Finished the ceiling of the ground floor Sunday, 19-Sep-21 20:59:41 CEST

Removed the temporary stairs Sunday, 03-Oct-21 21:33:15 CEST

Sunday, 26-Sep-21 21:38:17 CEST

Finished the first floor

This week the first floor became ready for floor heating.

Monday 20 September

New week with new possibilities! Today we worked from our old home, nothing new there. In the evening we went to our new house. It was a sunny evening, all looked beautiful, but we only shortly greeted our sheep and went inside to continue work where we left yesterday.

My wife put up gypsum in the windows on the first floor, and I continued filling up the gap at the bottom of the walls. This evening I worked in the kitchen.

There were water pipes here that I decided to fasten with screws before filling up the gap. I did this because I don't want pipes to shake around and make noise when using water. It was actually tedious to get the pipes right.

When I was happy with the pipes, I filled the space around the pipes with styrofoam blocks. Yesterday we had our vacuum cleaner with us and connected to the table saw. This evening we forgot to bring it so that I had to saw the styrofoam without collecting the chips. It was okay initially, but for every plate sawed, it became dustier and dustier around the table saw.

I managed to finish the gap in the kitchen without a dust disaster, and it looks nice to see the wall without the gap.

Tuesday 21 September

Tonight I finished filling the gap at the bottom of the walls. This evening we remembered to bring the vacuum cleaner. With the finished gap, an item of our to-do list has been finished; that is great!

My wife finished setting up the window lining on the first floor. This is great because that means we can work on moving down a couple of multiplex plates from the first floor, and with that, we are ready to put out the floorboards. I have no idea how long time it will take to fill the first floor with floorboards.

We also have other tasks to do tomorrow, such as driving our trailer to the recycle center and emptying it. That way, we can continue to fill it with scrap gypsum plates, etc.

Wednesday 22 September

Today both of us had a whole day off for working only in the new house. We had planned to make a road trip today to get rid of scrap gypsum and find out what we want to have on our floor. Right after we left our old house, we were already on the highway when I realized I had not brought with me my laptop. That meant that if the same thing were to happen today, like last Wednesday, I would not be able to log into work and fix things. It was a bit troublesome feeling. On the other hand, I had a day off. Nevertheless, I decided to gamble on it and not to return and pick up the forgotten laptop.

The trailer was pretty packed! I connected it to our car, and we did the regular check of the lights as you ought to do. One light did not work! I tried to replace it, but it still did not work. I wiggled on the cables and scraped contacts to see if any contact was made, but it still did not work.

This was when I realized we had the trailer among the sheep, and one of our girls likes to chew on cables! Hannah likes shoestrings and cables. We have seen several instances of this: My son was with the sheep, listening to audiobooks, and sure enough, Hannah chewed his headphone cable. My wife has been with the sheep and said that Hannah is undoing her shoelace. This has to be the problem.

The trailer was packed, and it was not the right moment to fix the cable, so we decided to drive with the trailer to the recycling station anyway. The left direction indicator was not working, and we had to take many rights turns to get there, and not so many left turns, so that was okay.

Our nearest recycling center is a fancy place. We had to wait for our turn.

At the entrance, there was a sign, but half of the sign had been broken off. The new text said in Dutch, "Is guarded, deocameras." They guard the place with deodorant cameras! I suppose the recycling business can bring up some lousy odor, so it is not bad at all they guard the place with deodorant cameras. Fancy!

We got to the place where they collected gypsum and started to unload our trailer. When we started, there were three empty buckets. When we were done unloading, we had put gypsum in all three buckets. I know you may not take photos here, but I did it discreetly, so no one complained. This is a recycling station, not the Van Gogh museum.

Throwing away trash was a nice feeling. I can recommend throwing away trash; it feels good. When the trailer was empty, we went to our new home and parked the trailer. Then we started on our next mission for today: Finding tiles for the floor. It worked pretty easy, actually. We had already decided on something gray. Preferably with some kind of pattern. We walked into the shop, and quite early on, we found these tiles. They had some kind of pattern in them with a tint of "rust." We will have that laid out for the floors on the ground floor everywhere except the workshop. In the workshop, there will be a PVC floor. On the first floor, only the bathroom will have gray tiles. The rest will have PVC. The bathroom walls on both floors will have white tiles.

