Having got the building watertight, we could move on to “First Fix”, in which all the services (plumbing, electricity, etc) that will be hidden in the walls and floors are installed.

We had four jobs going on here:

• Plumbing – Ryan Nicholls and Liam, putting in hot and cold water, heated towel rails, and the linking-up-bits of the underfloor heating system
• Electrics – Tom Jefferies and Matt, putting in the power and lighting wiring, heating controls, and the all-important data and audiovisual wiring
• Mechanical Ventilation – Rega Vent putting in a system
• Underfloor heating (on the ground floor) – Mark Allen completing this job.

Ventilation, heating and wiring in the loft

The data cables (one end of all 700m of them – Cat6 cable)

Bathroom plumbing (in the roof room)

Bathroom plumbing in our en-suite

The ventilation plant

Mark installing the UFH pipes in the lounge.  They are laid on top of a 120mm-thick layer of insulation, over the damp-proof membrane, on top of the concrete floor slab, and will be covered by the floor screed.

Next

Once this was complete, we can start on boarding out the walls and ceilings…

 

Since my last post at the beginning of June, Devon has had more wet weather than anyone can remember.  One result of this is that progress on the build has been (much) slower than we had hoped.

The Roof

At the time of the last post, the groundworkers had done (just) enough to permit the scaffolders to do their work, and for the frame to be completed. What we had then was a shell with a nearly-weatherproof roof, covered with felt and battens.  The most significant piece of progress on this front was getting most of the roof tiles on.

Even this seemed to take for ever, as the rain kept the roofers from working, and water dripped into the house through the incomplete roof.  The ridge tiles and some tiles around the (still to be built) chimney remain to be fixed, but the roof is now pretty much watertight, though this did rely on Mark (handyman, UFH installer) taking his life in his hands one wet day to put the ridge tiles temporarily in place.  This seems to have dealt with water leaks around two of the Velux roof windows.

Finishing the Velux windows was a saga in its own right, taking 3 goes to get the right flashings.  They are now fitted, and look good.

Groundworks

The groundworks (still) go on.  Again, the weather didn’t help, but excavation of the space under the garage was next

followed by the construction of still more retaining wall, and the formation of a (nuclear weapons-proof) bunker under the garage base.

Finally, the construction of the simpler retaining walls that bound the driveway, and the steps to the front door.

There are still more groundworks to do, but they will have to wait for the removal of the scaffolding.

The day after the my last post, we went on holiday for a week.  When we came back, the house had moved on a great deal.  Before we went away, Josh had just started on the main roof structure; the gables and some of the internal supporting walls were up, but none of the roof beams or rafters were in place.

When we came back, not only were all the rafters up, the roofers had started on felt-and-battening the roof.

 

You can see, too, that (most of) the windows and doors are now fitted.  Once the felt and battens are on the roof, the structure is essentially weatherproof – no more indoor floods from the Devon rain.

For the first time, too, we could see just how big (huge!) the house is.

Progress on the roof has been fast, and Josh and his team have also fitted the soffits and facias…

…and installed the roof-lights in the main bedroom and the rooms in the roof.

The work on the roof now moves on to tiling, which has to be done before we can start on the wall cladding – the weight of the roof tiles compresses the whole house by 25mm or so.

Meanwhile, Mark has started work on installing the under-floor heating system.  Here is the mile of tubing that will be fitted under the floors…

There are 3 manifolds – great boys’ toys, because they have DIALS and KNOBS!

And, finally, we have the porch and front door fitted, so for the first time, we can lock the house up when we leave.

 

So, after weeks when not much appeared to change, suddenly there are big, obvious developments.

The work on the retaining walls and paving has moved on substantially now, and it’s pretty much off the critical path.  There is still (a lot) more to do, but the shape of the paving and steps all round the house is clear, and we are on track to complete the wall that will retain the bank to the right of the house.  That will be a great relief, as it will mean that both Alf Blackman’s drive, and the sewer pipe beneath it, will be properly secure.

But today’s particular fun was the lifting into place of some of the big structural timbers for the roof.

Josh was out in his BYT again, a huge JCB forklift, with an enormous reach

Clearly serious stuff, as Josh had to turn his hat round!

The most impressive job was lifting the ridge beam for the roof above the master bedroom into place.  This is a 420×140 glulam beam, that located in a pair of sockets at the gable and at the junction with the main roof

The fork lift lifted it about 10m above the ground, and 6 or 7m over, and dropped it directly into place.  Well, it was 8mm out, but I suppose that’s OK in the circumstances.  Jamie seemed particularly impressed!

The remainder of the work was lifting some more huge timbers into place for the main roof

Tricky, mainly because access is a bit limited.  But the forklift was truly impressive

 

April was an extremely frustrating month.  After the rapid progress we made at the end of March, things pretty much came to a halt at Easter.  Josh and his team finished the work they could do on the timber frame without scaffolding in place.  The scaffolding, in turn, depended on completing the retaining wall to support paving across the front of the house.  Then the weather intervened again.

