Finished the first floor Sunday, 26-Sep-21 21:38:17 CEST

Finished the window sills Monday, 11-Oct-21 21:14:44 CEST

Sunday, 03-Oct-21 21:33:15 CEST

Removed the temporary stairs

This week we finished the lining of windows and doors. Removed the temporary stairs.

Monday 27 September

After several weeks of focused work, we how now come to a new phase. We still need to have all floors cleared by the end of October, but it feels like this is now possible. Stacks of gypsum still need to be moved out, but it would be a pity to start doing that while we have smaller tasks involving gypsum. Moving things out and then back in again would be annoying. There are smaller plates of gypsum that still need to be mounted around windows and doors. That is a task my wife will work on.

I will start work on the window sills again.

Tuesday 28 September

Today I went to the new house to do office work. I decided to record a movie during a break where I walked through the house presenting the various rooms. I think it can be challenging to follow the blog when I am talking about the cardinal directions. I filmed with my mobile phone's selfie camera, and It is taking photos mirrored. I don't see the point of that. It was not so that I had a proper script and am not good at following scripts, so that did not matter. I managed to film the walkthrough without too many ah, oh. So that is what it is. In the evenings, I started to process the film to see if I could improve it. I managed to flip it back to avoid the mirroring. I could also stabilize the picture.

In the evening, my wife was happily working on the window linings. I started up the window sills project, dragging my feet behind me.

Tonight I got myself together and concluded I need to have proper light to work in the evenings. So I fixed that! Until now I worked on the sills outside, but I decided to move the work into the workshop room. Tonight I got the workbench ready for the sills. I got the material for the sills, and I even started working on one when it was time to go home.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, and we got a full day off, so I will continue to work on the sills tomorrow.

Wednesday 29 September

Today was the last full day off Wednesday of September. It was back in August I arranged holidays to be able to work on the house. This worked out well. It looks like we will be ready on time with or without the washing room on the first floor.

Today the forecast was bleak regarding rain. It was going to rain a lot today. I was going to prevail and work on window sills indoors, and if that was not possible, I could work on taking down the scaffold in our staircase.

I started on a window sill; it even got the code "I" on my scheme of window sills I have to make. When I had come so far that I had to go out to measure part of it, I concluded it was raining as they had predicted, and I was not feeling like going outside climbing the scaffold in the rain.

There was the other task of removing the scaffold in our staircase. I started on this. The motor of the electric hoist is a hefty object. I tried to slide it off its beam, but that did not work out. I had to unscrew it while holding it. This is high up in the staircase, 7 meters from the ground. It succeeded. I got the machine off the holder. Now I had to get it down to the floor. I decided to put it in straps and lower it in the straps. That was also working out pleasantly.

Then we had lunch, and exactly the moment when we were finished with the lunch, our plumber came driving along the road.

He had a helper with him today. They started working on the last part of the ventilation system to finish the ceiling and wall in the washing room.

They did some of the work at the bottom of the staircase, and it was not feeling right for me to put down the scaffold right above their heads. I decided to stop doing that. I was running out of options of things to do. It was not raining all the time, but the scaffold outside was not getting dry enough in between the showers.

Luckily I could get a task helping my wife with the window lining. She cut the gypsum for the lining, and I mounted them in the windows. We could combine this work with the plumber and his helper not being in the way of each other. That was great. We finished almost all window linings, except the window in the washing room.

There came more pipes in the ceiling of the washing room. The plumber did not finish today but was coming back tomorrow to continue working on the ventilation system. If the ventilation system is finished tomorrow evening, we can start isolating and building the ceiling this coming weekend.

Either that or take down the scaffold and perhaps finish a window sill?

Thursday 30 September

We worked from our old home today. It was a bit chilly today, but we still had the heating turned off in our old house for the summer. In the afternoon we turned on the heating system. That was nice. It will be great when we get the heating system in the new house as well.

After work, we went to the new house to look after the sheep and move the project forward.

I think the plumber said he planned to be back tomorrow, but that had not happened. I was a bit disappointed about that, but I suppose I have to be glad he showed up doing some of the work yesterday.

My wife continued working on lining things. Each of the walls ends in the kitchen got a gypsum strip tonight.

I continued on taking down the scaffold. This was frustrating because the parts of the scaffold were interlocked. We had made it so that it had one foot on the first floor instead of one on the ground floor so that the ventilation system could be moved around above the hanging scaffold.

Now we had the new ventilation box below the stairs. It is difficult to remove the stairs with the new precious machine standing right there. Besides that, we can still put up small pieces of gypsum on the first floor. The issue with the gypsum project is that we are running out of screws, so we need to get more screws as well.

Saturday 2 October

Yesterday I worked from the office. We were very few in the office today. In the evening, we went to our sheep, gave them their food supplement. While they were still eating it, we left the new house, went to our old home, and started heating our own food supplement in the oven. I was hungry.

This morning we went to the new house to work on it again. We went to the new house via a hardware store to pick up a bucket of gypsum screws. It was a lovely October morning at the new house.