We also ordered sinks and other bathroom equipment at this shop.

It will be interesting to have these placed in the house, well on time. That latter part is the most essential, I suppose. The shop could deliver the tiles we had decided on from their warehouse, so that was good.

When we were done with the tiles, we went to a shop selling second-hand building material. There we found a lot of doors that could be nice to have. We will need to find the measurements of our door openings to see what we can put into the new house.

We also tried to find second-hand sinks, but that did not work out well. We decided that the sinks we had already ordered at the first shop were better.

Then we went to our new home again and started working on the activities to get the house finished. We moved out a couple of multiplex plates to the container. We moved more rests of gypsum to the ground floor. The floor is getting really empty now.

I started to put out the isolation floorboards. I just put out whole boards. We will also need to cut boards to totally fill up the floor. That will be something we are starting to work on tomorrow evening already.

Sometimes, perhaps already this weekend, I will put the trailer on the side, so I get access to the cables under the trailer, and then I will find the problem with the light. It is better to solve this ASAP because I want to fill it up with the next load to the recycling center. It is a tiny trailer, so it is possible to put it on the side. Our other trailer is too heavy to do such a thing.

Since we finished a couple of things, it is nice to revisit our ToDo list from 29 August:

Section one

Hobby room on the first floor:

• Beams in the ceiling.
• Isolation of the ceiling.
• Gypsum plates on the ceiling.

Staircase hall and utility cupboard on the first floor:

• Gypsum on the east wall.
• (Re)isolate the ceiling.
• Gypsum on the ceiling.
• 18 millimeters thick multiplex for mounting floor heating distributors.

First-floor final preparations before floor heating:

• Empty all rooms.
• Apply 20-millimeter thick fibreboards.
• Remove temporary stairs and scaffold.
• Edge towards the staircase.

Groundfloor all rooms:

Section two

• Styrofoam along the bottom edge of the walls.

Ground floor hall:

• Beams in the east wall.
• Gypsum on the east wall in the hall.
• Beams in the ceiling.
• Gypsum plates in the ceiling.

Workshop ground floor:

• Gypsum on the east wall.
• Beams in the ceiling in the workshop.
• Gypsum in the ceiling.

Bathroom on the ground floor

• Finalize the ventilation (ventilation specialist).
• Gypsum on the south wall.
• Beams in the ceiling.
• Gypsum in the ceiling.

Livingroom

More isolation material in the ceiling.

I think we will finish the fiberboards on the first floor this weekend. This ToDo list makes it look like we are almost finished with the fiberboards, but that is not true. We have a lot of spare gypsum plates on the ground floor. That needs to be used or moved out. I think we can make a new ToDo list after this weekend that better reflects what we need to do to meet the deadline of the floors.

Thursday 23 September

Today it was solid overcast the whole day. It feels like autumn is well underway. The last tiny bit of forgotten summer is now consumed. From here on, it is about orange leaves, evenings becoming darker at an ever quicker pace. On the one hand, it is nice when it is dry, but there has been no rain for a while, so it starts to be about time with some precipitation.

Tonight we went to the new house and worked on the floorboards. It went quicker and easier than I had anticipated. We finished the hobby room. Then for the rest, almost all rooms had full-size boards laid out as many as possible. All rooms except the southeast bedroom because that is the room where the floorboards were stacked up. We will do that room as the very last.

From here on, we will have smaller pieces to fit in here and there. It will be a puzzle to get the pieces in. Luckily, we got plenty of boards. It is not like much other material the builder delivered to us: Just barely enough to finish the task.

It is a dusty work sawing these plates. It was so dark I had to put up our lamps, and I could see the dust swirling around in the light. It cannot be healthy to breathe in all the particles, but it is just temporary. I cannot see any way to do this differently, in a way, so we don't generate dust. Luckily it is a quick job, and when done, we can do less dusty tasks in the house.

