Export YouTube Music Playlist to Excel using Word Monday, 15-Nov-21 21:22:54 CET

Finished the foundation of the heat pump Sunday, 28-Nov-21 21:31:48 CET

Sunday, 21-Nov-21 21:19:10 CET

We received the rest of the tiles

This week we received all tiles, we got most of the lamps working, the tiler is working on the wet rooms.

Monday 15 November

Our tiler had a start at the bathroom on the first floor. We arrive in the evening when it is almost dark, so it is not easy to show, but I think you get an impression of how it might look. I am thrilled to see the floor emerge like this.

We got the toilet to work, and the sheep got their food supplement. That was the progress in the house for today.

In the evening, I was busy with another blog post about exporting the playlist from YouTube Music into an Excel sheet. Great fun.

Tuesday 16 November

It is already Tuesday, and we had a full day of work. Originally the plan was to have a half-day off and go to our daughter and attend her bachelor's diploma award. That plan was canceled due to Corona. Today we could log in via Zoom to have a look. It was not that exciting, really. The sound was awful. It had been more fun being there with her. I am pleased about this milestone in her life. The photo was taken off my screen when she got the diploma, so it is a little fuzzy, but this is it!

After work, we went to the new house. The tiler had continued working on the floor in the bathroom on the first floor. He created the slope down to the drain where the shower will be.

Today we also had the electrician in the house, and he delivered electricity to the outlets in the ceiling today.

We could turn on the light for the first time! We had been longing for this moment since the end of last year.

We also got the electric light above the workshop door installed.

Things are coming together now. It feels like it is progressing quicker than it has done for many months.

Wednesday 17 November

Today our kitchen was finished! Just kidding. But we got electricity in the kitchen. Our electrician had this spare electric stovetop that we could lend.

We don't think we will fully use this stovetop until the floor heating is installed and our bedroom is plastered and painted. But it is good to have it working.

It was beautiful weather this afternoon. Here is the first image of the house with red planks without the scaffold on the north and west side. You can see the heaps of scaffold material lying waiting for being moved into the container.

I worked on moving in scaffold parts into the container. I finished all small ledgers and all long pillars. Another day I will continue on this task.

We bought lamps to install, with regular E27 fittings. It was not clear if our electrician would deliver the fittings or if those were for our account. He talked about special fittings for halogen lamps, but I am not interested in that kind of lamp. I want to buy E27 lamps. After we figured out the misunderstanding, he told us that he would get us that kind of fittings.

Things are coming together, but we still need to be patient.

The tiler started working on the floor in the washing room downstairs. To do that, he had to remove the toilet. He had been without a toilet the whole day. He told me that tomorrow the toilet can be installed again.

We were told that the tiles that will come from Spain will be delivered tomorrow. That will be so nice. I am a little curious about when they will be delivered and how I will receive them. That will be figured out tomorrow.

Thursday 18 November

Today I worked from the new house. We expected a new delivery of the delayed tiles, and it is good to be present when a big heavy truck is about to deliver things to you.

Since our tiler was busy downstairs at the washing room, I decided to set up my workplace as far away as possible in the hobby room on the first floor. We still have no doors inside the house, so I cannot shield myself from noise. Luckily the tiler did the noisiest stuff outside. This worked out really pleasant.

This worked out very well. Today I was planning for a meeting with my boss at the office tomorrow. It was nice to have the empty room around me. I could concentrate very well.

Around noon the truck came driving.

	You can see the truck from a distance. It is red.
	The truck driver, Ronald, got the back of the truck straight onto our driveway.
	The driver reversed all the way to the entrance of the workshop.
	Here we are looking into the truck. There are two packages of 600 kilos each.
	Here the driver unloaded one package. Then he drives the truck a little bit forward to make room for unloading the next package.
	He is finished. This went a little smoother than last time.
	1200 kilos of tiles.
	These tiles are gray with a random pattern in them.

 

I could have gone to our old home right after the tiles were delivered, but I stayed until it got dark and my workday was over. At some point, I had to get some lighting for my workplace.

After work, I gave the sheep their food supplement.

The ventilation specialist arrived in the afternoon to prepare some things for tomorrow. Actually, our ventilation specialist hired the tiler to work in our house, a helping hand, another freelance plumber, and whatnot. The tiler tiled while the other two moved in the tiles of the first delivery. Then all of us had a cup of coffee. They planned to move in the tiles of today's delivery tomorrow. We will see. I will go to my office tomorrow.

Friday 19 November

Today I went to the office. I am hesitant about going there because we are seeing a dramatic increase in Corona cases in the Netherlands right now. The meeting went well, so that was good. In the evening we went to the new house. The plumber had put back the toilet so that we could use it this weekend. Highly appreciated.

The electrician had mounted fittings almost everywhere in the house and also provided the fittings with lamps. There was light in the house!

On Monday, he will continue finalizing the light. We will have light in the bathroom on the first floor on Monday.

It fills me with great joy that we can see progress in the house, especially without doing all the hard work ourselves.

First, the house was an abstract construction on my computer. We made the abstract idea into reality step by step, but it has been a lot of work, and there is still a lot of work to do. It will be enormously satisfying when we can turn on the heat in the house.

Tonight we discovered that the bathroom on the first floor had the west wall provided with white tiles. This is going well.

Here is the south hall on the ground floor in the evening with the lamps on. At the end of the hall is the shower wall of mat glass still in its packaging.

