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

Started the last gypsum project Sunday, 24-Oct-21 18:53:23 CEST

Monday, 18-Oct-21 21:52:09 CEST

Finished ventilation in the washing room

This week the ventilation pipes were finished in the washing room on the ground floor.

Monday 11 October

Today we worked from our old home as we usually do during a pandemic. I hope more people can do that. In the evening, we went to the new house, and there it was challenging to figure out what we should do. It had almost got dark when we arrived at the new house.

Where would the floor box be placed? For this, we had measured our dining table at our old house. The floor box needs to come below the legs on one side. Cardboard had to play stand-in for our real table. I drew squares where the legs would be on the cardboard. We moved the cardboard around until we found the place for the table. There I drew a cross with the text “floor box” but in Dutch.

That was the house task for tonight.

Tuesday 12 October

We worked from our old home today. At work, I have been struggling with a programming task since last week, and today I solved it. It was such a nice feeling.

After work, my wife suggested that we go to the new house first, to work there for a while, and then go home and eat dinner. We both kook dinner, but my wife is doing it more often, and she is quicker at preparing dinner. I was all in for her suggestion, so we went to the new house first.

It was a lovely October evening where the sun was illuminating all newly mounted window sills on the south side of the building. In the photo, these are the white stripes above and below all windows. We will paint the area around the windows and doors white at some point.

We are rarely using the pump anymore. It gives saltwater, and we cannot use that for our plants. I think of putting a tank in the ground below the pump and feeding it from the water pipe. That way, we can still use the pump, but it has good water. These are the kind of projects we can work on when the house is finished. Right now, things like these are purely theoretical.

The ventilation specialist had been to our house today and continued working on the washing room project. It is so much more work than anticipated.

He had created the drain for the shower drain. We will have a shower drain installed, but we will not use it to shower. This is to make it possible to install a shower in the washing room if that is necessary one day.

My wife continued on clearing the area around the water pond from weed. For me, it was time to make the extra ridge around the staircase on the first floor. When they mount the floor, this ridge is necessary because it holds back as a mold for the concrete they will be pouring here. Actually, it is anhydrite that they will be using. I was not wholly finished with this task since I still needed to do something where the ladder was standing. That is something I can look into tomorrow.

Tomorrow we will also go to the floor tiles company that we visited a couple of weeks ago. We will have a new look at the tiles.

Wednesday 13 October

Today I worked the first half of the day at our old home. Then we went to the new house, or instead, we went back to the shop where we ordered tiles on 22 September. We decided on tiles 60 by 60 centimeters over the whole ground floor except the washing room.

The tile is called “Lithos Tepuy-R Basalto.” It is a gray tile with a pattern that is not repeating itself. So every tile is unique. I hesitated a lot if I should have tiles in the workshop, but I decided that even if I am going to work with heavy things, that could potentially be dropped. We are not considering avoiding tiles in the kitchen, but I experienced an iron frying pan being dropped on the floor. So with that, I thought we would have tiles in the workshop as well. It is perfect to have tiles when working with hot things, such as welding.

In the washing room and the bathroom, we will have another tile. “Arcana Tempo Naos.” It is also 60 by 60 centimeters.

On the walls in the washing room and bathroom, we will have white tiles.

We also ordered all the rest of the bathroom things like a shower, shower wall, toilet seats, sinks, etc. The tiles will be installed by a tiler.

After the visit to the tile shop, I continued with the ridge of the staircase. I set up a better ladder so that it is possible to get to the first floor at all. I could place the ladder so that our ventilation specialist could still do his job.

The ridge is complete, meaning all the ToDo tasks of the first floor are completely done!

We were not that lucky that our ventilation specialist showed up today. He is a busy person.

After the staircase ridge, I cleared out some things from the workshop. At some point, the place should be completely empty.

My wife cleared weed around the pond, and I helped her a little bit as well. It was overcast but mild and not windy at all.

Our sheep have been grazing as well as they can, and they start to get a little bored with their current patch. There are still some to eat, though, so they have to be a little more patient. We notice they are bleating more. We start to get to learn each other, and we can see the patterns of how the sheep are. They are lazy and want to have the most delicious to eat while not finishing their current plate. It is a little like young children, really.

On the way home, we shopped groceries at a shop, and my wife bought allium bulbs for me. That is really nice!

Thursday 14 October

Today I worked from the office. I thought there would be more people in the office. There were more than on Fridays, and it was different people. I could concentrate very well, but it was frigid and not to my liking.

After work, we went to the new house. It is a bit odd because we finished many of our tasks. We still need to work on the gypsum in the washing room, but the pipes are not finished, so we cannot do that. I was curious to see how things had progressed. No electrician and no ventilation expert had been to our house today. It had been empty. I doubt we can start on the washing room this weekend.

We still have to work on downpipes and finishing applying kit on the windows and whatnot outside the house. Those were not tasks we could start on this evening. I decided to plant the allium bulbs my wife bought yesterday.

