Such a great feeling!!
Well, after finishing the exterior of the house (al last!!) we are taking a breather and will shortly start to construct the detached garage. It may seem strange to stop work on the inside of the house, but we need the garage … or workshop as it will be!! … to move all the spare materials / tools / work bench / etc out of the house so we can have the room to start fitting the air-tight membrane and then the services. It will also allow us to finally see the inside of the house for the first time as it will be when it’s finished! We have an electrical layout plan – it was needed to establish what fittings we should buy when there was a great offer at Bricomarche!! – but until we can actually get a feel for the spaces we can’t finally agree the position of light switches. sockets, etc. To be fair we did manage to finish fitting the extra wall and all the insulation to the inside of the frame – so that is four layers giving us 40cm in the walls! Should be enough to keep us nice and warm! One posting to the Green Building Forum gave the calculations for the amount of heat needed in houses with our level of insulation and they suggest that the bedrooms will only require around 100 watts of heat – about the same as an old style light bulb!! Now that what we call low energy!
One amazing plus is that we managed to get a pile of plasterboard carried into the house. Considering it has been sat, covered, outside for around 18 months we were very relieved to find any of the sheets were worth having! Just three more to uncover and get shifted!
We’ll post some photos of the progress on the garage build. Should be pretty easy, although it still just the two of us!!