Other odds and ends...

We've been beavering away on other projects too.

This is the guests bedroom. It's where our daughter was sleeping before we did her room. You can't quite see it, but we went through the wall here and took some of the bathroom to make a guests en-suite.

This is that en-suite. The dark walls are the shower enclosure - it's Adex and it's a sort of liquid tanking. It should be totally unnecessary if the tiles are done right (and they will be - we have a great tiler), but if nothing else they give a good key for the tile adhesive to grip too.

I fitted the bath at the weekend. Not had a bath in it yet, but looking forward to it. It's in the same place as the old one, but as you can see, you're facing it from the new doorway now.

This is the family bathroom's shower enclosure. To fit it and insulate the walls, we had to buy space technology insulation. Plasterboard never cost as much! It's used in Passivhaus builds.

This is just a view down the hall upstairs showing he plasterboards and the rewiring.

Eve's room

When we bought the house, the removal men wanted to know where we wanted stuff left. There's a room over the kitchen which is basically in the roofspace, and so is in the eaves. So we said, put that in the eaves room. After a while, seeing we had 2 kids, and neither of them were called Eve, they were a bit confused!

Anyway, Eve's room is that one with the little dormer window.

It looked like this not long before we moved in.

We've been umming and ahhing about what do do with Eve's room, the dormer window is a bit shabby and looked like it needed sorting out. It also really just looks onto a wall - the outside wall of the shower room next to the master bedroom. So in the end we've decided to double the size of the dormer and do a full job on the room.

So today, it looks like this:

Completely stripped, and the next job is to start the major surgery.

The decision to really get to grips with the room was a good one. Water had been getting in from the outside on the edges of the dormer and had rotted the rafter next to it. This had been bodged up by pinning some batten to the edge of the rafter.

Not good. So a victory for gut feel for once...

More kitchen...

The kitchen is a major project, but is now cracking on at quite a pace. These pics are how it looked about a month ago.

View into what's the breakfast room, or 'area'

Next wall down is into the kitchen proper

You can see in this one that there's a steel beam where there's the second wall down, or in this case the third room to be converted to being part of the kitchen. The studding is the wall between the kitchen and the downstairs loo to be.

Now the kitchen looks even more different.

It's been insulated and plastered out, the electrics are in, the underfloor heating is in. The above view is from the very back wall - kind of over where the sink will be.

That alcove over on the left is where the hob will be, and that red shape on the floor is going to be where the island is going to sit. The doorway on the left is the entrance to the pantry, which is a walk in job, albeit quite narrow and with not much headroom.

This pic is the breakfast room or 'area'. It faces East, which is perfect for morning light through the bifolds. Clearly then the windows on the right face south, so should be light all the time in there more or less. The wires sticking out of the wall above the bifolds are speaker wire. We're having a little stereo that lives in the cupboard on the left you can see.

We're having the kitchen made by a joiner. The above pic is the unit to house the fridge.

The sink unit along the back wall.

This is the island. Shows the quality of the drawer boxes - they're 22mm thick!

Island from the other side.

This will be the unit that contains the ovens and will have the hob on top of it. That is close to the finished colour, but it will need more paint.

UK Garage...

Continuing the garage theme. The company had given us a date when they'd come and put the thing up, and they turned up and got on with it.

That lot took about a day. They finished off the day after, but I didn't take any pics. Duh. Incidentally, that cabbage patch on the left has now been seeded and has little grass shoots all over it. It's never going to be a bowling green, but it'll look better than it does now!

Garage and other stuff

Today was a bit hectic.

Supposed to get a concrete pump at 8am. He turns up way before then (while I'm on the way to the bank to get him his money) says he can't get to the house because the road is blocked by Police. Apparently a body found just at one end of the village.

Then the same problem caused the concrete lorries to be late. In the meantime, I was waiting for UK power networks to do the preliminary work to get our meter moved so it's not hanging down in the middle of the kitchen! A window man turned up, and a roofer, who was investigating why we had water coming into the house over the weekend (heavy rain) and 2 electricians who were there to do the follow up work for the meter move too.

Anyway, the concreting part was the most interesting - we had two concrete lorries:

and

and the concrete pump:

A load of pipework:

And a whacking great hole to fill:

While the concrete lorries were being swapped over, the reinforcing mesh went in:

Then the rest of the pour:

Until we had:

Then:

And finally:

That shuttering is 225mm high - so a standard scaffold board. The 'toe' of the foundation - so the trench all the way around was 500mm deep, then this on top. So even though there was some type 1 in the middle, that can't have been more than 50mm higher than the toe, so basically this is not going anywhere, Close to a 9" slab of reinforced concrete.

Garage and stuff...

Originally, I thought we could fit in 5 garages. Kind of a right angle type affair with 3 garages on one side and 2 on the other. Then, I thought we could do 4, one long building. In fact, we got as far as digging the foundations for a 4 garage building, and then realised we couldn't get the car to turn into it. I was kind of despairing when I found this picture:

and thought that will do.

So the two open bays are going to be for our two family wagons, and the closed bay with the catslide is going to be for the TVR.

The ground works look like this.

This is the drive. The area in front of the shed is where it's going, There'll be another hedge on the left hand side.

This is the first bit of the foundations. In here, this is the 'toe' of the foundations - there's a 400mm x 400mm hole all the way around. There's going to be another 200mm+ on top as a slab, with reinforcing wire in it. That's another of tomorrow's jobs.

The garage will be put up on the last week of August.

Here are some random garden pics:

The pond, with our neighbours garage the other side.

The stables at the bottom of the garden.

The strip of land that we bought that used to have apple trees on it.

Pushing on on lots of fronts.. pt.2

Finding a plumber has been a nightmare. Lots of poeple to call, none of them ever call back. I text, I call again, nothing. So I've carried on. These are the primary pipes for the boiler:

These are in the kitchen. That alcove would have been a big fireplace. The boiler house is behind the chimney. I thought it would be a case of drilling through with a big drill and then all would be good. So bought a 30mm SDS drill that's 450mm long and drilled away. Got to the end of the drill bit, and still not through. Had to get a breaker bar and do the rest. Lucky the diameter of the bar was about the same as the hole! Turns out the chimney wall is about 600mm thick.

Here's the boiler in its new house:

Wish I'd held the camera straight!

That boiler house is this one:

The primary pipes in the top picture go up the wall. They exit in the room above. Unfortunately behind a wall:

More work!

You might remember that the airing cupboard was looking like this. 

That wall on the right after the open door was in the way. So:

That's going to be the shower in the family bathroom. The pipes will be behind the wall of the shower.