Week 6 - 6th Sept 2010 - and Up

The frame is really progressing now, the second floor is being put on. We've set up a time lapse camera which should make interesting viewing once the whole house is up. The big Douglas Fir beams are in position and are sticking out of the frame just waiting for the roof and second floor.

The flooring is down for the first floor and we can start to see the shape of the rooms emerging. Downstairs the only steel is in place, which runs through the kitchen. They just managed to get it into position with the tele-handler from the front of the house. Lee and Ben have been joined by another two chippies, Dave and his apprentice so we should really start motoring (Well after we have had another delivery which is holding them up). There are also two Trell (ground worker) guys on site slogging away with the 750m of piping for our ground source heat pump so the site is  now quite lively with six guys in total and the stereotypical radio blaring out radio two!! .

The hole where the chimney and fire place will go looks massive; it will really be a feature of the living room. We have booked a guy called Trevor Pryor - who is on the Potton list of sub contractors and has done loads of Potton houses, including the show house - to build our chimney so he should know what he is doing.
The scaffolders are also back (asking for tea as usual) and pushing each other over in the mud, that's scaffolders for you!! They are putting in the next lifts for the gable ends and closing off the scaffold, it doesn't take them long to do at all.  We were told that scaffolders have a tendency to be somewhat unreliable but the team we have employed have been great to date.

Finally our sunroom frame has been erected.  We were really excited to see this, and we are chuffed to bit with what we have seen of it so far.  The views across the garden and over the fields are great.  When you are just at the planning stage it is really hard to envisage exactly what a room will look and feel like in real life, but this one has certainly lived up to expectations.

The roof trusses for the sun room are causing a problem and Potton are sending out some timber so they can be made up on site.

The walls of the first floor are up now and the roof trusses are going on. With four guys here it's really flying up. It's amazing now how big it looks, when we stood on the foundations 3 weeks ago we wondered if we should have made it bigger, but now the frame is nearly up you get a true sense of the size and as you come up the drive it looks great.