It has stopped growing at least...

We've got a sort-of-roof! Trusses anyway, which in their own way, cap off the house and I no longer feel it is growing out of all proportion...

This is our bedroom and the window spaces look great. Just heard today that our triple-glazed Optiwin windows left the factory in Austria this morning - on two pallets, one of which is 4metres long and totally impossible to unpack at this end so there has been a hurried call to get them returned and put on 3 or 4 pallets, no idea where they are now! I just hope that driver wasn't too annoyed...and our builder Colin's otherwise very organised schedule is not shot to pieces.

But meanwhile, bathroom window...

View from the neighbouring plot which has just been bought - their detailed planning runs out in August so there'll be building down this lane for a long time yet!

 Colin checking the roof trusses...

See, it looks sort of capped now and not looming much over next door's bungalow...

View from the back alongside next door's bungalow again...

If the window chaos gets sorted out soon we should be weather tight in a week. It'll rain each day till then of course but what can you do?

It is big and it is very orange...

Oh lord, it is definitely one of the stages where it all feels very BIG...

We've been told by lots of people that you go through stages of the house seeming too small, tight and enclosed...and others where it feels enormous and looming...Rob has sent me these and I've not seen the first floor yet (the top floor - no more to come - the neighbours will be glad to hear!) Might not be a bad thing just yet.

I'm sure with weatherboarding and a slate roof and a bit of Welsh weather it'll stand out a lot less!

It is great how quickly this bit happens after the endless waits for paperwork, drawings, and rain rain rain...

But there are some ominous signs of airtightness problems. It seems that we have a lot of people working on the house but those that know what they are doing in terms of specialist windows and airtightness and MVHR aren't the ones organising the day to day work...So we have been told, just as the roofing is due, that the designs and now the frame aren't suitable for the airtightness membrane, but if they don't tell us how are we or the builder to know?

It is too late to change the design but fingers crossed a solution is found that doesn't lose us too much of the passiv design that is costing so much!

Floors/ceilings and the actual view from our bedroom!

Not only is this a real photo of some sun, it is also a sign that we have a ground floor ceiling and somewhere to put the first floor...

In a funny way it is a dislocating experience to see these spaces being enclosed (stupid I know!) after getting used to the open space for so long. But also, I have this feeling that these sights are one-time-only specials! Pretty soon (relatively - in the hoped for lifespan of this house) this will be concealed from human sight and unless we're really unlucky, won't be exposed again.

Rob in the hallway/stairs area just inside the front door:

It seems that the downstairs bathroom - a little room with shower squeezed in for those who can't make it upstairs - has had the window moved to the left and a bit lower than we had in the drawings. This, we've now been told is because of the window in the spare bedroom on the other side of the left hand wall, and perhaps because of the supporting bit of wood above the window? It's a shame because the shower is in the left hand corner and the window wood...and we'll need to put some frosted patterning on at least the lower half now but I guess it isn't a disaster judging from Rob's response!

Some scaffolding surrounding the house - it makes the house look even bigger unfortunately but it does mean we can get up there and see our bedroom and bathroom view for the first time...

Yup, not bad.

A house! A lot of rain...and some airtightness hiccups...

It is still pouring with rain and may well do all week - it is hard not to lament the weeks without rain we had in August now but here we are, and the builders seem to be doing their best to put  a brave face on it.

The rain may damage the OSB and destroy the hardboard protecting our floor but it hasn't diminished the excitement of seeing the plot become a 'house' at last! We took Meg over to have a look and she bounded in the front door like she was born to the place...

It looks massive here from the road/hedge with the scaffolding ready to put in the first floor...just the living room and kitchen wall not yet in as this will need some steel to support the windows:

(Rhododendrons in bottom left doing well!) The below is the downstairs bedroom with the office to the right, lounge/kitchen in the middle and front door and dog friendly hallway (!) far left.

View from the office...it does feel strange framing off the view we've gotten so used to just standing on piles of earth but one day that'll be a distant memory I suppose. I know the window frames will make the view smaller still but thankfully they seem fairly massive!

House from the back and lots more OSB out there ready to finish the ground floor:

View for Rob while at work...

 Overlooking lounge/kitchen:

Front door is the one on the right (below) - there will be a little garage on the left and that left hand door way will lead from the garage into the laundry/corridor space where the plant will be. There'll also be a big wooden overhang from the garage covering the walk to the front door where a handy bench will be for taking off wellies!

We were giddy with all this great frame work which was built in our builder's workshop near Cemmaes but then, showing round our Passif expert on Sunday - in pouring rain - he realised that the air tightness membrane had been cut for the internal wall joins which would allow cold bridging all over the house! We might not have felt the difference although our wallets would have when it came to the bills and as Nick said, its much better to get the basics right rather than find problems when it is built and plastered over.

A scary moment as so much great work had already been done but when we turned up on site Monday morning the builders thankfully agreed to remove the easier walls and leave a gap and with the tough ones they got in and cut out a section of wood (below) so that Mike, the airtightness specialist can come back and tape it all up. So nice to be working with people who don't freak out when something like this comes up...

Crisis sort of averted and the view of Cae Bach from top field (you can just see the estuary in the top right...)

Not sure what'll be there next time!

Sole Plate and missing bricks...a good band title?

It has been a while since the excitement of the concrete pour but to be honest, the thrill of having that done has sustained us while the frame and technical drawings were finalised over August and the site cleared up ready for the next onslaught...once the digger and concrete pour vehicles came off site the plot which we'd always felt was quite small, it suddenly felt a lot bigger to me.