Today my wife continued covering the thin stripes of the surface around the doors in the hall on the first floor. This was a tedious task since each stripe was no more than eight centimeters wide.

I worked on the window sills. Today I was feeling I really worked on the sills for the first time. The forecast had predicted dry weather all the way until the afternoon, so I had plenty of time to work on window sills.

Our son worked on applying more woodcuts on the path along the south side of the house. While he was working on this, a neighbor came to us. He came to explicitly thank my son for clearing the area along the border of his plot. My son was not prepared for receiving gratitudes, so he was a little stunned at first. Then my neighbor said that it was not only done, but it was also very well done.

I think doing precision work is a thing that runs in the family. When the builder came to us, they had never seen anything like how we applied the isolation, so they took photos. Of course, we can be proud, but there is a downside to precision. It takes time.

After some time, my son helped my wife with the stripes.

The window sills are also tedious. I did a couple of the sills today. It was the first time I walked the planks of the scaffold for several months. There was one place where I had applied foam to a corner of a window months ago (5 June), but the foam still had to be cut and painted. So I did this. When doing that, I noticed we had brushes that still had to be taken care of, so I did that as well. The paint needs to dry, and then I can apply another layer. Let us hope this will not happen in another 5 months. That would be awful.

In the afternoon, we had booked some progress both on the gypsum lining of doors and the window sills, but it did not feel so fantastic for me. The tedious work is a bit annoying, really.

Before we went to our old home, we harvested some Belle de Boskoop apples. Or rather, we harvested one and picked up more from the ground that had fallen by themselves. It is October now, so it should theoretically be the correct time to start harvesting this apple. At home, I cooked dinner, and my wife made an apple pie. It was delicious, although my wife concluded that we could leave the apples on the tree for at least another week.

Sunday 3 October

Yikes, it will rain most of the day. That means I will continue removing the scaffold in the staircase instead of working on window sills. The good thing today though, is that there is no plumber working at the bottom of the scaffold.

While my wife and son worked on the lining of doors on the first floor, I worked on the scaffold. I figured out that I had to make the scaffold fully supported at the base before removing the top. The ventilation unit was removed so that I could work freely at the base of the scaffold. Where the machine had been standing, I created a support for the scaffold. With the support in place, I could start removing the top.

I must say that the hall looks already majestic like this. This is a nifty wall that goes straight to the top of the building.

The lining work progressed nicely. Removed everything from the first floor that my wife did not need for the lining work.

After lunch, there was only the lining in the hall wall and the door opening above the bathroom. I helped her a little bit with that, and as a result, the lining work was finished.

We had a break where we sat down and had a cup of tea and apple pie from the day before. After the break, we took down the rest of the scaffold with the temporary staircase. We placed the parts in the workshop as long as it was raining. We used a lot of scaffold stuff for the staircase. This is the Crab 48 scaffold system. It is originally a French scaffold, but it is also made in China.

We can not easily reach the first floor, but that does not matter because we have nothing there. It is totally ready for the floor heating. Well, there are two tiny little things:

1. There should be an edge installed along with the opening of the staircase.
2. The bottom of the west wall of the staircase still has a gap. I had missed that when working on wall gaps.

As I can see it, we only have to clear out the ground floor for the rest. Our plumber can finish the work in the washing room on time, but that does not matter so much. He got stuff we will need to move out, but I think that can be done.

The only thing I can be a little worried about is that we might run out of space in the sea container, but I think it will be fine.

With no stairs in the staircase, the wall towards the ceiling is impressive. Today, my wife asked me how we will plaster the wall and ceiling in the future when we have permanent stairs and a ventilation machine standing there?

I don't have all answers, but I think we will need to have a sturdy staircase to build the scaffold on top of it.

We have a similar situation in the rooms on the first floor. If we get a PVC floor that cannot handle the weight of a scaffold, then we can not reach the ceiling. Easy as that. The floor of the first floor will have that as one of the requirements.

When we had removed the scaffold, we carried out all the pieces to the Crab 48 stack on the north side. Since we are the only people in the Netherlands with such a scaffold, it is relatively safe from theft when it is lying there. Besides, we keep essential parts of the scaffold in the container, so it is pointless to steal the scaffold. Besides, it is hard work to steal a steel scaffold. You need to be a powerful and persistent, and dumb thief to steal the only incomplete Crab 48 scaffold in the Netherlands. It can still happen, but we do it like this for now.

To round off the day, we decided to potter around in the garden for a while. It had stopped raining, and it was a pleasant temperature outside. We walked around for a while in our garden and picked weed here and there. My wife ordered a book about creating a fence with the help of living bushes and trees. We talked about the book and the trees we have and how we think they will be growing. I have no idea, really. It would be nice with trees that were big enough so that they are resilient to the sheep. That way, the sheep could be gracing below the threes. That will be awesome.

I am pleased with the work we have done on the new house this week. It is such a nice feeling to have something finished. The first floor is now really finished and ready for floor heating. I know I still need the border towards the staircase, but that is all.