After the House of Commons was devastated by a German air raid in 1941, Winston Churchill reflected:
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Category Archives: Diary
More cladding, the last door & the garage progress
A chunk more cladding has gone up, including some of the thinner horizontal cladding on the top box:
The vertical cladding on the middle box is wider with nice detailing around the windows.
The last door has been put in. The doors and windows are all in place, but not yet 100% fitted.
The garage floor has been poured and the last internal wall is going up:
Amazing to be calm and dry, inside, with outside having howling wind (I’d been kitesurfing earlier in the day), looking out at kitesurfers on the beach.
EPDM is on, MVHR is part in, Windows are mostly in …
A chunk of progress.
An extra Tyvec membrane has been wrapped around the house to make it increasingly waterproof but “breathable”:
The window & door frames have all been going in, and more recently the glazing has gone into them:
There’s a chunk of progress on the garage and stairs by the garage:
The MVHR ducting is going in:
No rain, no high winds, so the EPDM can go on
After what feels like months, the forecast is for 2 days without rain or strong winds, so, at last, the waterproof EPDM membrane for the “flat” roof system can go on.
Over the (checked for nail heads etc.) marine ply sheets is a protective layer (white below) and then the thick rubber EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) rubber sheet.
The MVHR is due to start being installed tomorrow, so some of it’s ducting has arrived:
A lot of sealing up progress
A lot going on, with the build and with other things, so a long while since an update.
The relentless UK weather of high rainfall and strong winds that have flooded large sections of the UK and battered the Cornish coastline has slowed down the daily work rate and meant that some items, such as the dry roof membrane for the flat roof, is not yet done.
The stormy sea from the house:
The roof had a mesh of timbers put on, with marine ply over the top, to give a gentle slope from a central ridge for the “flat” roof:
You can see the level drop in this photo:
At the same time, the internal studwork is going up:
The window frames are going in (the white tape comes off later !):
and a bit more of the garage has been built:
Despite looking bigger than it will due to the scaffolding and lack of cladding and other details that will soften the impact of the size, it’s shape is now there:
Glass for the fish bowl has arrived
The Yprado GRP window frames and doors, with the glazing has arrived.
The rather large truck stayed down the road and the forklift cherry picker brought the pallets up to the house:
The ecofab team are packing up areas that didn’t have panels with sheep wool (bundle below) and starting to put sealing tape for, what will be, an “airtight house”.
The rear external stair cast concrete steps are in:
From the beach, the house has it’s form:
Dawn moon over the sea:
The roof is on
The building now has it’s form. Cladding and other external detail will, mostly, only change what it looks like.
The “cherry picker” crane was able to reach onto the top of the first floor, from where the hand lifts could take panels up to the top of the 2nd floor.
This collage has one of the last panels being lifted to the top of the 2nd floor and being put in:
Inside, the lack of internal walls can mean supervision from the 1st floor up to the 2nd floor which will be the study.
The view from the study:
The roof and other elements are being taped, sealed, filled in …..
The bulk of the doors and windows arrive soon. They might not all go in straight away.
1st floor roof is on
The first floor ceiling is also the building ceiling in some parts.
It’s now all in place:
From inside:
Looking at from the perspective of the master bedroom:
Looking at from the perspective of the second bedroom:
The top floor is emerging
Verticals for the top second floor going in. Also glulams across the ends and in other positions that are the top of the first floor and the bottom of the second floor.
In the background the waves are enormous:
The progress is towards putting in the next level of ceiling / floor panels:
and from the front, you can see the first floor front steel has been put on:
The groundwork’s are also progressing with the re-enforced concrete steps coming out of their shuttering:
The sea spills into Perranporth
A combination of big tides, at the same time as big swell and lots of rainfall is meaning that waves are breaking over the sea front wall and leading to other flooding in the lower bit of Perranporth village.
But a great turn out by the community with sand bag filling & distribution etc. alleviated a lot of the damage (it would have otherwise been worse).
The ecofab team are back on site, which has held up fine, despite the wind and rain over the last few weeks and the last weekend in particular.
Elsewhere in Cornwall, some of the cliff locations like Sennen have had some truly massive waves:
