It's been a month since our last post. With the exception of Mal the roofer, we have been working on our own on site. So what have we achieved?
We built the front porch, extending off the side of the Beattie frame. We used leftover timber from the house build, supporting the corner of the roof with a galvanised steel post.
We use the same antracite grey cladding as the garage.
Sarah learned how to use the new Makita multi-tool to cut the edging strip for the cladding into the window reveals.
We experimented with DIY plasterboarding - we lined the utility room with tapered boards, using jointing compound to fill the gaps.
We're very pleased with the results - a smoother finish than plasterboard with a traditional skim coat on top.
We dug in the rainwater pipes by hand - not a sensible choice in hindsight. Days of hard, navvy-style work instead of half an hour with a digger.
We have three hoppers collecting rainwater off the house and garage roofs, feeding underground into our 7500 litre rainwater harvester.
There is now a second feed into this inspection chamber with rainwater dropping down into the tank. Overspill drains away into a soakaway.
The blue conduit contains a power supply for the pump, a connection to the level sensor and the supply pipe back th the house to feed the washing machine and loo. We have tee-d off a second supply to the garden.
We dug a second (smaller) soakaway and trench to drain the roof of our new porch.
We investigated the mystery holes that appeared in the Wraptite fabric.
Turns out that blue tits are attracted to the yellow colour of the fabric and the shape (but presumably not the taste) pf the polystyrene bead insulation.
We'll have some patching to do before cladding this wall.
We started cladding the rest of the house in ivory-coloured boards, mounted horizontally.
We are very pleased with the contrast achieved, although a little daunted that it is now the start of October and we still have a long way to go before the walls are completely weathertight.
And on the rainy days, we installed our mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) system from these parts that a senior member of the family dubbed a Meccano kit.
We chose a Brink Renovent unit. There are two large ducts penetrating the wall of the utility room (fresh air intake and stale air exhaust) The MVHR then supplies air through ducting and extracts air from the kitchen and bathroom through a separate set of ducting.
There's a condensate connection still to be made from the bottom of the unit.
The large square boxes are "cross-talk silencers" to reduce noise channelling through the ducts between rooms.
All of this ducting will be hidden above a dropped ceiling. Then the system will be commissioned by the supplier (Green Building Store) to set up the designed flow rates.