‘Safe as houses’

On 23rd February 2017 gale force winds raged for 5 hours and wreaked havoc across our part of England. Two of our polytunnels had their polythene ripped off their frames and our mobile home rocked gently during the biggest gusts. It was too dangerous to be outside unnecessarily, so the photo below was taken the following day when we had the forlorn task of cutting up the shredded polythene sheets and gathering the battens together. But the new house has walls that are so thick and windows that are so well insulated, we couldn’t hear the wind at all. We really were ‘as safe as houses’ while we worked in there.

The house is progressing slowly but steadily now that nursery work is once again taking priority. When the top half of the hallway was plastered, the temporary mezzanine floor was no longer needed, so for the first time we are able to appreciate the scale and beauty of the full height entrance hall. A banister wall separates this from the upstairs lounge and we have fitted a shelf inside this and inserted a plant trough. Hopefully some houseplants will get enough light to thrive in it.

Our electrician has been back and has successfully located all of the wires for the downlighters and smoke/heat alarms, so we have numerous wires dangling from holes in the ceiling, resembling some strange alien invasion!

After 3 weeks of work, interspersed with a 3 week gap, the plasterers finished their task, and out came our paint and the colour charts. We knew that we couldn’t leave many walls white, as I don’t like bright light and I would have to walk round with my eyes scrunched up all day. But we hadn’t realised that we had chosen kitchen cupboards which don’t really seem to match with any shade of paint! Eventually we decided on one which is vaguely mushroom soup coloured. By coincidence it is also similar to dried mud, so wet dogs can wag their tails to their hearts’ content and the dirt won’t show up too much!

Painting round the edges of rooms is one job that I do better than Martin does. So in the past, he has covered most of our walls and ceilings using a roller while I have done the fiddly bits with a paintbrush. Now, however, he is busy fitting out the kitchen, so I have had to rapidly learn to use a roller. This weekend a friend kindly shared her experience and expertise with me while her husband had the important job of making sure she didn’t fall off the platform! Teamwork at its best!

A few screws in a batten clamped in a vice make a handy drying rack

The remains of a polytunnel cover

Experienced help with the decorating

Working on light fittings

Our son plastered the inside of one wardrobe

Connectors for lights or alien invasion?

Climbing the stairs without having to duck under the temporary floor

Getting plastered

Phew – we finally managed to fix battens everywhere they were needed and finish all the downstairs first-fix plumbing and door frames ready for professional plasterers to start work last Monday morning. Although we could have fixed and filled the tapered-edge plasterboards ourselves, we decided this was one job which would be done so much better by a skilled, experienced team. And our anonymous pair of plasterers have done a fantastic job so far. We now have walls that are as smooth as a beautifully iced cake.

And the plasterers are really enjoying transforming the interior of our Wikihouse. On some walls they can screw the plasterboard straight to the plywood sheet, while on others they are screwing it to our battens. Everything being so straight and precisely square is, apparently, a novelty.

Unfortunately everyone’s signatures under the stairs were covered over a long time ago, but the plasterers found their own way of leaving their mark – plasterboard screws form the shape of their initials for posterity!

The other wonderful thing about Wikihouse is that minor re-designs can be done quite late on in the build and without needing to consult an architect. We recently decided that the pipework for the dining room/office radiator really needed to be recessed in the wall – so we popped a wall panel off, removed the insulation, and then decided to recess the whole radiator. But then we thought it would also be nice to have shelving above the radiator. So Martin built a vertical box to hide the pipes, added two horizontal pieces of plywood, and we now have storage space for our accounts folders, catalogues etc. and for my teaching files. And when we eventually retire, the shelves will provide a home for civilised things like ornaments and photographs!

….. and plaster. The finished shelves and radiator recess.

Skilled plasterer at work

Fitting a home-made door frame.

Plasterer’s initials under the stairs – RC

Door frame friends

Remove a wall panel and add an infill……

A tricky corner. Plasterboard above the 2 door frames.

……. re-route the radiator pipes ……

….. add a half-panel and a shelf or two ……

 

Battling with battens

It’s Christmas Day afternoon, 2016. I’ve just been into the house to close the windows. When I went in this morning to retrieve my camera, it was noticeably colder inside than out, so we opened the windows to let some warmth in! Because the house walls and roof have such fantastic thermal insulation properties they have kept out the strangely mild air that is here following the departure of Friday’s ‘Storm Barbara’.

