Ground Floor internal walls

With the outside walls poured the work has started on the internal walls.  Again we'll start to see the floor plan come to life and be able to walk though the house, allowing us to start planning the interior layouts in our own heads.

There are more and more detail decisions we need to make at this stage, that we really haven't thought of.  Size of the opening for the stove, final ideas of room sizes, as well as starting to plan stone cladding, windows and cills.  It'll be a busy period now as we make these choices, view work in other houses and order in materials and labour. On top of that the roof will hopefully be ready to be started in another 2 weeks.  While that is going in, we want to be moving fast on all the other aspects - sills in, stone on, windows in or there-abouts and if we still have time maybe start the external render.

With the windows we'll end up with some problems.  The large windows in the basement are too big to have as side-hung, so while we could have a tilt & turn window closing it may be very difficult due to the weight.  The curved wall may either be segments or a curved pane- the latter may be very expensive.  We also have to decide if we want certain pane's divided or left as single large panes.  Thats all without deciding on colour and type.

We have a decision on the external stone - a natural stone cladding made up of quartz and granite.  This has proved to be significantly cheaper than natural stone to apply - both in the cost of the stone and more so in the cost of the labour to fit it.  We'll also need to sort out an installer for the sills - these require a bit more detail as damp-proofing needs to be installed as well.

Finally, we also have our first tenants in - a flock of swallows have built a nest in a girder inside the garage.  They did it a lot bloody quicker than we managed as well.  They'll be off for the winter, and hopefully when they get back there will be no way in for them.  The carport area is exposed though, so we'll have to ensure there are no handy nesting spots - otherwise Lorraine can park her car under the nest and clean up the consequence!