More first-floor joists

Liz passed by the plot today and found that the first-floor joists are now all in place. There is a gap where the staircase will be, and the shape of the double-glazed lantern over the single-floor dining area is now clear.

When the blockwork continues upwards, the ends of the joists will be secured within the inner skin of blocks. The battens currently in place to space them will then be removed and (wonderfully named) noggins will be fastened between the joists to prevent them from bowing.

from outside the kitchen picture window: this big space will be divided into kitchen, utility room and a front study. The three openings to the right will lead to the dining area, to the hall from the kitchen and to the hall from the study

the doorway to the left will mark the division between the kitchen and the utility room

in the sitting room, looking out towards the fields and hills

in the hallway, leading to the sitting room

in the dining area, with lantern above. Around the lantern, as over the front porch, there will be a green (living) roof covering.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eighteen months have passed

Image
So it has been a year and a half since the last blog post. Yes, I have become lazy about updates and yes, the last few things have been completed. Well not quite - we still need to have the labels removed from the velux windows, and I need to sort out the building insurance policy, but to all intents and purposes we are there, and have been for the last few months. We had waited a while for Pat to sort out the last few things. The replacement skylight had been leaning against the container tor the best part of a year, the lovely stone walls remained uncapped, and the pedestrian path from the gate to the front door remained unfinished. In the end it took an email following the death of a close contemporary to elicit a response from Pat, and then things happened quickly. He had struggled to find someone whose work he trusted to finish the epoxy gravel path. Sadly we were away when the work was done, but we were very pleased with the result. We were also away when Pat capped Andy's st...
Read more

Gravel, gates, and a working wood-burning stove

Image
Pat had wanted to wait for Andy's completion of the boundary walls to lay the gravel-retaining grids and the crushed stone. With one of their characteristically early starts, the front parking area began to be transformed. The white grids, which have attached landscaping fabric, protect the tree roots and reduce the gravel's tendency to wander by lunchtime we had a new look and with gates in place, a black paint finish preferred to the galvanised look, it just remains for the approach from the road to be tarmaced and the pedestrian path given its resin-bound top layer This week Chris finally arrived to fit the flue which links the woodburner to the chimney lining. It started like this, with lots of boxes of bits,  and finished like this V and at night, with the blinds drawn and the complimentary/complementary carmine Clearview gauntlets, it looks like this: Oh, and I've been at work with the panto-router and a piece of old oak, and we have a house sign: We still haven't...
Read more

We have boundary walls

Image
After just over 7 weeks of continuous Monday to Friday working from first thing in the morning to the end of daylight in all weathers, Andy has completed our boundary walls, examples, we think, of masonry magic. We now await Pat and his team fitting the capping stones and the gates, followed by laying the retaining crates and gravel on the drive, with a layer of tarmadam across the entrance shared with our neighbours to finish it off. Andy works to Pat's aesthetic of 'sharp'. It has continually amazed us that his day starts with something like this: and, after hours of hammer-on-bolster-chisel tapping and a mix of a dry mortar, he turns it into something like this: The pedestrian path will in time have a coating of resin-bound gravel and there will be a tiny triangular flowerbed inside the gate. The outer bed (a planning stipulation limited the height of the boundary wall to aid the sightline for traffic approaching the village) will be an extension to our garden. The unuse...
Read more