opening for Bristol Green Doors

BGD

We have been busy with (the almost) finishing touches, just in time for the Bristol Green Doors event taking place this weekend (28th and 29th September). So if you’re in Bristol, please feel free to join one of our tours, which run at 1100, 1300 and 1500hrs on both days. We need to limit numbers, so please book – you can do so by leaving a comment on this posting.

More details about the finishing off soon, I promise!

weeks 36 to 39: scaffolding comes down

Front of house

The big reveal…after an interminable wait for the scaffolding company, even to pick up the phone, they finally get them to come to take it down! But, it’s worth the wait. With the sweet chestnut cladding and steel Lindab gutters, the house looks great (completely unbiased opinion of course!). There is still a fair amount of finishing off to do: painting; render below DPC; roof profiles; sedum roof; etc., not to mention landscaping. Some of these works should be happening over the next couple of weeks.

Rear of house

The balcony is now usable. It is good and solid and almost thermal bridge free. The balustrade has been fitted: it looks okay, but not quite what we would have chosen (planning condition to match existing). Overall, though the rear of the house looks smart, and the rear extension, clad in the chestnut, smartly encloses the balcony at one end.

We haven’t quite decided on whether we should leave the chestnut to naturally silver, or whether we should lacquer it to retain the new-look colouring for as long as possible. The intention was to let it silver, but it’s nice as it is right now. I think we’re likely to leave it.

weeks 33 and 34: utility room floor

Spacetherm installed  Spacetherm

Our utility room on the lower ground floor is the only part of the original floor slab that we didn’t lower as we didn’t see the benefit of all the disruption involved with such an intervention. The disadvantage though is that we have less opportunity to insulate it to the high standard that we have for the new floor (see earlier post). We are at least able to increase the floor by a maximum of 40mm in order to meet the level of the new (higher section) floor and have specified spacetherm. This is a very thin insulation blanket, which is bonded to chipboard. We opt for 20mm thickness of spacetherm (+18mm chipboard), which gives us the make-up we need. The spacetherm is highly efficient, with an exceptionally low conductivity of 0.013 W/m.K, which impoves the U-value of the floor from the original 0.72 W/m².K down to an acceptable 0.26 W/m².K (approximately the standard required for houses built to 2010 Part L Building Regulations)

week 21: a placeholder

Due to upgrade problems since just before Christmas, the recent entries you have read have been back-posted (actually I’m not sure what the correct time-related adjective is for this). But we’re now in the present. Week 21 following week 18 is deliberate and skips weeks 19 and 20 as the site was shut for two weeks over Christmas.

From a programme viewpoint we are behind. This has a lot to due with the wet and cold weather and a bit of over-optimism by our contractor as far as the original programme was concerned. I think the construction phase will last until around week 30.

Continue to enjoy and please continue to post your comments: more and more coming through. I am also pleased (and shocked) to see that this site now has some 38,000 hits from over 1000 individual visitors – thanks for your interest.

Happy geeking

Ian

sorry for the delay…

Dear readers – this blog is now quite behind due to problems updating the wordpress blog software. I am pleased to say, as of today, that the problem has now been fixed. The blog will be updated during the course of this week – so much has happened (and much more yet to happen). Please check back soon and thanks for your patience!

Ian

welcome to my fourwalls’ blog

Thanks for visiting. Our building work starts tomorrow, so thought I should launch this blog. I have been building and tinkering with this blog in the background for a little while now. So have a look around at earlier content: pages and posts, that give the project background and some earlier works on the house. It also covers some of the problems so far regarding approvals and costs. Going forward, this blog will contain information about each of the stages, from foundations through to completion and everything in between.

My aim is to update this blog on a weekly basis, usually a Friday evening (I won’t have much of a social life whilst the main building work is happening!). So check back frequently to see how we are progressing and feel free to post comments/ask questions/offer advice.

Happy reading!

Ian