A month on...

Now it has been over a month since we moved in. A couple of 'teething problems' needed to be sorted out and still need to be sorted out. For example, getting the heating working properly was a bit of an issue. The heating company made a reasonable decision on how to heat the radiators (our second heating zone, the first being the underfloor heating). However, they hadn't reckoned with Alois. He heats downstairs with timber - an oven in the kitchen and a stove in the living room. Because he likes it toasty warm downstairs, immediately upstairs (the bedrooms and office)  get warm as well. Coupled with the radiators, it was too much, so now the radiator zone is turned off. It is still bordering on too hot.

Another issue with the heating system is coupled with a problem with the electrics. After Christmas we started having power cuts. It turned out that the main conduit from the electric meter downstairs up to our separate electric distribution box (the one with the fuses) was somehow damaged. Two of the three phases were shorting, and constantly tripping the main (50A) fuse downstairs - i.e. cutting out the power

completely. Since then I bought another cable to do the job - a big thick stiff cable which was wicked hard to bend, but which should easily deal with any power running through it. Whereas I was able to run the cable along the floor of the gallery (still OSB) with the other pipes (i.e. pretty much hidden), down through the hole in the corner of the living room floor (with the rest of the heating, electric and network cables), along the floor of the party room and out through the wall to connect up with the rest of the cabling, I still had to cut a channel about a metre long into the freshly plastered (and painted) wall (you can see it in the picture). I also had to cut through the outside plaster to get the cable to the box. Petermaier will have to come and plaster it up again as soon as the weather gets a bit warmer.

Other than that, our shower is finally finished. It was finished well before Christmas, but the glass wall was missing, meaning that it was hard to use. The week before last, the company came around to put it in. It was very heavy.  The cats have discovered that the underfloor heating is warmest in the bathroom (probably because of the tiles) so they are almost always to be found lying on the floor near the shower.

The next delivery is going to be our couch(es). I called up the company the other day and they confirmed it is going to be calendar week 8 - roughly the middle of February. It's a bit unfortunate it took so long - I can't hang the television on the wall until the couch comes. Otherwise I won't know what height to hang the television at. We got a new television about three weeks ago. The old one (a 32") is going to go into the guest room (also hanging on the wall). I need to get the right screws for it though.

Other than that we put up some pictures in Eileen's room and generally made it look

more like a child's bedroom. I also ended up painting a bit of a wall again, after Eileen coloured it red with crayon. We started working on getting the guest bedroom into shape as well. The shape of the room made is a bit of a puzzle as to how to turn the bed and the presses to make is some way logical. The presses are the old ones that were in the house before we started renovating. A bit of a cleaning and they were ok-ish. I still think they need to be stripped and re-varnished. My office is also pretty much finished. There is still to much stuff in boxes there for my liking (waiting on their final destination), but it's fine to work in. Below are some pictures.

Dr. Schutz to the rescue

 It looks kind of like Murphy puked on the floor at regular intervals. This stuff is Dr. Schutz's amazing floor cordial. It is a tenside polymer bonding agent that forms a protective layer on top of vinyl floors. Bloody expensive too. It is applied undiluted on a floor which is either just put in, or which has been washed and polished three times. Ours is the latter. I washed and polished it three times last night. Strangely, even after the third wash, it looked as though there was (still) a very thin film of dust on the floor. Sven put in the floor in the corridor between the kitchen and the bathroom yesterday, so it was easy to see the difference between a really new floor and a floor which - albeit was washed three times - was a couple of weeks old. I was a bit worried about sealing the floor with Dr. Schutz in case I ended up just creating a sealing layer on top of the dust. It worked out fine though - the downside being nobody can walk in the living room until later today. At least three hours, preferably more. 

 The result is quite good, I think. I'm still waiting for it to dry, to see what kind of "final finish" it has. In the picture on the right it looks like a high gloss finish, but it isn't really - at least, it shouldn't be. The Dr. Schutz film is still wet. You can kind of make out the direction it will go in, though. Below is one more photo of the living room, with Dr. Schutz applied. I couldn't move the table out, because there is no room in the kitchen (the chairs are in there) and I didn't want to put in on the balcony. On top of that, it is too heavy. I ended up working around it, then moving it. We should soon be able to move in more furniture. The couch won't arrive until mid February, so we'll have to find some way of bridging the next month. The electricity is working now too - ish. There are a couple of problems which need to be looked at.

Getting there...

 "In by Christmas" was always going to be a bit of a challenge. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "in" and what you mean by "Christmas". For all intents and purposes we are more or less "in" - in that we have heating, water etc. Most of the rooms are finished (for now) and just need a good cleaning. There is still painting to be done (especially the beams in the gallery - they received a coat of linseed oil paint to prime them but they need the black paint to match the other beams) and lots of acryl/silicone to be used around windows, doorframes, skirting boards etc. All relatively small jobs and nothing which would really hinder a full change of residence. The blockers at the moment are electricity and furniture.

Uli is already working on the electricity issue. All the wall sockets are done and ready. The lights are installed in the kitchen and bedrooms. The wall lights still have to go in and the thermostats for the underfloor heating. The biggest single thing that has to happen is for the main 64A connection to be connected to the mains. Once that is done, the lights come on and we're ready to go.

