Sven started (and finished) the kitchen floor in a couple of hours this morning. The floor itself was delivered last week, when I was in Bologna. It was recommended that the floor be left open in the environment in which it would be installed - that way the floor would get a chance to expand to suit the humidity and temperature. In our case, that was a bit problematic as we were running the warm-up program for the underfloor heating. That program is on a downwards curve since late on Saturday night. The water temperature running to the floor is now at 30° (down from 45° last week) so the surface temperature is a little lower than that again. It was just about at the threshold where we could consider spreading the glue and setting the floor. The floor had to go in today, though, because the kitchen is coming tomorrow. The finished job looks quite well, I think. The italian travertine is nice and bright.
Chrisch was on site on Saturday and Sunday to sort out plastering in the bedrooms. The leveling coat was done with
Rotband and the top coat on top of that was done with
Hasit 150. The same kind of finish was applied as we used in the living room - when the last coat of plaster in on and still wet, a sponge roller with lots of little holes is used to give the wall the kind of cake-decoration finish. One thing I noticed about the finish in the living room was that the points tend to break off on contact. When the wall wasn't painted, that wasn't such an issue - however, when painted white, the broken off points appear gray. What I decided to do was to break off all the points myself before painting. The result is still quite appealing, but with the added advantage that it shouldn't break off anymore. Given that the living room was already painted, I ended up tearing open the points again, but it needs a last coat of paint anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Below are some more photos of how it looks. As you can see, I finished (the first coat) painting in the living room. The warm-up phase of the underfloor heating was so hot, that it easily got rid of all the damp spots on the wall. You will also see that I got rid of the stairs up to the attic. There is a pull down ladder going to be installed there (hopefully tomorrow) and we want to finally finish the ceiling in the corridor. On the positive side, once the stairs was gone, we saw that the space in the alcove was actually quite big - it is exactly two metres wide. We still have to think of something to do with the space, though. Bookshelves, maybe.