Friday 24 September

Today I went to the office to work. The transformation was total compared with earlier Fridays. There were real people in the office, and there were many of them. Many feelings were swirling around my head, and one of the feelings was, "are all these people vaccinated?" It is all nice and well with an informal small talk with someone until you realize it is an anti-vaxxer. No, I don't think I have any colleague being a full-blown anti-vaxxer. That would be truly awful.

People were happy to see me, I suppose, and I got the question several times, "how is it going with the house?" and it is a really complicated question to answer. I refrained from telling them to read my blog; that would not feel alright. So I started talking about gypsum plates and isolation material, and whatnot. It is not feeling like it is really landing how it is to build a house.

It was good to get together and see each other on the one hand. I don't feel like I need to meet all these people every day. We got phones, email, chat, video conferencing, and that works very well. It is not so that the pandemic is over yet. The reproduction number in the Netherlands is below 1 for a couple of days. That means that there are fewer and fewer being infected in the Netherlands right now. It is not to say the pandemic is over.

If all of us who came to the office today get sick now, it would be a terrible thing. Time will tell.

After work, my wife and I went to the new house to work on the floorboards on the first floor. It went really well. We were able to finish two bedrooms. The south hall is almost done as well as the bathroom.

We started measuring a really complex plate with cutouts for doors and various other things, but instead of pursuing that, we stopped for the day. It is also essential to identify when something is too complex or not suitable to do a complex task. At the end of the workweek, the end of the day is not the freshest moment, so we called it off right before we started to cut the plate.

This is great, though, because we just have a tiny part of floorboards left to finish. When that is done, we just need to take down the scaffold in the staircase, and then the first floor is completed.

Saturday 25 September

It was weird weather today because there was no wind at all, warm and totally overcast. It stayed overcast the entire day. It was not until the evening that we got some rays of the sun.

We finished the first floor just before lunch! We started with the complex plate, and it went fine.

We need to take down the scaffold in the staircase to lay down the last two boards, but we are done with the first floor for the rest. It feels so great! Tomorrow and Tuesday, we get visitors, so it is better to keep the stairs, but I suppose we can remove the scaffold next weekend.

Next, I decided to look at our tiny trailer. It has a hood making it the perfect place to fill with things we need to throw away. We can have it standing for several weeks, gradually filling it with the stuff we need to bring to the recycle station. It turned out so that the problem with the light was due to the plug. One cable had got loose.

Obviously, this means I have to take back my accusation that our sheep have been chewing on the cables of the trailer. That was not true. On the other hand, it is not good to have the trailer with the sheep anyway.

 

The screws holding the cables were not able to tighten the cable on their own. The screw had a flat bottom, and the cable fit inside the cavity below the screw no matter how hard I screwed the screw. The solution was to put an extra piece of the cable into that cavity so that the screw had something left to tighten the cable. It is so lovely when it is that simple!

With the first floor finished, I started to clear up the mess in the container to fill it with things we currently got in the new house. I had the idea to build a shelf of the scaffold we had on the first floor, but without the wheels. That way, we can fill up the container more efficiently and at the same time have access to the stuff we move in there. The container started to look really shiny after I got the shelf in place. There is plenty of room for stuff on this shelf. The best thing about it is that it can expand several meters.

My wife was busy putting up window lining on the ground floor as well. It looks so nice when that is done. The rooms start to look so polished with the window lining. The upper parts of the windows still need to be done, but that will be finished by the following week.

When the shelf was standing in the container, we moved out the remaining floorboards into the container. I am concerned about the amount of stuff we need to put there. Preferably the things should be put in the container so that when we need to take them out again, that should be possible without changing the stacking order completely. I actually have no idea what we will use the remaining floorboards for. Right now, we just stove them away, and later we will think about that.

The ventilation specialist has still not finished the ventilation pipes in the ceiling of the washing room. He did not come to us this week. We talked about what impact his work has on our planning. There is still time for him to come finishing the piping before the deadline of the floor. We have less and less time to put the walls together after him, though. We can still try, but I am not sure if it will succeed. If I build the bottom of the last wall so that the floor people and our ventilation specialist can do their work, all should be fine.