 I finally got around to getting the big window done. I was kind of procrastinating as much as possible with this one, which was not a good idea, given its height. On the last day I had the scaffolding, I decided to get a window sill from the carpenter in the same kind of material/colour as the other window sills. It was installed quickly and the whole window frame was painted white. I think this was the right choice. Black, to match the beams, would have given it a strange frame effect - like an obituary notice. The off-white colour of the boards in the ceiling would not really have suited either. Two coats of white paint, a cleaning and a dusting and the window is finished. I'm not looking forward to having to clean it at any time in the near future.

 The living room was finished too - you can't really get an idea of what it looks like from any of these photos. It is currently covered in dust, so it looks a lot older that it probably should. Tomorrow, it is going to get a good cleaning and a sealing (a kind of wax does this). We got a table and eight chairs as well - they are made from oak, which doesn't really match any of the timber in the house, but they were a great deal. Maybe we'll find an oak cabinet to match it at some stage.In the photo to the left the table and chairs are actually in the position they are supposed to be (permanently). The light arrived today too. It is to hang down from the purloin to about 2m above the floor. I'm hoping it will provide enough light not just for the table but also for most of that side of the room. We'll see.

 Niedermaier also finished up. He had to re-mount the radiators in the bedrooms (he had already taken them out so we could finish the painting). The bathroom had to be fitted out and the insulation had to be done in the attic (the copper pipes carrying hot water were not insulated, with the result that the attic was unbearably hot). The bathroom is now finished except that a glass shower wall has to be installed. The company responsible for this has already measured it and apparently it will be installed at the start of January. The good thing about it - the most important thing really - is that the shower water is immediately hot. No waiting three minutes, leaving cold water run down the drain (an expensive undertaking) - turn on, straight away hot water. The same applies to all the taps, so it seems as though that has worked out well.

Just photos

Kitchen floor done ,kitchen coming tomorrow

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.

Linseed Oil Varnish

I did quite a lot of work in the kitchen over the last couple of weeks. Apart from painting all but the last coat (which will be a latex paint), I wanted to get all the dirty work out of the way before the kitchen is installed (which is next Tuesday, Nov 4th, by the way). By "dirty work" I mean cleaning the brick wall (by scraping the old pointing out), pointing the wall and sealing it, varnishing the beams and sealing the whole lot. The last coat of latex paint also belongs to the "dirty work" category, as does putting in the floor. Basically, when they come with the kitchen on Tuesday, I want that room to be fully finished (apart from having no door).

Apropos varnish, I read that a linseed oil varnish is the right man for the job if you have old beams. It is mixed with turpentine, so there is a bit of a whiff off it (like petrol), but it soaks into the timber very well. In the photo you can see the difference between a beam which hasn't been varnished at all (just sanded) and a beam which had a single coat of varnish. In the meantime all of the beams in the kitchen and in Eileen's room have received two coats of linseed oil varnish. I ordered a linseed "Firnis", which is a linseed oil based sealant. It dries quickly and leaves a bit of a shine on the timber. When it comes I'll give all the beams a shot of it. The pictures below are of the kitchen floor ("italian travertine") and the living room floor ("antique oak").

Some more painting done

For the past few days I've been putting in a couple of hours painting - it's a relatively quiet activity that I can do at night as well (especially now that I have a 50W LED floodlight in the living room). I started with the bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom and all walls but the north wall (the one backing on to the corridor) of the kitchen are covered in fibreglass. Theoretically, it is possible to paint directly on to the slabs and practically it is better to plaster the slabs, but the fibreglass is actually a very good solution. It is considerably faster than plastering and has the huge advantage that it will not crack if there is movement in the slabs underneath. In our case, there very likely will be movement underneath, as the beams running on top of the internal partitions are also connected to the rafters. Thus, in a high wind, the roof will move, put pressure on the ceiling beams and this could be transferred down to the partitions - causing cracks in plaster or paint (the latter if the paint is applied directly to the slabs). There is already one significant crack in the paint. The kitchen north wall (the one without fibreglass) has a crack at the place where two slabs join. It isn't really a problem because it will be behind the kitchen block, but it goes to show, painting directly on to slabs might look ok (it does actually), but it isn't very stable.

After putting two coats of dispersion paint on the bathroom and kitchen walls I moved on to the living room. I have one coat on the partition walls (i.e. between living room and bathroom/kitchen) and two coats on the corridor (including the ceiling). I also have one coat on the south wall of the living room and have also put one coat on the reveals. Another thing that makes a lot of sense and which really enhances the final coat is sanding. Before the final coat, I decided to sand the subcoats of paint. Sven has a great machine called a "Giraffe",

which is connected to a big vacuum cleaner. The giraffe sands the wall and the dust is sucked directly into the vacuum cleaner. The result is a very smooth wall, ready to take the final coat of paint. Speaking of which, I now have the latex paint for the bathroom and the kitchen. I'm delaying applying it until I have new rollers. The good roller that I have can now only be used for the stipple finish on the plastered sections. I used it there and now there are tiny stones from the plaster in it - these make it impossible to paint the slabbed walls.