With walls finished with either varnish on the wood or paint on the stud walls, we are ready to start putting in the electrical sockets. We have used Hamilton sockts on the house as they were able to make some specials for us like this 6 way light switch including dimmer.

 The inside of the house has to be sanded. We found this hand sander ideal. But there are acres and acres of wood to do, the dust is fine, and not popular. Wearing a mask is essential, and Western Red Cedar dust is a particularly aggressive irritant. A light sand with a hand block is also required between coats.

 As Christmas approaches, extra input is drafted in to get the house nearer to completion. On a crips winters day we have a bricklayer preparing the paving outside the house, two carpenters (well there is a lot of wood in a house like this) a dry liner to do the walls, the floor installers, and later on the electrician come in too.

Here is a little tip from our consultant builder that can be used on any house with a tiled in shower.

IF the shower outlet behind the tiles ever leaked the water would fill the stud wall first before there was any sign of the leak on the outside.

 So to act as an early warning device, simply set a piece of plastic tube around the shower outlet in the wall, using silicone to secure it against the base of the shower outlet.

  Carefully tile around the pipe, then trim it back close to the tiles, connect the shower pipework to the outlet (a threaded joint that can spring a leak, hence the cunning trick) and if there ever is a leak, you will see it as a small drip from the end of this tube, which is trimmed back after tiling so that it is behind the finishing plate for the shower outlet.

At last, with the floor leveled with latex and marked out to show where the underfloor pipes are, it is time to lay the floor. 

 The wood is acclimatised in the house for a fortnight, preferably in the room it is going to be used in. With the underfloor heating on, this enables the pre dried floor to get used to the envirionment it will be in. Two days prior to laying the floor, the underfloor heating is turned off, and after the flooring is done, is very gradually warmed up again over 2-3 weeks so that the wood warms up very slowly.

With our 18mm solid oak “budget price” flooring, we are generally “secret nailing” and where this cannot be done because we are too close to a wall or passing over an underfloor heating water pipe, special glue is used.

 The nailing “machine” is rather like a giant stapler. It puts nails in at an angle of 45 degreees on the “tongue” side of the “tongue and groove” interlocking flooring. By putting the nails in here, you just push the next piece of flooring on to the tongue and the nail you have just put in becomes invisible, or as they say, “secret”.

 The nailing machine uses barbed nails which are feed into the machine on a strip. This strip is made by gluing the nails together with a flexible glue. They are sliced off the strip like stapes in a stapler.

 Where we cannot nail, a special flexible glue is used.

 This comes in a fat sausage and needs a special gun to apply it. How much glue you use depends on whether you have any uneveness in the floor, as the glue is also used to take up any gaps. Just like the tiled areas, the wood floor must be protected using a cardboard underlay and hardboard on top, held together with rolls and rolls of duct tape. It is certainly one of those moments when the house seems to be progressing as the site of the floor having been laid is encouraging for flagging enthusiasm.

 To get a level floor we have applied a latex leveling compound to the floor. This tends to cover the cut outs in the joists where the underfloor heating pipes travel across them so first of all we took digital pictures of all the pipes in all the rooms.

  Then we have made simple drawings with dimensions of the cut outs prior to latexing, and then used these to mark up the floor on the latex to show where we must not put nails!

  The floor nails using the secret nailing method will go in at about 45 degrees so you have to allow for the horizontal travel when looking at where to put a nail in.

 As an extra precaution as the position of the joist can sometimes be concealed, we have drawn lines with the felt marker to show where the joists are too. After all, if we went through a pipe it would be a major job to repair the pipe.

 Now we have plumbed up and pressure tested the Hans Grohe I boxes we can put the 3/4″ ply on the walls of the bathrooms. This first one is the front view of the I box for the shower, so has the hot and cold coming in, and the mixed output to the shower coming out of the bottom (in copper) going to the shower outlet.

  This shot is looking at the back of the mixer for the bathroom with a shower and a bath, so again the hot and cold come in from the left and right, and the output to the bath filler and the shower are at the top and bottom. However with the block design of the I box, it actually does not matter which way the pipes come into the block.

 With the toilet cisterns now connected up we need to fill the header tank in the roof space with rain water. The installation instructions for the rain water harvesting system say to leave the pump out until you are ready to install it. IIn the background you can see the cover is off the manhole into the tank. The pump assembly is ready with its float to keep the gauze mesh pick up point off the bottom of the tank and the blue cord to lower it into the tank (and retrieve it later if servicing is required!)

We have suffered from a small amount of water creeping in the chimney flue. It ran down the outside of the flue pipe, suggesting there was some sealing issue with the rain collar supplied with the flue.

 What we weren’t aware of when we fitted the flue was that the collar needs high temperature silicone to ensure a totally watertight seal. So it was up onto the sedum roof and off with the collar and out with the silicon gun.

 As we had a whole tube of sealant and did not want to go up again, we put the high temperature silicon on the obvious places and the less obvious places to make sure we did not have to get the ladders out and up on the roof again in a hurry.

 Hopefully the next time it rains we will find the job has worked!

With the tiled floor in the hallway laid, it will need protection for the remainder of the build.

 So after brushing and hoovering the tiles to take up any debris, cardboard packaging is used with any metal staples removed to completely cover the tiled areas. The cardboard sections are taped up with duct tape. Then hardboard is used smooth side down to create a hard wearing surface.

 The hardboard is used this way round to avoid creating a slippery surface if it gets wet. The carboard will stop any sharp gritty bits from marking the tiles. This will now stay down until we need to put the skirting down just before the house is finished.