This is our house diary. Hopefully we'll build a house in the next year and this will remind us never to do it again.
Well, there you go. it’s really coming on now.
So, we’ve had a lot happen in the past couple of weeks…
We have water and sewerage connections and are now waiting for our electricity to come from over the road. I’m sure that we’ll have working lights really soon. v. exciting.
Also the plumbers have been and installed several working taps and 1 working basin. WOW
the last epic Parquet session is underway and today Don and I have laid 800 tiles. thats 16 sqm.
The kitchen is all in and looking lovely. The doors are all painted and mostly hung and looking great. The stairs are in and painted. There are wall tiles going up left, right and centre.
All in all an exciting time.
I guess the main thing is that we have handed in our notice on our flat so that we will have to be out of here come the end of October. So that’s 5 weeks. I reckon we can just about do it.
Let’s GO.
B
We are having a ‘mare getting services connected because we’ve hit sheer and hard rock all the way from the house, over the garden and all the way to the other side of the road where the sewer is. It is taking ages, and being very loud and messy. Nearly there though.
The reclaimed parquet from an old school is being cleaned piece by peice and fitted by our lovely joiner Don. We’re all mucking in to clean it up because there’s thousands to do. It’ll be worth it in the end. Or maybe it won’t.
The whole inside is beautifully plastered now, and Ben has been painting walls with a superb paint sprayer machine from LIDL which was 14.99 but it covering so evenly we may not even need to do more layers. Soon it’ll be time to fit the real stairs - it’s so near and so far….
Drainage headaches ongoing with a massive digger shipped in to cut into the rock to let out our sewer connection and let in water and power… broke three times, the rock is soooooo hard. It’s like that. Place is a right old mess now.
Ben and our lovely mate Jase got cracking with the deck, since we aren’t allowed to backfill earth to door step level on that side, it is a good solution, so we have squared off the ‘L’ shape of the house with a larch platform. Will be lovely. Ben built in posts for his hammock, for when it’s done.
Everything is dug up around the house for the drains and water/electric/sewer connection. Some of it dug by Ben in a wee digger, some by highly skilled Angus in a very big digger when it came to cutting through the huge bed of whinstone. It is very unsettling to have these enormous trenches, hunks of rock and heaps of earth all around the house, which looks pretty smart now the outside is finished. Still, it is progress towards connecting to the world and we are really getting on towards the end now….
The inside looks more and more civilised now that the plastering has begun upstairs, and our joiner Don is plugging away at plaster-boarding the rest. Soon it will be time to lay floors and spray paint around.
We took delivery of some gabions - you know those metal cages filled with rocks that hold back earth, like on the side of motorways - so landscaping can happen once the pipes are inspected, connected and covered over again. Ben has been designing a deck to go outside the big window from the kitchen.
Thanks again to all friends and family who’ve been to help. I do believe one day it will be a real house!
Hey ho - thanks to all of those who’ve popped by to help - what lovely friends and family you are! We are going great guns again, the outside is finally done and the scaffold is mostly off.
Lots of plasterboarding done, but p l e n t y more to go. Ben got a superb machine that lifts the boards to the ceiling on a winch and holds them in place, most useful, especially in Kirsty’s studio where we are keeping the full 3.5m height.
Took delivery of an enormous amount of reclaimed parquet tiles from an old school - really cheap for hardwood flooring but that’s because it all has to be cleaned and fitted in a painstaking fashion.
Looks like we’ve another 3 or 4 months to go…
Hello
The outside is done, and soon the scaffold will be removed and we’ll see the house standing proud. The inside however, has a lot of finishing to be done. We are just building the remaining walls and beginning to plaster board and gear up for floors, plumbing, electrics… so much to do!
Could you help?
We need peeps to come help hold up the plasterboard, to dwang, to lay reclaimed parquet - anyone with OCD is most welcome - many jobs are easy and we have food, board, booze and love to offer…
We need you. We would be so grateful!
Things going well, still on a mad rush to finish the outside - slating is done, Ben and Lukey cladding for two days then ran out of wood. Bah! The render team are nearly finished strapping and boarding, so you can see what the white faces will look like. That will be all smoothly rendered in the next couple of weeks, with any luck. The flue has to be fitted up through the roof - it’s up to first floor level so far. Then the solar tubes need to go on the roof. When that’s done we can remove the scaffolding and breathe a sigh of relief like a lady who’s taken off her corset!
Some lovely family things have gone on in the last few weeks; Ben and Andy (Kirsty’s dad) laid a concrete slab for the hearth, which was a job he had done on his house with his father in law, when Kirsty was little. Then we used Victorian terracotta tiles reclaimed from Ben’s family home in Peterborough to cover the slab. Most symbolically satisfying.
More dad-powers came into play last week when Peter (Ben’s dad) came up to help with the reviled slating, and turned out to be fast and furious - 7 courses in one day! That’s 301 slates - go Ghandidad!! He and Ben actually got sun tanned that week because spring has sprung and the sun was really beaming down.
Meanwhile, we’ve been feeling the pressure. It is hard to keep up the momentum and excitement levels over such a long stretch, and feeling utterly fed up we agreed to swap jobs this week - Ben is on 5 days childcare, laundry and dinners (plus working in the studio in the evenings), Kirsty has been scaffold monkey; learning to slate and soffit painting, nursing aching muscles each evening. Also been discovering the joys of ‘yellow jelly’ - the scaffolding that moves (quite a lot) when you move, up at the top. So far this plan seems to be superb: a change is as good as a rest… we both feel like we are getting respite from our usual burdens.
Finally, the rendering team have set to work, and the three exterior walls which will be white are being prepared with timber strapping and render boards. They are a lovely bunch of guys.
Ben hates slating. He has toiled away at it and been horrified at how slow and cold and rough and hard it is. He’s done a good job mind - check it out!
Just goes to show what an ace job Ross Langdale and his brother made of the house roof… they are highly recommended! They left us this heart o’ slate to put hot pots on… <3
