Curly pipe disaster avoided

Darren spent most of yesterday, and today we spent all morning wrestling with our MVHR. I had never heard of one of these before we started building our house but it stands for mechanical ventilation and heat recovery. 

Basically it is an air flow system that has ducting to every room and pumps in clean new air and sucks out used air. Its something to do with our house having to be a highly insulated eco house and we need to keep breathing inside it. 

But anyway, we have been threading the pipes through the metal gaps in our floor joists, and taking the pipes down to a central area near the front door. 

Each roll is 25 metres long and it tries to tangle itself up as it is unrolled, but we got a better technique today and kept it rolled up until we needed to push it. 

I then noticed that there was a little hole in the pipe that happened as it often got stuck on little bits of metal sticking out of the joists. This was a disaster because the whole system has to be air tight and tested before it starts working. 

We were very upset and disappointed, and we thought that we would have to rip it all out and start again, and it would be very difficult to avoid it happening again.

After a couple of hours Darren managed to speak to the manufacturer and it turns out that the real pipe inside the outer corrugated one and as long as that one is okay then everything is fine.

A quick check and we seem to be fine after all. Massive relief all round. 

This is a lovely aerial shot from the Graven Hill drone taken last week, and our orange front door is glowing nicely. 

Day two of painting

Our staircase is fairly close to the boundary fence, so the wooden cladding has to be fire protected. We have spent £400 on five pots of fire retardant paint and I have the job of painting it on.

We have 26 square metres of cladding and I have split it in to four identical sized pieces and I am painting one section each day for four days. 

Four of the pots are the same, so I am using one pot per day of primer and then two coats of the fire retardent paint from the big pot. 

It sounds really boring just writing it, and it's certainly boring to do, but only two more days to go.

It will be worth it when it's done. 

Stud walling

Darren has spent the last couple of days putting up stud walls on the first floor. It is amazing how the whole layout is coming together and we can see how big the rooms are going to be. 

Sorry, possibly they all look a bit samey, but I recognise each room. 

Yet more insulation

I don't know why I thought a few weeks ago that we had finished putting in insulation, because the whole of the ground floor has a layer 120mm thick.

I have spent the last couple of days getting reacquainted with it, and have now finished two of the three rooms. 

This is the before.... 

and this is the after.... 

The difference is that the floor is quite a bit higher and currently very shiny. 

Great news - the plumber is starting the first fix next week and then the floor screeders are coming the week after that to put down the underfloor heating and then the concrete screed on top. 

Also, the electrician is coming round tomorrow to sort out the electric first fix. 

Pond

Today I tried to turn the free bath into a pond.

It took me ages to dig through the scaffold mat of tamped down stones and then through the clay underneath. Eventually I had made a deep enough hole and we put the bath in it.
I levelled it and then started to fill it with water.

Once it was full it looked just like a bath buried in the garden, and not yet a pond.
We had a bit of turf left over from the last project so I experimented with putting it round the edge.

It looked okay so I have put it all the way round and I hope that the grass will grow over the edge.
I am going to eventually put in a lot more plants, but for the time being my lovely metal stork will keep an eye on it.

I brought some oxygenating weed back from my tiny pond at home, so that is in the water now. If it goes well then in a couple of weeks time I will be able to bring my goldfish, Hilda and Mary to their new larger home.

New grass

I have made a real mistake today because I didn't take a before photo, so no one can imagine what it started off as.
However, I got a great present of five metres of grass from S and P and have used it in the garden.
I have laid it in the little area next to the greenhouse and am really pleased with the look. The walls are only temporary and will go on later.

I was also going to dig in the new pond but it was very windy, and a bank holiday Saturday, so we took most of the day off.

We have picked up a couple of plugs from Screwfix so at least it shouldn't leak when we do start it.