Okey dokey

Or should I say Oakey dokey! The oak floor isn't finished yet (hopefully tomorrow) but it's looking good. Great to be able to walk without having to balance on beams and bits of wood. The dry sand & cement that is covering the UFH pipes is proving to be a bit of a nuisance for them though and is slowing them up. As soon as they have finished a section of floor I am covering it up with a patchwork cardboard carpet to protect it.

The stairs are looking good now they have been cloaked in oak (cloaky dokey!)

Meanwhile Stuart has been doing some plumbing in the bathroom & ensuite

and he has been outside laying paving in the back garden

We are short of topsoil, but Trevor at the garden centre has a mountain of it that he wants rid of (it came off what is now the car park) so I have been loading it into crates and wheelbarrowing it to my van and gradually bringing the mountain back to fill our raised beds

Cotton House without scaffolding

...and we have got this far with the kitchen - we won't touch it again for quite a while - other priorities now (like clearing the ground floor so they can start flooring it next week!)

The Big Three

Actually they were a Merseybeat band from the 1960's who disbanded about the same time our house was being built, but in our case I mean - the scaffolding is down, we have started the kitchen, and the guys have started laying the oak flooring upstairs

Another thing we have done is chopped off the newel posts and banister rails on the staircase - the stairs is also going to be lined with oak and we will probably have glass up the sides. Wish I had chopped them of earlier - it would have made it a lot easier when I was carrying all those sheets of plasterboard upstairs!

Not where we wanted to be right now

We thought the house would all be rendered by now but  there was a hitch - the plasterers ran out of beads (that's the plastic edging strips) because they used the wrong ones, and then we were caught by the perennial problem of them disappearing to start another job. They were supposed to come back last Saturday to finish the rendering but it rained!

We, and the plasterers stuck polythene to the windows with mastic tape to protect them but were then faced with a sticky residue to remove. Luckily Stephen (Sue's brother) was back for a few days to help me with the underfloor heating so he did a great job cleaning it off with thinners

So the underfloor heating is all done now - Stephen and I finished the ground floor this week - just needs to be all dry before the floors are fitted but it is mostly dry and sandy anyway so we don't anticipate a problem.

I imagine this is the last time I will be able to use a cement mixer in the kitchen (above) - it was raining and we wanted to keep the sand & cement mix dry!

Floors are pretty dry upstairs now

Stuart has been fitting basins in the bathrooms. He's been doing inside work whilst the scaffolding is up, making progress on the patio difficult.

bathroom

En suite (got to decide between a tall tap or a standard size tap!)

Monocouche

Monocouche is the type of render we are using - it's a pre-coloured render which won't need painting in the future. The renderers have been working this week, putting a basecoat on the old brickwork, whilst the new blocks in the extension can have the Monocouche directly applied to it. It's a very different process to normal sand & cement render - it's put on thick, then when it has started to set it is 'scratched back' to 15mm

#

The top of this will have timber cladding (Western Red Cedar)

UFH

...short for Underfloor heating. Sue's brother Stephen came to stay last week to give me a hand with the underfloor heating. The insulation boards were already in place so it was a case of uncoiling the plastic pipe, clipping it down, and covering with a dry mix of sand & cement.

We could only put the sand & cement upstairs as we haven't finished downstairs yet. We can't do the kitchen at the moment because there are about 170 bags of Monocouche render stored there!

Back on track

Well back from Australia anyway!

Whilst we were away Stuart has continued to work on the back garden but has also carried out some work inside - including alterations to the top step of the staircase (it had to be reduced slightly) and fitted a toilet & washbasin in the studio area, moving the 'builders toilet' back down stairs etc.

Stuart emailed these 'in progress' photos.

Once we got back we picked up all the lighting that we had ordered whilst we were away so I got on with the job of fitting downlights

Stuart continued rendering the walls he had built outside for the raised beds, sorting out the drainage and leveling the ground

Then earlier than we had expected the plasterers were ready to start the prep work for rendering the walls. I sprayed the bricks with a fungicidal wash and then they came and started jet washing them, and putting on a scratch coat of sand & cement on the area where previously there had been timber on the front and where the bricks were set back.

We subsequently had a problem with the scaffolding - George who we had before was to busy to come but after Sue spent some time on the phone we eventually found someone who could come and put it up the next day. So now we are all set for the rendering.