The news in April was full of declarations of drought, hosepipe bans and dire predictions of standpipes in the streets.  “Worst drought since 1976!”.  Then the rain started.  And it rained.  And it rained.  Then it rained some more.  On the radio, someone said that it had been “Droughting heavily in Cardiff”.  Whilst the site was not as badly flooded as in January, Darren, one of the groundworkers, lost his bet about the depth of the water in the Void, when it overflowed the top of his wellies.  Then it rained some more.  So progress on the retaining walls was painfully slow.

Bore Holes

At the same time, the bore-hole drillers finally arrived, after a few false starts,  to drill our 210m of borehole for the ground-source heat pump. There were supposed to be three holes, each 70m deep.  Our information was that the house sits on Bude Formation sandstone; we had expected, therefore, that the boreholes would be fairly straightforward.  In the event, things were not quite so simple.

The drillers set about the first hole, and quickly hit the water table at 7m down.  That meant a cascade of water out of the hole, propelled by the compressed air used to drive the drill hammer.  So another river down the site – fortunately, flowing away down into the River Deer.  Then, rather than the uniform sandstone we had expected, they found the rock fractured and containing loads of hard inclusions, which made the drilling difficult.  Eventually, they managed to get that hole down to 53m – some way short of the planned 70m, but usable nonetheless.  The next day, a second hole.  Most of the same problems, but eventually, the hole went to 79m; better we thought.  But then the next problem.  The drillers had had to insert a temporary steel casing in the top 20m or so of the hole, to prevent it collapsing.  Normally, they would withdraw the casing with the drilling rig.  When I arrived on site, the drillers were sitting in their Land Rover, wondering how to extract the stuck casing.  Shades of “Need a bigger hammer!”.  The legs of the drilling rig were bent, the casing stuck firm.  Phone calls to the boss, and general despondency.

A day or two later, we returned to see a pair of HUGE hydraulic jacks around the top of the hole.  They could evidently exert 30Tonnes force, and managed to extract the rogue casing.  So, we now had 132m of bore hole.  All we needed was another 77m, and all would be well.

We went to site on the day they had started drilling the third hole.  The rain was coming down in torrents, the wind blowing.  A perfect spring day in Devon, then.  “How’s it going then?”.  “Not well.  Down to 30m, and hitting real problems”.  We stood inside the house, out of the pouring rain, and watched the driller, standing in the rain, with a torrent of water coming up out of the hole, and the drill turning, catching, having to be withdrawn and tried again. This was not going to plan at all, and we wondered what Plan B could be, particularly when the poor chap threw his hands up in resignation and retreated to his Land Rover.

The conversation before we left amounted to “Not going well, do the best you can, see how things go”.  We didn’t expect much, to be honest.  When we returned the next day though, the news was good.  The drillers had stopped for their lunch break, then gone back to work on the hole.  They had struggled for 15 minutes more, then the drill had found easier rock.  The hole was now down to 79m, and we were OK, provided the pipe loop would go down smoothly.  It evidently did, and we now have three pipe loops sticking out of the tops of the boreholes awaiting terminations.

More Groundworks

The critical path for the build was now the completion of the retaining structure to support the path in front of the house.  This is needed to support scaffolding to complete the upper floors, and to support the porch structure on the house.  The speed of progress here has been frustratingly slow, and the work is still not complete.  The weather has not helped, certainly, but there are some other factors too.

In the interests of getting things moving, then, Sean (project manager) suggested that we erect the scaffolding around the rest of the house.  Josh is happy to work off that to put the roof on the frame – about 2 weeks’ work – which has to be enough to get the paving in place.

So, yesterday (Friday) the scaffolders arrived…

And so did Josh, Rick and Jamie

And Brian, Jerry, Malcolm and Darren

More men on site than I’ve ever seen before!

By the end of the day, the scaffold was complete.

Meantime, Josh was using one of the Big Yellow Toys to lift the floor panels on to the top of the frame…

 

Josh will now carry on with the top floor.  This should be complete in about 10 days, when we can get the roof felted and battened.  Weatherproof.

 

The two weeks or so since the last post have seen a lot more obvious progress.  Both the retaining wall that keeps the hill from falling on the house, and the timber frame have grown a lot, thanks partly to some exceptionally good weather.

The Timber Frame

The last post here showed the bottom floor of the frame ready to receive the joists for the next floor.  Pretty quickly, the joists were in – thanks to some terrifying walking across the open joists by Josh and Rick – then the floor deck went down, and we had a sort of outsize garden shed.

Then, so as to avoid the need to work around scaffolding (and to get them out of storage), Sean installed the bi-fold doors in the living room and dining room.

 

We now have most of the middle floor of the house in place.  There was one small hiccup, that Sean dealt with.  Josh had been proposing to build a walkway across the ravine separating the bottom floor of the house from the bank at the top of the site.  In the bottom of the ravine was the concrete footing for the retaining wall, complete with projecting (by about a metre) steel reinforcing bars that would connect the wall to its foundation.  I had nightmares about one of the framers falling and impaling himself on the iron maiden below!  The problem was resolved, by Josh and his team unloading the Potton lorry on the driveway (that we don’t own) at the bottom of the site, then carrying them to the house by hand.  Laborious, but at least not deadly.