Our builder, Colin, and Rob spent an hour marking out all the no go areas for fixing the sole plate to the concrete so our precious under floor heating pipes don't get pierced - the endless measuring we did before the pour clearly makes sense! The dug out bit is the downstairs wetroom and the water needs to drain down - could be an issue later but will have to see.

Typically, the date set for starting this next phase was yesterday, 24th August, when it proceeded to pour down again...and it hasn't stopped since! But rain or not (and you can't see the downpour in the photos but it really was there) the guys came down and got on with fixing the sole plate (had to check the spelling and found Wikipedia was useful...although I reckon our pictures would help!):

And you can just see the Rhododendrons (had to check that spelling too! that Rob has planted below the hedge and above the wall in the above photograph - they seem to grow pretty well here so we're hoping it won't be totally barren when we move in...

Wednesday is the day for the internal membrane to be fitted to the sole plate, so the rolls stored in our hallway and boxes of very expensive tape can be put to use at last, and then the frame work can start on Thursday...it might even stop raining at some point!

Concrete at last!

We waited five weeks for a couple of days without rain scheduled and at long last pencilled in the concrete and the guys from Y Rhondda...and the concrete pour began...

In fact, after floods, rain, low temperatures and grey sky there was a risk of it being too hot in the end - too cold it'll freeze, too wet it'll pock mark our concrete floors, too hot and it'll crack...

But it got poured...the underfloor heating pipes started to move up and Rob had to squeeze in to put more cable ties on the corners to keep them down...

 The eight guys got the concrete all down early and then hung around till they could powerfloat it...

And then it had to be hosed down every few hours all afternoon and evening because it was so hot to touch - and then again the next day. Not nice to think of those pipes in that heat...but they seemed to have survived ok.

Concrete pouring team headed off to their next job in Central London and Rob and John dug up the manifolds and John has tested the underfloor water pressure - it seems good.

Now, just a few jobs and the groundworks are done and the framework begins - feels like there might actually be a house there one day now. Not sure what the cats and dogs will do with that much room now!

I would walk....

We made it!

My brother, Ben and I did the 42 mile Across Wales Walk that the Rotary organise each year last month - starting at 3:50 in the morning at Glandyfi and finishing at 7pm at Anchor in Shropshire. I raised almost £400 for Caffi Cletwr - a community cafe project in Tre'r Ddol and Tom and Ben raised money for St Francis hospice in Essex where they both live.

After a lot of practice (mainly with Meg the lab, my walking buddy) it was actually not too bad...it is so well organised that all we had to think about was getting from stopping station to stopping station, our bodies, water and food - which meant no thinking about work for a really long time!

The weather was, predictably, wet, but much better than May's heat wave walk (see below) ...after that 25 mile one we just couldn't contemplate another 17 miles but walking through the wind farm at about 34ish miles we were quite impressed with ourselves!

All in all if I was given the choice of doing this walk or moving house I'd take the walk EVERY time.

Didn't help that Tom left his boots in London of course and did the whole thing in trainers...

Walking, Moving, Raining...but not Pouring

So, its July - and we moved from our rental on our first wedding anniversary...fun! And not, as per the original plan, into a brand spanking new house which would have room for all our stuff and animals, but into my little flat by the sea...

Lovely, but a fit tight enough to send Rob - who works from home - over the edge...

Given our experience and all the stories we hear once people know what we're up to, the temporary homes necessary to build THE home seem more and more interesting...rentals mean contracts and fixed dates that building a house seems to laugh in the face of, so I can see why people go down the caravan route (currently scrubbing mildew from my little Abi Maurader which one day will be my office/dog hanging out room - pics to come) but it must drive people spare.

We put more boxes in storage but can barely move at the moment and my lovely long corridor will soon have to host a 10metre long washing line because even now, in JULY (!), it won't stop raining.

Which accounts for the lack of any concrete being poured and my filling space with tales of moving joy. Although, I must confess that after 3 van loads to the flat, 1 to the dump, & 1 to storage we did sign the contract with our house builder (get in!) and then had a tasting meal at Ynys Hir which was amazing and duly special.

Hum, might leave the big walk story for another post...

Pretty piping!

Hours and hours in the rain but the underfloor heating pipes are in and all connected up! Thousands of tag ties and a lot of piping under heating engineer John Cantor's watchful eye and it looks pretty good.

This is where Rob'll be working - and John is connecting up at the manifold which, fingers crossed, will appear in a cupboard:

Two pipes interweaved:

The whole ground floor - it looks like a circuit board ... or a 70s string painting. It was great to be able to balance in between the pipes and on the mesh and imagine being in the office, on the couch, or looking out the kitchen window...

I have just been told, however, that we need to go down after work and add another thousand tie tags as there aren't enough to stop the pipes moving when the concrete moves in...just hope it isn't raining at the time!

ummmm

We're a bit disappointed that the membrane covering the EPS has been punctured quite a lot. It looks like the surface wasn't flattened properly so to even out the height the mesh and a-frames have been manipulated a bit and have damaged the pink layer:

The membrane is supposed to protect us from the slightly high radon levels caused by the mines in the area ('Romans' and Bwlch arian) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

The height of the breezeblock is where the concrete will reach and it varies a little around the slab:

And there are a few gaps to fill in - if cold air gets into the EPS and through the membrane we'll have cold feet!