Steel onsite

The steel for the windows and reinforcing the garage roof are now onsite, when you see it laid out you can see why it costs so much!  I thought it was a few small sections, but there is metres of the stuff.

Delayed on fabricating the structures needed, but with lightning in the area over the last few days I can understand a certain reluctance to be swinging some of these about.

Ground floor detail

The walls rising on the ground floor bring to it a number of details that have to be resolved as we construct.  There seem to be number of issues cropping up here, mostly as a result of changes and one that has been deferred until now.

• First off, we moved the kitchen wall out by a foot.  Sounds small, but what we all forgot is that there was a steel beam in the basement roof below that was waiting to carry that wall, and more importantly the weight of the hollow-core slabs on top of it.  We moved it as we're worried the kitchen would be smaller than we'd hoped.  Similarly, the front wall of the living room moved out 450mm or so to ensure it was sitting on the wall underneath it.  The incremental cost here is a new steel beam in the underside.
• We've decided to add another half block of ICF on the wall level of the ground floor - with the step in the kitchen the ceiling height there would have been affected, so to maintain a reasonable height there we need to up the size of the wall a little.  More cost of material to do so.
• The living room features windows that wrap around the corners, nice but something needs to carry the weight of the wall above and in particular the stone on that wall.  This requires steel box sections to carry these, with .  Up till now it's been left, but now the engineer has spec'ed it our builder is a little skittish about the fabrication of the piece.

With all that, timeline for the next bit are to pour these walls towards the end of this week, complete the internal blocks next week and lie the hollow-core slabs by the end of next week.  If we miss the last deadline, we'll have an issue as we'll be waiting 2 weeks while the floor slab company are on holidays.  If we make it, it's likely we'll get all the walls completed by mid-august and look at starting on the roof.

Ground Floor walls started

The Radon barrier in, floor poured and the walls for the ground story are starting.  Had a look last night to see the progress and get a sense of the house as it sits back offset on the basement.  Also, all important, the tape measure to ensure the kitchen size is correct - 5.4m square.  The tape is correct, but without all the walls and ceiling on it's really hard to judge the size accurately.  It was the same in the basement, rooms look a lot smaller until they are finished off.  So finger are crossed really that it will work out.

Here is the back wall of the house, the radon peeking out from where the walls join the footings.  Again lots of jacks are going up to support the walls, giving me confidence that they will be straight!  This phase will only take a few days, with the detail going in around the front door - it seems to transcend the levels of basement/ground floor so getting these levels right is a task for the architect.

In the meantime, our minds switch more firmly to stone and windows.  Realistically we need to order our windows in about 3-4 weeks.  Similarly, we'll need to get in cills and stonework before they arrive, and it's proving difficult to get the stone - colour is no problem but we like the more rectangular cut rather than square or round and sourcing it is tricky.  However we've seen it around so it can be done.

On the windows the PvC or Alu-Clad is still a topic.  We've quotes from several companies that are competitive and may open up alu-clads, still would be a massive stretch.  But, if we're going with black windows PvC suffer from expansion and contraction with heat and this will cause gaps to appear, with contraction in winter.  So we may end up saving on windows and spending money yearly on heating.  With the heating specification at a stretch that isn't ideal.  We're going to look at some samples on the weekend and see where it all stands.

The offset on the basement leaves us with a natural balcony from the sitting room, which will be great in summer.  The outline of it is going up above.  Also working out nicely is the vertical services shaft.  So far, so good - the next detail to go in at this level is central vacuum and HRV duct runs!

Ground Floor footings

The ground floor footings are laid out, defining all the rooms on this floor over the ground (as opposed to over the basement).  These have a Radon barrier placed over them and the interior filled back up with earth.

These footings will support the block walls internally, and ICF externally or for load-bearing.  The plumber has also been in to install soil-pipes for waste water and showers at this level so that they will be under the path level on the finished build.  This will stop all the pipes being visible on the finished walls.  For the 1st floor, these pipes will route via the suspended ceilings internally.

Also added at this stage are the draw pipes for the stove fire.  Since the rooms are not ventilated naturally, we don't want the fire drawing air from the room directly.  2 pipes are installed, one routing to the left of the stove (just at the edge of the curved section of wall), the other routing back to the kitchen wall.  This allows 2 directions for air to get into the fire, preventing downdraft from the chimney into the fire if the wind direction isn't favorable.

Next is the installation of the Radon, and remaining pipes to sit in this floor level.

With the perspective drawing, I'll keep a set of photos taken from roughly the same perspective and it will be interesting to see the progress to that - so far we look like this