Playing Tetris...

Tetris floor

Having taken a week off to work on the house, we ploughed ahead with installing the floor insulation.

Because out house is situated up a hill, getting heavy loads to it is very difficult. We looked at a huge variety of flooring options, each with their pro and cons, but eventually we settled with a product called Tetris.

This used large reinforced concrete beams, and t-shaped insulation panels that slot in between, and then another flat panel on top of this. This clever design means we avoid having to manually lift into position 2500 individual concrete blocks, each weighing about 10kg each.

The insulation all slots into place, just like Tetris. Once you get into a pattern, you can install it fairly quickly. Once the insulation is in, we laid that Damp Proof Membrane, onto which the structural concrete will be poured, giving us out final structural floor.

Despite living in Scotland, we were fortunate enough to have mostly dry weather for this, and managed to get all 480m2 of insulation installed in three days.

We now need to shutter (basically build temporary walls out of wood to stop concrete getting out) the edged for the concrete pour, tape all the membrane joins and book the team to pour the concrete....oh, and pray for a few days of sunny weather!

Here are some pics of the install.

Our Grand Designs moment?

As you will know from our last update, our flooring started to go in using a telehandler.

There was a hitch with this as the plant hire company supplied the wrong winch jib that would give us the extra reach for the far away section of the water tank. This delayed work for the beams, but on the Friday, the team started to erect the steel frame.

As luck would have it, we had arranged to go to Southampton to visit friends, and although considered cancelling, decided to carry on as the team doing the job were very good.

We had a 7am flight, and at 11am, we were ensconsed in Cafe Lou Lous in Portsmouth, watching the site webcam when I spotted something not quite right...I had taken the laptop to ensure we had all the drawings, and quickly pulled them up. Yup - a bracket was not in the right place. Not the end of the world, but the more we  both looked at the webcam, the more worried we got. This couldn't be right...the building was no this high. If that's how high the lower part of the roof is, how high will the front be?

Now, one of the biggest downsides to our Water Tank is that the phone reception is garbage. We tried to phone Euan to tell him our concerns, but couldn't get a decent signal. We text him with the concerns, and he replied saying he was driving to Largs and would phone from there. In the mean time I thought I had identified the problem, and that hopefully it was not too serious, but I wasn 't an engineer, architect or draftsman! I phoned the engineers and asked them to go on site, and to be fair, they left 20 minutes later to inspect.

However, before he arrived, Euan had came to the same conclusion - the baseplates were on the wrong side. To try simplify - the walls the steel sits on are 1 - different thicknesses and 2 - different levels. With the square baseplates for the thick wall on the wrong side, it meant that the tallest steep pillar was much much higher than it should be - it also meant that even if the frame would connect (which it couldn't), the whole building would be pointing the wrong way!

By the end of the day, the draftsman had accepted that he got the drawings wrong and that Euan would take action to remediate - fortunately, this did not require a completed refabrication. This was that moment that Kevin McCloud just longs for on his builds, when it looks like it's going tits up and they then go on an advert break to keep the audience in suspense. Well, they could have milked this one, but thanks to the guys doing the job, everything was sorted in a few days.

By Friday night tho, I was frazzled...

However, by Tuesday, things were already looking up - the steel was fixed and erected - looks good!

 Also, the hire company finally sent the right jib attachment which allowed the final beams to go in.

The hire company delivered the new job on a rigid lorry...at the exact same time that Palletline turned up with our walls (more on a future post!).

In the middle of all this, we were scheduled for a visit from the Building Control Officer to pressure test our drainage pipes. This went well and we passed - with some suggestions on some changes to make.

By CoP Wednesday, all the lifting was done and Wednesday was spent with Craig and I starting to place the Tetris insulation panels into the beams. We got one section of the tank in and put the DPM on top.

Insulation and DPM laid in section 3. The lower part is our bedroom, with the walk-in wardrobe and shower room on the level above

All in all, a productive week off. I took my first 'holiday' for the year and can't wait to get back to work for a physical rest!

However,when you see pictures like this, you feel like you're getting somewhere, even if there is a hell of a lot still to be done!

Flooring is going in!

After what seems like an eternity, the flooring is starting to go in. Due to the very awkward nature of the site, we ended up going for a contract lift using a rotating telehandler, rather than a conventional crane option.

On Monday, Euan and his guys started preparing the ground for getting a telehandler up to the top of the site. Although it sounds really easy, the machine weighs 17tons! They created a track round the side of the plot and then a rubble runway for the machine to move along and sit on as it lifted the beams and steel work up.

The start of lifting was delayed as the hire company provided the wrong crane job for the handler, meaning it would not operate correctly. This has cost us two days, which is annoying as Craig and I have taken time off to get the flooring in. Anyway, here's a short time lapse showing the beams going in on day 1 of the lift.

and from inside the tank