Week 42, Day 5

Week 42, Day 5:

  • Today’s automated WordPress posting didn’t work because the Broadband link was down at 16:00 through being moved over to VDSL / FTTC
  • Various significant milestones today:
    • It’s exactly 10 months since building work started, meaning today was the original forecast completion date; it’s currently expected to take about another month to make the house habitable and a bit longer than that before the landscaping and decorating is complete
    • The plasterers completed the last room, marking the end of their continuous 11 weeks of work
      • Mostly a two-person team assisted by one or two others on occasions, so something like 25 weeks of effort
      • A really top-quality job including some difficult areas – especially the inside of the curved roof (which looks amazing, even inside the storage cupboards)
      • I’d highly recommend GC Interfinish to anyone wanting quality plastering in the East Midlands
    • All the scaffolding on the south side got dismantled ready for the installation of the solar shading next week, meaning that today’s time-lapse photo looks a lot different from yesterday’s
    • Thanks to some better weather, the majority of the zinc got installed on the north roof, with just a few sections left to complete – and then the fascias, down-pipes etc.
    • The kitchen worktops arrived and the sink worktop and splash-back is finished but there was a mishap fine-tuning the cut-out for the flush-fitting induction hob and the worktop for the island will have to be re-made
      • I think the mid-grey colour (Silestone Cemento) looks a bit odd against the bare plaster, the blue protective film over the gloss-finish cabinet fronts and the cardboard protecting the polished concrete floor but it should look better when everything is finished
Week 42, Day 5

Week 42, Day 5

Zinc roofing mostly complete

Zinc roofing mostly complete

Worktop and splash-back for kitchen sink units

Worktop and splash-back for kitchen sink units

View from the south-east

View from the south-east

View from the south-west

View from the south-west

Week 24, Day 1

Week 24, Day 1:

  • Easter Monday Bank Holiday so not really a working day but the build team were on site while the scaffolders (re-)added boards to the middle lift of scaffolding and removed a section of scaffolding at the western end to provide access for installing the windows and external doors
  • The photo shows how the temporary blue cover on the roof got blown off thanks to Storm Kate though it was nothing like as bad in Derbyshire as in the south of England
Week 24, Day 1

Week 24, Day 1

Amended scaffolding with an access gap for the windows

Amended scaffolding with an access gap for the windows

It seems that my automatic upload of the time-lapse photos to WordPress broke when the clocks went forward, so apologies for the auto-generated posts that said simply PLACEHOLDER since the weekend.

I’m deliberately naming the photo files with a UTC timestamp, so the photo above has filename 20160328T1600Z.jpg (16:00 UTC or “zulu” time on 28th March 2016) though the timestamp on the image (added automatically by the camera) says 17:00. The problem was that the photo file hadn’t been copied to the WordPress server when the scheduled job ran to insert the photo into the PLACEHOLDER post, since it was looking for the 16:00 filename (only actually written at 17:00) at 16:30. It doesn’t help that the server hosting WordPress is in Germany, and uses Central European time; that’s my excuse anyway.