Today’s lack of noise is also strange. There is a self-imposed ban on working on the house today, there is very little traffic on the main road, there are no trains running alongside us due to engineering works, and the birds have gone to roost for the night. Even our dogs are lying quietly by my feet, having had a mad chase round not long ago.

Because there is no mains gas on site, and to save us having to change gas cylinders over at regular intervals, we have had an underground lpg gas tank installed which will provide fuel for the hob and our boiler, which in turn will provide the heat for our radiators, showers and hot taps. The earth that the tank has displaced is still piled up in 2 large mounds which the dogs have adopted as their playground!

The down side of of this method of heating is that the pipework running around the downstairs ceilings occasionally has to cross over itself. The engineers who installed it were reluctant to set the crossing pipe up into the plywood, so we have had to lower the ceiling height to accommodate the downward bulge within the ceiling void. This entails using bigger battens, but wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except that the architects have cleverly calculated the window sizes such that the surrounding plasterboard will slot snugly against the window frame. Now we have come across the problem that if we lower all of the ceilings, we can’t actually open some of the inward-opening windows!

A combination of this, and the sloping ceilings upstairs, has meant that we have spent a considerable amount of time puzzling over the precise size and location of battens. What should have been a relatively straight-forward part of the build, has been an enormous challenge. But with the help of amazing friends, we have now got most of the interior battens in place, and all of the windows can open.

Kitchen walls ready for plasterboard.

Dogs’ adventure playground!

Battens cut and ready to fit.

Battens fitted around the ventilation pipes

Biggest, brightest moon, November 2016

How many gas engineers …?

Pit and trench for gas tank and pipe

A visiting fieldfare outside my window

Roof work completed

November 5th and I had hoped that the tatty clothes that I wear for house-building would be stuffed with newspaper and burnt alongside the other guys at tonight’s village bonfire. Instead, I am still wearing them! But at this time of year we are able to spend many more days each week working on the house again.  Tell-tale signs are that my hair, which always has a mind of its own, has reverted to being shaped like the inside of a hard-hat, and breakfast-time conversations are once again punctuated with questions such as “Where is the TV aerial cable going to come in?”

The fantastic mild, dry Autumn that we are having, has allowed us to concentrate on getting the oak cladding on the outside. All the walls are clad to the top except for the fiddly bits round the windows and the corners. My fears that we would run out of planks of wood were justified, but with careful selection of previously rejected offcuts, we had exactly the right amount to finish the end that most people will never see! We have also fitted the gutter fascias, which cleverly hide the gutters from view (unless you are flying overhead!) and the barge board on the East-facing gable end.

The soil stack (the vent for the foul drainage) is finally finished. This involved working out precisely where the waste pipes for the bath, shower, sink and toilet would go so that we could ensure the joining boss was at the right height in the bathroom. Having fixed that position we could then work out the length of pipe needed to end a full 900 mm above the skylight to comply with UK building regulations. Unfortunately lots of decisions that we had made 3 months previously had to be re-made because neither of us could remember the outcomes of our earlier discussions!

With with the roof work all complete and the sides clad we asked the scaffolding hire firm to remove their scaffolding. They arrived on a very rainy Sunday morning so we stayed indoors while they worked. It was a real ‘wow’ moment when we came back out and had a clear view of the house for the first time. Some of the timber has already begun to weather. Eventually all of the golden colour will be lost and it will silver with age, just like its owners are doing!

A moment to reflect

Passing the tools between scaffold towers

Hiding the gutter

Glueing the grommet

Precision drilling

Bird’s eye view of the gutter

Home-made grommet cut from a pond liner

What a lot of cladding!

Building a taller scaffold tower

Celebrations on reaching the top – East end

Foul vent from the bathroom!

Video of the build

The Wikihouse Foundation set up a time-lapse camera to record the first two weeks of our build as well as filming a few of the key stages during this time. We are delighted to have this edited version as a permanent record.

