I missed an update last weekend due to our grandson’s christening, which was a great gathering of family and friends.
Over the past 2 weeks, the shell contract with Insul Hub has largely been completed with a couple of minor snagging items left to finish.
Sam was able to install the stud walls on the middle floor having completed these screeds the previous week. Having worked out that we needed 3 times more screed than we originally anticipated, the search was on to source another 50 x 20kg bags! Sadly, almost every supplier locally was down to the odd bag, except for Wickes who came to the rescue. However, to secure 50 bags involved clearing out their stores in Oxford, Reading, Winnersh, Basingstoke and Newbury! Our apologies to anyone else in Oxfordshire or Berkshire who was trying to buy self levelling compound last week! Unfortunately, none of this was available for delivery so it took almost 2 days to collect all of the bags in the car without over-loading it. Undaunted, we set to with Sam and got all of the 72m2 of the basement laid and levelled in a couple of hours. This allowed the final stud walls in the basement to be installed on 4 April.
On 29 March, Mati and Rafi of Insul Hub arrived to set out the parapet walls for the balconies. This is the final course, which will be level with the front window threshold, and had to be redesigned to ensure that there was sufficient concrete to fix the balcony balustrade into. This was achieved by halving the insulation in the blocks to 115mm (this course is above the building envelope); doubling the amount of concrete to 240mm; inserting some 10mm bent bar; and topping the course of blocks with 25mm of Armatherm 500(160) structural insulation. The latter will eventually tie into the insulation on the balcony and ensure that all thermal bridges are eliminated.
On 30 March, we had the last concrete delivery of the build from Ashville Concrete. This was also the smallest at 2m3 to fill the parapet wall course for the balconies. However, a delivery booked for 0900hrs finally arrived at 1315hrs; par for the course for the final pour …
The rendering team from M B Facades arrived on site on 6 April. We are using a Wetherby Heck K 1.5mm silicon render in an off-white colour. Gary, Dave and their team have started to transform the outer walls even though this is just the mesh and base coat. After only 2 days work, the whole of the south wall had been covered and smoothed.
We are now moving into fit-out of the shell, which we will be directly managing on a trade by trade basis. As a result, we have had site meetings with several of our selected suppliers this week including:
- Wolverine Garage Doors of Reading
- Simple Kitchens of Thame
- G Q & Sons Roofing for the balconies where we will be using Polyroof’s Protec system again
We are also starting to take delivery of materials required for future work.