Services and foundations

So the builders have been on site for 2 months and we're only a month behind schedule, so far! Finally the service ducts are in the trench, to deliver and take away water from the house. 

The base of the drive has been laid, so we have access for vehicles into the site.  

The groundworks have now started - we've got some strip foundations and can start to visualise the size of part of the ground floor. Unfortunately this part of the build has already started to eat into our contingency, coming out at around double the estimated cost.

There isn't much left of the garden - it's turned into a sticky, claggy, clay mess.

Garden - before

Garden - 1 October 2016

Green Oak Carpentry took delivery of the oak from France on 15 August and we visited them a couple of weeks later to see them starting to put together the structure for bedrooms 2 & 3 and part of the sitting room.

Truss for end of bedrooms 2 & 3

Sling brace for sitting room

Sling brace for sitting room - close up

We've chosen the bricks for the lower external wall (Hoskins Old Farmhouse) and the roof tiles.

We've put our order in for the windows - due to be on site mid December. They're being supplied by a company called Norrsken - sounds scandinavian but they're actually made in Estonia. We've gone for triple glazed aluminium clad timber - painted internally and externally in RAL 9002, grey-white. The external doors (bi-fold and patio doors) are being supplied by Arbor. These were the first doors we saw at the first homebuilding exhibition we went to in the west country, and although we've looked at many others since we just kept coming back to these. The living-dining room doors will be oak internally and painted externally. The rooflights are coming from Fakro - 11 of these in total. All three companies have been really helpful and responsive to our constant queries. We just need to source the glass for the juliette balcony for the master bedroom and the roof window above the main sitting area. 

We now need to do some more research into front and back doors - the ones we've had quotes for so far seem incredibly expensive,

We've started to look around at ironmongery for the doors and have seen some pewter handles and knobs we like by Finesse Design. It seems a bit odd to be considering this level of detail when we still don't have any walls or floors! 

We've had a couple of meetings with the lighting designer, David Gibbons from Urban Projects. His vision is to minimise the number of visible light fixtures, so as not to clutter up the oak structure. The plan is to recess LED lights into the ceilings, walls and beams to light the house. This should mean that by day the fixtures will be practically invisible. We also need to consider the external lighting of the patio area and the drive, which is quite long. He hasn't yet told us how much this is all going to cost!

Julian's drawing up a plan of where all of the plug sockets, tv points etc are going to go and he's enjoying researching ceiling speakers and ridiculously overpriced audio systems!

Next on the shopping list? Oak weatherboarding, oak flooring, floor tiles, wall tiles, stairs, glass balustrade ..........

It doesn't sound or look like much progress, considering the amount of hours Julian is putting in researching, planning, sending emails, making phone calls, having meetings, paying endless invoices etc ..........