Week 58, Day 1:
- Very heavy rain all day, hence the rain spots on the camera lens and the lights on inside at 3pm – and a mini lake on the driveway
- Good progress with various of the internal snagging items and the installation of the remaining stair end-caps and the last of the oak for the glass balustrades
Week 58, Day 1
Last section of oak covering the fixings on the glass balustrades
Completed end caps on the ground-to-first floor staircase
Week 58, Day 1 by Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Hi, stairs are looking very good.
How warm does it feel with the rain and cold weather ?
How did you get on with air tightness overall with the block walls ?
Hi Jonathan,
Glad to hear you like the stairs. The final coats of oak oil should be going on on Friday which should finish them off nicely.
The house currently feels much warmer than the static caravan, which is currently using about 30 kilos of Propane a week, and still feels draughty. Because I haven’t moved into the house yet it’s a balancing act on the heating – making sure it works OK and getting an idea for how the different rooms heat up and cool down, but not having it at normal temperature since that feels too hot when anyone is doing any work inside.
The main thing preventing me from moving in is now the air tightness. The block walls themselves are fine with the wet plaster (including details like bedding the electrical socket boxes on drywall adhesive and parging the walls where they are dry-lined rather than plastered). The main difficulty with any air tightness sealing is the junction between different materials – and with components like the sliding doors.
Some other new houses are achieving remarkable air tightness test results – of the order of 0.1 ach – and mine is never going to be in that sort of territory. I’ll be happy with 0.5.
The likelihood is still that some of the plasterboard will need removing and then patching up, which will be dusty, so I want to wait for the air tightness to get signed off before moving in.
David