One year on

A year after we began to build the wooden structure which is gradually transforming into our Wikihouse home, we have been able to step back and admire the fantastic achievements of everyone who has helped us get this far. After the first 2 frenetic weekends, the pace slowed, then slowed some more, ground to a complete standstill, re-started slowly and has now swelled to 2 or 3 days per week once again, with 3 patient friends from the village being our main source of help. On Sunday they successfully scaled the South face and managed a cheery wave as the final piece of oak cladding butted up to the gutter.

There are a few things which we would do differently if we were to turn the clock back, but mostly we are delighted with the house so far. Today we proudly showed off the fantastic inward-opening patio doors to some visitors and discovered that the top edge of the doors are higher than our planned height for the ceiling! I think we might have to use smaller battens at that end of the room! The other end will have to remain as planned because of central heating pipes crossing over each other.

Minor details such as these did not prevent the ladies from the WI enjoying themselves when they joined us for a coffee evening. When their programme of events was printed last November we weren’t sure what stage the house would be at. But fortunately our younger son has been storing some furniture in our largest downstairs room (which will one day be an office and dining room), so we made use of his settees, chairs, rug and coffee tables to entertain 16 members before giving them a guided tour.

Our current task on the inside is to finish routing bright red plastic air ducting around the house to join each room vent to the heat recovery unit. This has involved the emotionally agonising process of cutting hatches in the upstairs floor. In Wikihouses of the future – I am sure there will be many – these could be fully designed in to the original cutting file.

The morning after the WI!

Using a block to tap down the cladding plank

Air ducting through downstairs ceiling

Sitting down on the job

Hole to fit air vent below

What length next?

South side fully clad

Airtight in April, Mothballed in May

Phew! With the mad rush of potting and plant deliveries out of the way for another year, and with the school where I teach having broken up for the summer, we finally have time to update the blog and start doing some work on the house once again.

In April we finished sealing round the front door and the new window, so we were able to arrange for a preliminary air-tightness test. This was to check that there were no major draughts which could be dealt with at this stage of the build, but would be difficult to sort once the house is completed. The first test involved fitting a fan into the bathroom window opening and sucking air out. This negative pressure made the green vapour barrier billow alarmingly into the rooms. In the second test, the fan was turned round and the air was blown in. The high internal pressure made the vapour barrier cling spookily to the walls.

Meter readings were taken at a range of pressures and the resulting data gave a figure of 3.3 air changes per hour. This meant little to us, but apparently it’s very good but not as good as the architects would like. However the main draught was around the flue for the gas boiler, which the heating engineers have since sealed. We are also confident that this figure will be lower once we have floor coverings in place and when the wet room floor is sealed in position. A final figure of less than 7.0 is acceptable to building control and we are certainly well within that already.

Clingy!

Our biggest fan!

Beginning to billow

Marching on

March will be remembered for my Mother’s 90th birthday and for several emergency medical visits with 2 other family members. Thankfully both are now back to ‘normal’ but I have spent as many hours in waiting rooms as I have on house-building! Nevertheless, the house is progressing. The heating engineers have fitted a boiler for the central heating and hot water systems, but we are now waiting for the manufacturer to convert it to run on lpg as we have no mains gas. The electrician, Mark Garrett, has installed what looks like miles of cabling – even working on Easter Sunday and Monday to finish the job for us. And we have installed pipework for the central vacuum system. This posed a few problems for us as it is designed to fit into a traditional breeze block wall. But after a lot of thought, measuring and debating, coupled with a little bit of trial and error, we finally came up with a solution.

Outside, the cladding is slowly marching up the wall which faces East. It is the most visible and has the largest number of windows, so it has involved a lot of accurate measuring and each individual piece has been double-checked with a spirit level before being fixed in place. Because it is oak, the holes all have to be pre-drilled and countersunk before the stainless steel screws can be inserted. As the cladding goes up, so the pile of timber goes down and we worry whether we have ordered enough. I have visions of the final wall consisting of hundreds of tiny offcuts!

Also during March our work was regularly accompanied by birdsong from the hedge and we had visits from flocks of migrant fieldfares and redwings. These have now moved on as Spring weather has finally reached us. No longer are we having to add an extra three layers of clothing every time we come outside to work on the house.

More cladding

Measuring the next layer

A mile of pipes and wires!

