Another couple of weeks of steady progress, although it rained and it was friday today .. so the brickies and the joiners had the day off.
The brickies are nearly finished, the garage and the first floor have been build and their only work left is to finish off when the steelworks are all in .. and a bit of tuning as I’m tweaking the windows. It escaped me that the first floor bathroom windows are at shoulder height so we’re going to chop a couple of courses of blocks out to let Ang can see out of them.
The joiners are now the main trade on the build. They spent the past couple of weeks building up the UGF ceiling – joists, laying the firrings and boarding ready for the roof. There are 3 more roofs to do and then all the wall joinery and cladding .. literally a couple of months of work.
The crashdecks have done their job and are coming out. The scaffolding needs a final lift to the FF roof. The garage steelworks are now in .. it needed a good faff to level up as the brickies work to +- 20mm on blockwork which meant all the corners were a few mm out.
Its good to see the internals of the UGF, the local ashlar stone in the hall is a nice touch and I love the look of the large windows throughout. We can now look out of the first floor window (well – a hole in the wall!) into the garden and beyond.
I’ve spent inordinate time planning all the services to the house, plumbing, the kitchen/util/bathroom ventilation, the electrics, smart-lighting wiring, the services riser, ‘t internet and the burglar/fire alarm. The sheer volume of bits to think of has left my atrophied brain bewildered.
I’ll have a little rant on security/fire alarm systems .. the ‘smart’ alarm systems are all wireless, but the building regs require fire/smoke detectors to be wired powered and interconnected. This drives you to the ‘professional installer’ alarm systems but these are prehistoric in smart-home capability. I know what I want .. a UK hybrid intruder/fire system supporting IP access, a phone app and MQTT into HomeAssistant. but I haven’t found a solution yet.
Much discussion has taken place on the accoya and corten cladding .. we have detail design and now need to see if its build-able. I visited a superb little company yesterday that do corten paint .. and I now plan to paint the whole house, and Ang, in corten .. v exciting 🙂