Stairs complete

Finally the stairs is complete - the sage of this has been a bit of torture, and has held up a lot of the work that needs to be done over the next week - that will then allow some parallel work to take place.  The concrete will be finished off with a stone cladding on the topside and plastered underneath.  

With this in place the windows can be installed and the roofs tanked giving us a weatherproof house (bar the front door and 1 window) and plumbing 1st fit can begin next week.  There are some changes in the design that will effect the plumbing, a bit of concrete slab chiseling will be required as well as getting out to the outside for waste pipes. These will have to be carefully sealed afterwards to prevent future air and water ingress.

So plan for the next week:

Thursday - Window install
Wed -> End June - Roofs tanked
Sat - mark out the plumbing areas and get cutting the concrete, seal off the front door area with timber to prevent access.
Next week start 1st fit plumbing.

Filling in the Sills

The window sill work got started on the weekend.  The timing was dictated by the fact the bay window needs to be fixed into something solid at the bottom - this is a job that needs to be done but not until 1st fix carpentry when the window boards would be going in.

The thing here is to ensure that we dont' create a massive cold bridge by the concrete filling conducting heat into the stone window sills.  To do that, the DPC membrane is pulled up tight on the sill and against that a 1" thick layer of ICF insulation is placed along the DPC.  Then concrete can be poured into the gap between that insulation and the internal ICF wall.  I used can-foam to try and fill any gaps at the bottom or where multiple sheets of insulation were used.

2nd Lift

The second lift of the main staircase is being formed.  After a lot of wrangling over the measurements, number of steps, start position etc the formwork is going in and hopefully ready for pouring next week - the idea will be to get this framed up and then get the roofs shuttered up for pouring and hit them at the same time.  This will give us access to all floors and a weather-tight house for fitting.

From my jobs, yesterday was mortaring up the joints in some of the window sills.  A good evenings work.  The HRV is fully ducted and nothing more to do on that until we're slabbed and skimmed.