A local electrician fitted the wiring

Cutting the cladding

Checking the cladding is level

A visiting redwing

Installing vacuum pipework

The extra window

Monday 15th Feb was half-a-year from the start of our build. Martin had declared that from then on he would resume nursery work on Mondays and Tuesdays, so house-building would be now be confined to the weekends. I had decided to take the opportunity of taking a lot of new photos, cataloguing this point in time in detail, and updating the blog. However our friends and the weather had other ideas! After 9 storms had each brought rain to the UK over the previous 3 months, our field had become waterlogged. But on that Monday the squelch of mud finally gave way to the crunch of frost, and the sky had changed from various (fewer than 50!) shades of grey to a brilliant blue. Consequently, 2 friends from the village disobeyed instructions, arrived at 11am and declared that we were fitting the extra window in the lounge!

We are now pleased that they did. While the two upstairs bedrooms and the bathroom still have their lovely cottagey feel, the lounge has become much lighter and the views will be stunning once our mobile home and cars are moved from the foreground. (Below in italics is a piece of advice for anyone fitting windows in the future.)

Inside the house we have now finished fitting the green polythene vapour barrier to the floor. To prevent this from tearing, we have tacked hardboard sheets over it, which will serve as a good base for vinyl or wooden flooring – another decision we’ve yet to make. Since it is impractical to remove our shoes on entering the building, we have covered the hardboard with temporary cheap polythene dustsheets, which will catch any dirt, and then we have protected those with flattened cardboard boxes! Hopefully the boxes will be finished with long before November 5th when they can all go on the village bonfire.

We have also been planning out the wetroom and bathroom fittings and drainage and looking at samples of wall panels for each of these rooms.

Our hindsight on fitting the windows: Before fitting each window we have been sticking very expensive expanding foam tape to the edge of the window frame. On this final window we had a narrower gap between the frame and the timber panelling of the house.  so some of the expanding foam tape came off as we lifted the window into position. We decided to carry on and hoped that we could push it in afterwards. In fact, we found this far easier. So, for any future house-builders using expanding tape, we would recommend fitting the ‘nude’ window first and then apply the tape afterwards. Unfortunately we had been advised otherwise and we have now had to finish some of the frames with flashing tape because the foam tape has expanded too rapidly and then twisted on fitting.

The extra window

Green flashing tape round the grey/brown back door frame

Preparing the extra window opening

Marking out the shower tray and plinth

Hall carpet!

Ice patterns

 

We can fix it!

We were glad that our metal roofing sheets were all fully secure when the snow fell last weekend. And as soon as we have one more dry day, we can pop on the last few plastic caps which cover the metal fittings. Then the roof will be complete and we can concentrate on all the other jobs that we have started but not yet finished!

With the better weather, we have begun to fit the oak cladding to the South wall. It is air-dried jointed oak with a wide tongue and groove profile, and we think it looks great. It needs no treating and it will naturally silver in time.

A lot is going on inside the house. The heating engineers have started to install the copper pipework for the radiators, and the electrician has fitted a fusebox and some temporary sockets. This means that we no longer have to open a window to bring a power cable in whenever we want to plug the heater in!

We have started to thread bright red pipework around the building which will provide ventilation. Air will be extracted from the bathroom, wetroom and kitchen and will pass slowly through the heat recovery unit to warm the incoming air which will be distributed to the other rooms in the house. Connecting all the pipes to the right holes at the right angles in quite a confined space could be tricky. To make it easier we have extended the cavity that was designed to house this unit. In so doing, we have altered the wall above a bedroom door to align it with the front of the adjacent built-in wardrobes, which are partly recessed in the central wall of the house, resulting in an extra long doorway into the bedroom.

Now that the windows and external doors are all fixed in position, we have removed the temporary wedges and have replaced them with permanent plastic packers. This was one of the less physical jobs but required patience to tape together the right combination of coloured plastic rectangles to just fit the gap between each corner of every window frame and the adjacent wall.

Will we be in by the end of February? I don’t think so, but hopefully by the end of the summer!

Airflow pipework meeting above the bedroom door

Radiator pipework

Temporary sockets

Oak cladding

A gap for the Airflow pipe and a smaller one for electrics

Different coloured Post-its for each type of fitting.

The finished roof just needs caps to cover the fixings