Finishing up some smaller jobs

The hole down to the party room

The last couple of days were spent finishing up smaller jobs. The roof is more or less finished now (still some smaller things to be done) and we are kind of in limbo waiting for the next big job to start. What we have planned is that the windows and doors go in during calendar week 28 (starts 8th July). When those are in, the floor can be poured. Of course, for the floor to be poured, the underfloor heating has to be in. For that to be done, a couple of smaller things needed to be finished. One of those that was at the back of my mind for a while was that a hole needed to be bored from the living room down to the party room. The hole is for the heating pipe from Harting 10 to go up to the attic and for the heating pipes for the radiators (downstairs) to come down from the attic. The water pipe(s) have to go upstairs as well. Lastly, I want to install a Cat7 network down in the party room. Currently there is WLAN from Harting 10, but it is kind of shaky and not ideal - especially for music.

The other jobs that were finished were the OSB up in Sandra's "Gallery". They were half done, but Uli and I finished them on Saturday. It involved a lot of fairly tricky cutting to fit the OSB around the rafters but we got it done. Next Wednesday (19th June) at 08:00 the water company is coming around to fix up the water. They will be bringing a mini digger to do the most of the dirty work, but I had to dig a trench a metre deep and about five metres long from the house out to where we think we will hit an existing water pipe. It would be too dangerous to use the mini digger in around the house (especially because of the temporary supports for the glass roof). I dug the trench in sweltering heat. It kept falling in on me because it was very near the trench we dug back in March for the heating pipe from Harting 10 and the earth was loose.

Today (16th June) I decided to try to build up the inner leaf of the northern living room wall. The wall is 36cm thick for about the first 1.5m height. After that it is one wide brick narrower (the outer wall is obviously flush all the way up - the inner living room wall therefore has a step). It was this step that I wanted to fill up to the top so that we would have a uniform wall for plastering. We had a few piles of old bricks which needed to be used up, but only a few of them were full length bricks. Most of them were half or shorter. As well as that I have almost no sand left. I'll need to order another 5 tonnes tomorrow. This kind of work (building up walls with irregular bricks) means a lot of mortar is used.

The wall, built up to the wallplate

About half the wall is finished