First-time house renovation

ukmaggie45

OH went to the house on Friday evening and took some photos. We both went over yesterday afternoon, but it was raining hard so I didn't take more pics, but more work has been done since. Will try and get photos today if it isn't raining this afternoon. The base has been covered with hard core now, presumably sand and then damp proof membrane will be going down on Monday.


Foundations begin to rise! by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


Foundation for morning room part of kitchen diner by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


Looking towards corner of the kitchen diner, this is at damp proof course level I think. by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


Foundations rise towards DPC level by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


New extension begins to grow, garden in background by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


New extension foundation by ukmaggie45, on Flickr

We did manage to dig up some of the elephant garlic, despite the rain. The cloves are nice and big but the number of them was a bit disappointing, most of them only seem to have 4 cloves. Still have some to dig up though, so hopefully one or two of them will be bigger.

aliasojo

Ooooh, walls! Or at least the very bottom of them. *gets excited for maggie*

stolt

hi everyone, nice to see soe progress, maggie yours looks like its coming along nicely. I love that stage because you see some much changing in such a short space.
Not much doing for us, electrician is fit and working but we have arranged for him to come at the end of october, this weill give me several weekends to take out the old kitchen in stages because we cannot have both electrics running together because we dont have a big enough consumer unit, although i do plan to get a bigger one put in he wants £200.00 to do (not sure if that s a good price or not) Might try sticking the old kitchen on ebay as ive seen a few go for a few hundred pounds, plus it i have a new enough new neff white oven that was put in by the previous owners before they left and a dishwasher and hob. So might be worth£100 or so on there own.

Got the bar stools and we got four chairs for the dinning table and as par for the course when we get anything delivered, one chair was missing so the sender is accusing royal mail and well we are left to wait until someone finds it!!! put some new lights up in the playroom and put a bit of artwork in the playroom, missus has to reign me in because id have artwork everywhere!! got one being done at the moment for the kitchen which should be finished at the end of the week. Oh and we have more pets, three goldfish Getting itchy feet and want to start the dinning room!

ginvzt

ukmaggie - congratulations, it looks great - you will have the walls up in no time at all!

Stolt - fantastic pictures. I like the chairs...

Well, as for the windows - we are not going to change them. And with the work we need to (want to) do in this house, there will be no money for a while to replace windows. The current ones are ok, they are double glazed. Over 10 years old according to property information form, but seem to be in decent condition. We are both from the continent and we are used to windows opening to the inside. I have trouble with our current kitchen window that opens to the outside - once it is opened, I have trouble closing it, as I can't reach it over the sink!

First things for us are the doors. And the boiler.

latecomer

@maggie - great to see the walls coming up. Still curious about the blocks though. I notice that the blocks on the inner leaf look like standard blocks - same thickness as the bricks. What did they use the ones I was asking about for? Also any idea what they have used 2 different types of brick for - seem to be mixing and matching on the inner leaf?

@stolt - got to say I admire your style - I wouldn't be brave enough to order anything as bold/different as some of the things you have. I guess thats my nature though - ultra-conservative.

We've been away for most of the weekend and a rather poor nights sleep all round killed off any potential DIY on saturday morning. But the big news is that the lovely young lady at Jeld-wen has been on the phone as promised (after getting her manager to look into the problems over the weekend) to say that the window will be delivered to the builders merchant today (should be there by now) so will email the joiners to inform them of this and say that we expect it to be fitted asap and that all other joinery work can be done at the same time. And provided we get the window fitted then I'm sure they will be motivated to do the rest of the work to get their money.

stolt

[QUOTE=latecomer;36775916

@stolt - got to say I admire your style - I wouldn't be brave enough to order anything as bold/different as some of the things you have. I guess thats my nature though - ultra-conservative.

nah its not going to be to everyones taste, all our previous houses have either been cream or white walls. A bit clinical i think some people said on the for sale board when we had our last house up sale. Trying hard to inject a bit of colour into our schemes. Struggling though because as you can see from the furniture it still ends up being a black sofa or a white table!!! still dont think we have learned.

ukmaggie45

latecomer wrote: »

@maggie - great to see the walls coming up. Still curious about the blocks though. I notice that the blocks on the inner leaf look like standard blocks - same thickness as the bricks. What did they use the ones I was asking about for? Also any idea what they have used 2 different types of brick for - seem to be mixing and matching on the inner leaf?

Hi LC, it looks to me as if those big blocks went directly on the concrete in the trenches, and then the bricks built up from them. Here's a bigger version of one of the photos, click it to enlarge more if you need to.