As it is now when the window lining is finished on the ground floor, then we can start discarding the rest pieces of the gypsum plates. We put them in the small trailer with the newly repaired lights. Then we got whole gypsum plates left as well. We move those into the container.

You notice I am trying to figure out where everything will fit in space and time. It is not long now until I can go out and continue working on the outside of the house.

On the way home from the new house, I had to stop and take a photo of the road. This is how the roads look like in this area. I am glad I stopped and took the photo because a moment like that passes quickly, and with a photo, it is easier to remember and cherish memories like these. It had been overcast the entire day, and only a few moments before we went home, it cleared up a little bit, and this coincided with the sunset, so this was extra special.

Obviously, I am playing with the central vanishing point lying on the horizon, and the horizon is placed almost perfectly in the middle. Most composition aficionados cannot have horizons in the middle, which is perfectly fine in this image. I am deliberately breaking the diagonal composition rule because it is not made for left-handed people, and I don't like that. The image becomes playful and peaceful at the same time. The peaceful landscape in the evening with the sun projecting through the leaves of the threes and the road. Where is it going? Tastefully breaking the rules makes it even more enjoyable. What will this photographer do next?

Sunday 26 September

Today it was less cloudy. It started off overcast, but as the day progressed, it became lovely weather. I would almost say an extra summer day.

We came to the new house and had decided to move our sheep to a new area. It is so difficult to explain what we are doing when we move the sheep. Because of that, I had decided to make a timelapse of the process. I placed my camera on a tripod looking over the field in front of the house. The camera had stopped at image 100. That was not my intention. That was too bad because we had some real action this morning!

As we usually do, we first made a smaller inner area around the sheep. Then we remove the outer fence, put it elsewhere, and then move the sheep to the new area.

We were busy assembling the nets of the new area when suddenly we discovered the sheep grazing at the neighbors on the other side of the road. I went to them and grabbed Selma by the neck, but she was not pleased with that treatment. She tried to get away from my grip. I got her off the lawn of the neighbor onto the dirt road. At the road, I could not get her going towards the home fence so quickly. Although I can grab the fur very well, they don't like being treated like that. While I did this, my wife got a bucket of food supplements, and Selma saw my wife at a distance and wanted to go to her; I let her loose, and she and the two other sisters followed Selma running towards my wife, perhaps 60 meters, away from that awful man

My wife opened the newly created fence area, and they happily went inside because there was the friendly "mom" with food supplement, and it was the safe home area. The whole situation was over in less than two minutes. Not a single car had passed while this happened. One minute later, a neighbor came biking along the road.

There are a couple of things we learned from this. The temporary net has to be electrified going forward. It is also essential to fasten the temporary fence as well as possible because when we are busy doing other things, we cannot look after the sheep. Either this or someone needs to keep an eye on them while setting up the new area. We will need to do something because having them outside the fence is not a good option. I did not like this at all.

When the new fence was sorted, we checked the camera to see how the sheep went to the neighbor, and that was when we discovered that it had missed the whole episode. That was annoying.

With all this excitement behind us, it was time to prepare for our visitors to arrive, and they came well on time. It was nice to meet them, we had tea and a cookie and talked about all sorts of things. We also had a walk in the neighborhood.

When the visitors had left, it was about time to start work on the new house. It was not an exceptionally efficient day from the perspective of the house.

The plan from here on is that my wife continues on the window lining. I will start making the window sills. The last time I worked on the window sills was 6 June. A few days after working on the sills, we decided to get the interior ready for the floors.

I set up a workbench for hammering the sills, found the old plans and the material for the sills. When I had most of the pieces together, we decided to wind down this day. Next time I will pick up the sills again. I can work on that while my wife works on the window lining. When she is done with that, we can get out more stuff from the new house.

Before going to our old home, we harvested two beetroots, beans, and three corns. My wife incorporated this into our meal this evening. That was delicious.

 

The harvest of vegetables concludes this week at our new house. It has been great to reach the target on time. We are not there yet, but we feel we are on track to prepare everything before the floor deadline.