR.PDF 1120 - 104DIMS - Bagber Farm Cottage - PROPOSED GROUND FLOOR.PDF

The ground floor is about 180 square metres, 120 upstairs. We told the architect that we wanted larger rooms, not more rooms, and the downstairs is very open plan.

It's the scaffold erector that has raised the issue, not MBC. MBC are off today, back office at least, so I will be able to check with them tomorrow for a workaround.

Thanks, both. The garage is designed to have a flat roof, so I won't need to make any changes in that respect.

Thanks, Dave. Our supply doesn't come from that pole, it's currently an OH supply via the neighbours. I don't know the destination of the problematic one, but it does trouble me at the moment. Before demolishing, there were already sheds with hard standing directly underneath the line, but I doubt that counts for much at present. For the time being, I shall see what MBC have to say about it once they're back, then open it up for further input if necessary.

Let's start with the problem. I can't solve it today as today is a public holiday in RoI and the MBC guy I need to speak to isn't available, so there's nothing doing until tomorrow. I need to get the scaffolding sorted for when the timber frame team arrive on 27th August and thought I had this well in hand. I sort of still do, but there's a H&S problem with the scaffold erection and I've spent a little time this morning tracing back to the source of the error. I need a single lift of scaffolding for the construction of the attached single storey flat roof garage that is at the north east corner of the building. On the topographical survey that was done for the property by the vendor (for the planning permission that he sold it with), some overhead power cables are shown nearby and the building was designed so that the far corner of the garage cleared these. So far so good. All the setting out and construction has been done according to this. Now, lack of observation on my part, but it is now obvious that instead of clearing the north east corner of the garage by a couple of metres, the OH cables are, in fact, directly overhead of that corner and where the scaffolding would be. I had a look on the topo survey and the OH cables are incorrectly plotted - they are shown further out than they are in reality, so I'm not sure if this is collective responsibility, or who's it is. I'm not really interested in attributing blame to anyone at this stage, I'd rather just find a solution that gets the house and garage built within the current schedule. The issue is this - the cables are high tension and the scaffolder's original suggestion has proved to be a no-goer as the DNO has said that the cables are very high voltage and would just burn through any shrouding. Alternatively, they could switch off the supply running through these cables, but it would have to be for the entire time that the scaffolding is in place. I didn't even bother asking for a price on this as it's probably more than the build cost. Where do I go from here? Well, I need to speak with MBC tomorrow and find out if the garage can be built without scaffolding, or if there is some other way around this. Although all access and materials are coming in away from the OH cables, the concern for the scaffolders is if they make contact with a pole whilst putting the stuff up, or if the power arcs down to one being waved in the air. I have no idea of the likelihood of any of this, but I really wouldn't want to be responsible for an impromptu barbeque. Of a person. Update to follow. And so onto EPS and beams. I have to say that all that EPS on a sunny day is enough to burn your retinas out. It really is quite painful to look at, even when you're trying not to, and it doesn't do much for the already hot temperatures out there on site. You know it's serious when your construction workers are all wearing sunnies, as they're not a vain bunch. The trestles you can see are what they use to rest the rebar sections on before sliding on the steel rings then tying it together with wire before putting in situ and adding the rest of the rings. The blue polythene that you can see is the DPM/radon barrier sheet. This is the head of the pile that was previously cut to height. A hole is sawn through the EPS for the pile head to extend into, then the steels from the piles are bent over so that they can be lapped with the rebar forming the ring beam. Fruit pastilles are optional. The steel protrusions lapping over the EPS will get tied into steel mesh, and the two will overlap by at least 500mm. The channels in the EPS are where other beams will go. The EPS offcuts are just being used as spacers to keep the sheets that are down in the right place. Here, you can see where the steels from the pile are tied into the ring beam. Bear in mind that every single bit of wire that you can see is twisted on by hand. It makes my hands hurt just thinking about it. In the main open plan living room area, the west and north facing aspects both have lift and slide doors that need to be recessed into the floor so that the threshold is level. To allow for this, there are indents in the perimeter beams where the windows will go. This is the westward facing window; you can see that the building is oriented just over 10 degrees off the main compass points by the fall of my shadow - the photo was taken about 9.30 this morning. And one more photo of the pile steel lapped with the ring beam. The rest of the steels will take all of today and all of tomorrow, then there is the UFH pipe to be laid. Once all the steels are done, the building control bod needs to come and check that he's happy with all the tying in. Once that's okayed, then the concrete can be ordered and poured. I'm hoping it will be Thursday as we're due some rain at the weekend, by which time, I'll hopefully have some progress on my scaffolding problem.