Looking towards corner of the kitchen diner, this is at damp proof course level I think. by ukmaggie45, on Flickr


So far as I can see from the photos there's just 2 terracotta coloured bricks on the inside skin of the foundation. My guess is they just ran out of the grey ones.

Went round to the house yesterday, and there is hardcore over the earth inside foundation now, so the big blocks are more or less hidden (from what I recall). Didn't get any more photos as too knackered after visit to see the twins. OH took more stuff off the patio up to back of garden - pots and stuff. We still need to get more stuff out of the house too.

Had phone call from builder 8.15 this morning to ask where we want the cat flap to go. (it's an electronic one, so they are building the space for it in as the walls rise, and the power for it will be put in when wiring done)

No car today as it's in for a service, should be back this evening so I'll try and take more photos then. If the weather stays nice I might spend the afternoon at the house tomorrow and get on with some gardening... There's loads needs doing!

latecomer

Thanks for that - I didn't notice them in that pic although thats probably because I just had a quick look. I'm guessing from the thickness of those blocks that they must fill the cavity across at that level. What insulation are you putting in? We had to have 50mm solid board insulation in the cavity (leaving 50mm clear cavity) and then another 25mm on the inside underneath the plasterboard. It doesn't look like you have room for this so do you need thicker insulation on the inside?

And yes I realise that there is probably 100 different ways to get a set u/r-value for a wall before anyone points out the obvious

ukmaggie45

latecomer wrote: »

What insulation are you putting in? We had to have 50mm solid board insulation in the cavity (leaving 50mm clear cavity) and then another 25mm on the inside underneath the plasterboard. It doesn't look like you have room for this so do you need thicker insulation on the inside?

Hi LC, just taken a look at the plans...

100 concrete block outer leaf - form 100 cavity. Build up inner leaf using 100 thermalite shield block. Fill cavities using 100 dritherm fibreglass cavity wall batt. Fit 5 ties per square metre (stainless steel).

OH just gone to take more photos, will upload when I get a chance. May get to see how it's going myself tomorrow, but was too knackered this evening!

Hope you manage to catch up on sleep soon - DD and SiL looked a bit frazzled when we left them yesterday evening, had a long day travelling back from their holiday the day before and I think the twins were maybe rather overtired from it all.

andrew-b

We had a busy day sunday. My parents came down so my Dad and I spent all day putting up lining paper in the hall - i just did the cutting and some pasting and he did the putting it up and trimming. Progress was really slow though as it's just so fiddly so we didn't finish. We got the ceiling papered and all along the wall backing onto the nursery and between front door and bathroom. There's not really a huge area left but there's no straight runs so it looks like i'll be cutting my teeth doing the rest of the walls! One problem we had though was one of the hall light switches (two-way switching) was really hard to remove one of the screws so we papered around it and left it hanging off, we later noticed a loose connection so left it for me to sort out today.

My mum helped putting up the ceiling paper too but also dug out my compost heap, cleared and dug over the area of vegetable patch and dug in all the compost and dug over alot of the back garden too. Really brilliant compost as i hadn't dug it out last year at all so it was 2 years worth. What hadn't rotted down was put in the bottom of the composter to start again. New location for the compost heap is between the shed and satellite dish on the old shed base.

Then this morning we had to be at maternity for the repeat scan..it was the same sonographrer as last week but again the baby wasn't cooperative and wasn't as active as before so she gave up and arranged for someone more experienced to do another scan about 20 minutes later..by which time the baby was more active and had turned to a better position to get the neck measurement they were after. Then he/she waved and seemed to go back to sleep "i've done what you wanted now leave me alone"! After had to go to the opposite end of the hospital for a blood test then came home.

Rest of today i've been sorting out the light switches..the dodgy hall switch and replacing all the switches with new ones.

The hall switch turned into a much bigger problem than expected. I think the screw of the old switch had been cross-threaded before so when i put the new switch on it cross-threaded again..only this time i couldn't remove it again and in my efforts to get it off again i snapped off the metal lug for the screw on the backing box! Ended up cutting the screw in half to get the lug off - though i used a different switch in the end as i'd scratched it in the process. Fortunately i had a spare backing box but it was 25mm deep rather than the 20mm that was in there before so had to get out the SDS and "manual refinement" tools. To get the old backing box out and the new one in damaged the lining paper around it so i've filled around the new backing box and going to have to piece in a new piece of lining paper . The rest of the switches were all pretty straight forward to replace.

Rest of the week i'll probably spend slowly papering the hall i guess!