Saturday 30 April 2011

End of week twelve

The combination of Easter and the big wedding means that there's only been three days of work on the site this week and the pictures from the usual views don't seem to show much difference from last week.



If, however,  you look closely in this picture you can see that the walls are now complete so this coming week the roof work is going to start.

See how tall the rooms on the top floor will be at the centre of the house compared to their height at the southern wall.

Friday 22 April 2011

End of week eleven

It's Easter weekend so all's quiet on the build for four days. The house has almost reached the top of the walls now and the scaffolders have been in several times to add more levels to the scaffolding.

I've taken these images from the four corners of the site:


The lower pictures show the two long windows on the western face of the house. The one on the right spans two floors and on the left the window goes through all three. I'm not quite sure what we're going to do about curtains/blinds for that one - do they make blinds 10m long at IKEA?.......
 ....... doesn't look like it.
The site manager took a couple of photos of the top floor for me this week and here they are looking to the west and east:



No signs of the electricity company in the east but the sight of the green hill was a nice surprise.





Saturday 16 April 2011

Garden dreams

Here's a couple of pictures to look back on in a few months time. One is the view from the ground floor window out into the garden and the other is the view back to the house from the corner of the garden.

I hope at the end of this blog to have a photo of the views to show with a newly planted garden but, in the meantime, here's a picture of all the plants waiting to go into the ground:

I created this flowerbed in the winter once I knew the build was about the start and it's holding all the plants I've been collecting since we moved here three years ago in anticipation of my new garden. The pots are holding plants I brought with me from our old house and, as things finish flowering around the garden this year, I'm also potting them up ready to move before I forget where they are. Today I tried to rescue some Anemone blanda plants but the bulbs are so minute I only managed to find one despite some very detailed excavations in the garden. I think I may just put in an order with http://www.crocus.co.uk/ instead, one of my favourite websites.

Check out the scaffolding for the new house on the edge of the photo and my topspoil mountain at the side of the hedge. The local avian population can't believe their luck with the latter.

End of week ten


This week the crane was back on site and we now have both sets of floors in situ. The second picture shows what the top floor looks like from the front of the house looking back through. As you can see we are going to be above the level of the building on the western side of the site. I was hoping to get photos of the view too but, unfortunately the camera batteries went and I didn't have any spares. Why does that always happen?

After ten weeks we are now almost at roof level and you can see the contrast between what is, effectively, almost glass walls for the rooms on the ground and first floors and the solid walls on the top floor. The rooms at the top will have windows in the roof so we will have to have a periscope if we want to see what's going on at street level; mind you it ought to be great for stargazing as the light pollution to the west of the house is minimal.

Sunday 10 April 2011

End of week nine

 
Yesterday the next level of scaffolding was assembled ready for the construction of the second storey. Although the house will be no higher than the two buildings on either side it will have rooms on three storeys to maximise the available space. After input from the planning department the top floor won't have the big windows that you see on the two floors below but I am hoping that there might be a bit of a view from the windows on the western side. There will be a view from all the windows of course but to the east it's likely to be dominated by a massive building belonging to an electricity company - oh, the irony!

Im Westen etwas neuer

Last week, the underground network for the heating was completed and the matrix runs under the new garden rather like this. The inlet pipe I photographed won't remain quite as it looks at the moment but I won't spoil the surprise and show you the finished product until it's installed. All I will say is that I doubled up with laughter when I saw it in the box.
This week the digger was busy again in the south west corner of the site and where I've added the purple circle in the picture above there is now a deep hole containing this:

When I say deep, I mean deep: the hole goes down 8 feet and contains the soakaway. By my calculation it has the capacity to hold several thousand litres of water so it ought to be able to cope with summers round here with equanimity.

The hole will be filled in soon and only you and I will know what lies beneath but, just for now, it does look as if we're installing a nuclear bunker. An impression the Rehau inlet pipe tends to support.


Friday 1 April 2011

End of week eight


 

This week you can clearly see the walls on the first floor and in the picture below there's a good view through the main rooms at this level.


After another week of excavations, the underground matrix of pipes seems to have reached the end now and the vertical pipe marks the point of the air inlet. I'm hoping this is not what it will look like by the end of the installation but it's going to add something of a space-age touch to the wildlife area. I don't suppose I can plant anything too close to it to obscure it.