We also discovered a problem. The washbasins delivered today were not the ones we ordered. We will need to have them exchanged for the basins we ordered.

Other than that, all things are fine, and this was another productive day in the house.

Well, there was one issue, someone had been driving off-road again on our farmland. I will need to put up a barrier between our driveway and the farmland. I cannot have anyone driving around in our grass without my consent.

One of our electric heaters was broken, and the other stopped working. I found overheating protection on one of the heaters that I could deactivate to make the heater work again. This is good because this way we can make the house warm. It will be needed until we get the heating installed in the house.

Saturday 20 November

It was a never-ending drizzly day today. My wife worked on plastering walls on the first floor, especially our bedroom. My son and I were moving in the scaffold parts into the container. That was a tedious job, but we got all of the parts into the container.

For lunch, we boiled eggs. That is the luxury this kitchen can provide us with at this stage. It is so much fun that things start to work as they are supposed to.

I moved in the water gauge for the season. This has to be done because if there is water in it when it is freezing, it will break. Ice expands, and that will break the water gauge. That means I will not measure any rain from here on until next year.

Today, I also cleaned up the north side of the house where the heat pump's outdoor unit will be placed. Until today we had the sheep exactly there, and our heating specialist will need access to the place to install the pump. It is unclear to me exactly when he is coming and how the work will be done.

I moved the sheep fence as part of this work. When I did that, I could not get the electric fence to work again. I had to crawl under the house through the hatch to see what was going on. I had a little too many cables running, so I got that fixed. I think the issue was a failing extension of the cable. I got the electric fence to work again.

On 3 August we got the missing electricity outlet installed in the hall on the first floor. We did not get the data I had asked for, so I installed that myself on 4 August. The only issue was that I could not find a complete nice tube to run from the outlet all the way to the final destination. I had to put tube scrap pieces together that the electrician had left in a scrap pile. Yesterday our electrician said he could not run the cable through the tube because he got stuck with the runner, probably at a joint. My wife and I experimented with the runner, and we succeeded! We succeeded because my wife could poke the runner from one end, and at the same time, I could bend the pipe at the joints so that the runner came past these points.

Sunday 21 November 2021

Already in the morning, it looked sunny. The forecast said it was going to rain the whole day. I did not know what to make of it but decided we would try to ignore the forecast. That turned out to be a wise decision because we only had a couple of short showers in between for the rest, a chilly but sunny day.

My plan for today was to continue preparing for the outdoor heat pump unit. I have seen how the neighbors prepared for their unit. I think I might be able to do a similar thing here.

The first step was to find the pipes for the heat pump that Gijs put in place on 4 June 2020. I found them! Then I dug a trench 5 meters out to where I would like the outdoor unit placed. I tried to keep the depth similar to the heat pump pipes coming out from the house.

The place of the heat pump is exactly the same place where we had the gray plates stored. You see them on many photos I made of when we worked on the north side of the house's planks in January 2021. Later we got our sheep, and they enjoyed lying on the gray plates. We cleaned them from sheep poo, but I can tell you that some of the plates are dark grey while others have the original light grey color. This is because of the poo.

Actually, I am not sure how the heating system will be. The heat pump is probably the outdoor unit. Inside the house, we only got water tanks and that kind of thing. The details will be more apparent when Gijs arrives with the stuff and explains what is what.

Next up were the preparations for the platform where the unit will be. I decided on a rectangle of one by two meters. My son helped me dig today, and I was really happy for his help. We brought the soil from the platform to the area where we had our wood ships heap.

We got the wood chips on 1 February 2021, and I had no idea they would compact the ground so much that it would make a dent into the ground. Now we filled up that hole with the soil from the platform of the heat pump.

Soil remembers things. Especially when it has been abused. When I dug the trench, there were parts of the soil that was compact. That has to do with the machines preparing for the building of our house. Until now, I thought this part of the land was shadowed by the house, making it difficult to grow grass here. Now I realize that the house's foundation is dug out with a machine that drove on the north side of the house. Besides that, we had a machine digging for the sewer pipe, and it also drove here. You should not drive on soil unless you have a perfect reason to do so.

Actually, I don't know how to proceed with the platform from here. I need to talk to Gijs about that. Should I pour concrete in there, or is it okay with sand? How should I do it? My neighbors got concrete, but I am not sure if I can arrange that on short notice. Is it worth the hassle? That is the question.

The next task, the final task for today, was to arrange a barrier between our driveway and our farmland. It needs to be more evident that you should not leave the driveway and drive into the grass. I decided on hanging a rope between objects. I preferred this over using barrier tape because it is a little more subtle than barrier tape, but it still sends a clear signal.

As soon as we had the driveway, we had people driving beside the driveway. It is about time to listen to my own feelings about that and do something. I nourished a feeling that it was not that bad. It is a waste of time to do something about it. I changed my mind on that now because we need the grass for our sheep. The driveway is for cars. These two entities need to be separated.

Next to our helophyte filter, I drove three sticks into the ground, and then I drilled a hole through the top and threaded another piece of rope through it. That looked nice.

It started to be dark when I finished the barriers for the driveway. The photos are not that crisp and clear. I think they are clear enough to see what I did.

My wife had been busy in the house plastering the walls in our future bedroom. It is progressing nicely.

This concludes the activities at our new house for this week. We have a couple of things to fix next week, such as replacing the basins, finishing the heating pump platform, and so on.