The package contained 3 sorts of allium bulbs, and there were 25 bulbs in total:

• Allium ‘Violet Beauty’
• Allium nigrum
• Allium ‘Miami’

Obviously, it is difficult to know what bulb is what plant when the plants are blooming, but I am okay with having only three to choose from. The bulbs had to be planted 10 centimeters into the ground and 10 centimeters apart. I gave the compost as well, so that will be really good. The plants will become 80 centimeters high.

When I had done this, I went helping my wife clear out weed around the pond. She collected an enormous heap of weed that we stacked up behind the sea container next to our heap of pallets. The weed stack was so high that I decided to climb up and compact it, which worked out well. I managed to squeeze it by one meter.

On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store, and I bought more bulbs. This time daffodil bulbs.

 

Friday 15 October

Today we worked from our old home, again again. No worries, I was at the office yesterday. This week I listened to Slam Dance Top 1000, and it was a great joy throughout. You can check out the radio channel online. Every Friday, they usually got a Dance MixMarathon, but it is a pop radio channel for the rest of the week. They are not climate change deniers at this radio station, so I like that a lot. At other radio stations in the Netherlands, they are financed by the fossil fuel industry, and the DJs are happily trying to undermine the security of the fatherland by having it flooded from the Atlantic due to a rapidly changing climate. They are sitting there making lousy jokes about the changing climate, IPCC, Greta Thunberg, immigrants, vegetarians, windmills, nitrogen, and science. They play prerecorded laughs in-between, and it is so jolly everything.

Anyhow, we went to the new house in the evening and did the same thing as yesterday. This evening I planted narcissus bulbs. We bought two kilos of these bulbs yesterday. The sort is called “Dutch Master,” so I suppose they look grand when planted in traditional Dutch soil. It is funny, though, because the bulbs originate from Great Britain, written in German. But that is not all, “Originates from” is written in Swedish. The name of the bulbs was Narcissus, “Dutch Master.”

My wife cleared weed from the area around the pond. It was a lovely evening.

 

Saturday 16 October

This morning I got my hair cut by my wife! I have had too long hair for too long now. There has been no time to cut my hair, but today it happened. It was a solid overcast this morning, but around lunchtime, the sun appeared for a while. It was lovely weather!

Our ventilation specialist still needs to finish activities in the washing room. Because of that, we cannot work on the ceiling and wall indoors, and we have done all the indoor tasks we can think of. Because of that, we started doing outdoor tasks remaining on the south wall.

I worked on mounting downpipes, and I finished the southeast pipe just before lunch. For the very last pipe on the southwest corner, it was questionable if the pipes we got left would be sufficient.

My wife worked on applying a silicone kit to places on the wall that needed it. It is not so that the wall needs to be absolutely water-tight. Instead, it is a question of debit and credit. It should ideally be easier for moisture to leave the wall rather than entering it. This is why the wall is ventilated. There is a gap between the planks and the inner wall. When the wall is heated, the air behind the planks will be warmed and rise. At the top of the wall, the air will be let out. This makes sure there is no moisture trapped in the wall. When it is scorching, this also keeps the heat out because the heat is constantly transported upwards and out. The kit that my wife is applying makes it more difficult for the rain to get into behind the planks. Just before lunch, her kit tube ran out.

The downpipes were delivered as part of the package we got from the builder. The total length of downpipes just barely matched the length we needed. If we needed more, I would need to go and get more of the pipes, which could be combined with buying more kit. After lunch, we first figured out if our downpipes would be sufficient. It turned out that we could put a little of the PVC pipe at the bottom, and for the rest, the zink pipes we got would be sufficient.

We went to the hardware store and got more silicone, and after that, we went to a second-hand shop. When we returned to our new home, the sun had gone away behind clouds again, too bad.

My wife continued on applying the kit, and I finished the downpipes project. The new pipes were all shiny! After a while, they will get a matte finish.

It is really great to finish the downpipes because they look nice and give the house a complete appearance.

We are getting there, the moment when we can take down the scaffold. It is not time for it just yet, but it will not take too long now.

Sunday 17 October

We had a somewhat slow morning this morning. Eventually, we got to the new house, and the tasks were that my wife would apply more kit and paint the kit, and I had decided to work on the problem of the curling sheet below the solar panels on the roof.

In a way, it is not our problem; the people delivering the house left it curling. I decided to fix the issue myself because I think I can do it, but not only that, I think I can do it better. The latter needs to be proven, obviously.

I had the idea of putting metal brackets holding the sheet of corrugated aluminum down. I made these brackets and screwed them onto the wood below. The bracket then sticks out below the corrugated aluminum and then bent back on top of the aluminum. If needed, I can add a horizontal stripe, but I will wait to do that. For now, I mounted these vertical brackets. Then I will apply adhesives to keep the sheets glued down.

In the afternoon, our ventilation specialist arrived. He finished the activities in the washing room! This is so fantastic! Now we can start working on the ceiling and wall in the washing room. We got the days until 1 November to do this. That is 14 days. I will need to take whole days off to finish the ceiling. Perhaps it is sufficient with five days, including the weekends. I need to figure out how this will fit into the big picture at the beginning of next week.

We moved the sheep to a new area this afternoon, to the west and north side of the plot. It was a lot of work, but they did not slip out.

This concludes this week.