So, a few days later,

Josh and his team were just finishing off the external panels on the first floor

Quote: “If it won’t fit, you’re just not using a big enough hammer”

Once the exterior panels were up, we could go up and look around.  Again, surprisingly, just like the design!

The Retaining Wall

Meanwhile, more has been going on with the retaining wall construction.  The next step was to pour concrete in to the foundation slab.  This meant a similar concrete pumping exercise to that for the house footings.

Then a skin of blockwork was laid outside the reinforcing bars..

Last step so far is to lay a few courses of the second, inner skin, and fill the gap with concrete.  This has to be done 3 or 4 courses at a time because of the pressure exerted by the wet concrete.

 

 

 

When we left site on Tuesday afternoon, there was a floor slab and a pile (or several piles) of timber scattered around the site.

48 hours later, when we returned on Thursday afternoon, we had most of the bottom floor of the house…

Josh and his team had made great progress over the 2 days, assembling and erecting the 2 portal frames that will support the bifold doors on the living room and dining room, putting down the sole plates, erecting the panels for the outer walls and then putting in the internal walls.

For the first time, we can actually see the room layout.  As Paulette commented “It’s just like we designed it!”.  And we can now see the view across the river framed, as it will be, in the living- and dining-room windows.

Meanwhile, work on the foundations continues, in a sort of 2-steps-forward-1-step-back way.  The groundworkers are now putting the reinforcing steel (back) into the excavation for the footing of the retaining wall.

Should be finished with this stage on Monday, inspection on Tuesday, concrete later in the week.

Josh & Co will be there on the frame next week, and maybe a little longer.

 

This morning saw the delivery by Potton of the first package of our timber frame.  This comprises (mainly) the parts for the bottom floor of the house, which will sit directly on the floor slab.  The plan is to build this, then for the groundworkers to return to build the retaining wall and the outer skin of the house adjacent to it, allowing the concrete path to be laid in front of the house.  This will permit the scaffolding to be erected to allow the rest of the frame to be built and the roof constructed.  So, today was momentous, in that it marks the beginning of being ‘out of the ground’.

Pretty exciting in its own right, too.

We arrived at the site shortly after 9 this morning, to find the road crammed with Potton lorries (well, there were two, at least).  The construction team – Josh, Rick and Jamie – were expecting the crane for 10:00.  It finally arrived, reversing down the road at about 10:30

A bit bigger than even the construction team expected!  A while to set up, jacking the crane on to its levelling legs, and a bit of concern about the sewer across the top of the site,

then one of the Potton lorries reversed down to beside the crane,

and all was ready to start unloading.  The plan was to put much of the kit in the centre of the slab.  Josh and his team managed to get the main panel packs there,

but there was not enough room for everything, so some of the materials were dotted around the sides.  Some of it looked pretty precarious, particularly this (very heavy) pack of plywood floor panels

But by 12:30, both lorries were unloaded and had left for their return journey to St Neots.

A few meetings on site, with Project Manager Sean,  yesterday.  The first with Richard from Source Energy, the heat pump supplier.  This was to line up the drilling of the three boreholes to feed our heating system.  The drilling company will be on site on Monday and Tuesday, to drill three 70m deep holes, and to lay a pipe loop into each.  These will collect heat from the ground, which will be used to heat the house.

The next meeting was with Josh, from Timber Constructions, the company who will erect our timber frame.  The plan is for the bottom floor to be delivered on Tuesday, and for them to erect it next week, then put on the floor joists and deck for the first floor.  The Potton lorry with the panels is scheduled for 10:00 on Tuesday, along with a (substantial) crane to lift them down on to the slab.

Also on Monday, we have the inspection of the foundations for the retaining wall.  The excavations are complete for this, and the groundworkers are currently putting in the steel reinforcing mesh and bars for the slab and wall.  Subject to satisfactory inspection, this should mean more concrete some time in the week.

Now that we have a floor slab in place, the next phase of the groundworks has started.  This is the construction of the retaining wall above the house, that prevents the hillside joining us in the living room.  First part of this is to dig out some more spoil, to create the foundations for the wall.

This entails digging down about 600mm below the current level, to allow for a 250mm thick reinforced concrete slab.  The main difficulty is access, as shown here.  Jerry can only get the small digger in, and is limited on how much spoil he can move to the level above – plan is to move the big digger up to the top of the site, and fill its bucket fron the small one.  We shall see!

What’s remarkable is that, for the first time, really, we can see how big the house will be, and start to see how it fits into the site.  Standing on the floor slab makes it obvious just how well tucked away the house will be.

 

Also, now that Malcolm has started spreading the Spoil Himalaya across the bottom of the site, we can start to see the extent and lay of the garden, and confirm the way that it leads into the country beyond.

We’re now told that the first part of the timber frame will be delivered on March 12.  That will just be the bottom floor panels and floor joists for the middle floor. Once that’s up, the groundworkers can build the blockwork wall nex to the hill, and lay the path outside the front of the house, so that the scaffolders can do their stuff.  All seems, suddenly, very fast indeed.  We carry on anxiously looking at the weather forecast, and hoping for dry weather.