Small bathroom progress

It's been a while since I posted about this, and there has been a lot of progress.

The galleries I managed to "make work" here in terrible, terrible Blogger look like they're actually getting worse every day! I have added some captions to the images but they only show over the thumbnails in ALL CAPS now, wtf?

In any case, what Pim has been working on (I am really not doing anything of this anymore, I am due to give birth any day now):

• Put up electricity for aseo, laundry & kitchen
• Pipes for aseo & kitchen
• Tap fittings for aseo
• Drains for aseo, laundry & kitchen (lots of cutting and digging into the floors here!)
• Plasterboards for aseo, laundry & kitchen
• Self-levelling screed / compound / mortar for aseo floor which was very uneven 
• And he's also been re-setting the tiles on the mesh since I couldn't bend over anymore!

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Insulation

Next in house project is to insulate the back building on the outside. The width of the court allows us to do this, instead of losing space on the inside (which we've done on the rest of the house), the back building is only 3 metres wide. It also allows us to cover the very messy bricks of this part. The terrace had to be done first since the insulating foam and thin bricks that go on top will overlap the floor.

Pim finished the drains that come from the gutters, and he and his dad had to replace a couple of windowsills still, since they were not deep enough for what the new thickness of the wall will be.

Then Pim removed a layer of pieces of marble someone had attached to the bottom of the wall, washed the flaky paint (painting over moss is never gonna work, people) away with a Kärcher, and filled all gaps and largest unevenness with cement so that the insulation would glue to the wall properly. The insulation has guides to place the bricks, so they have to be placed level and correct (some bricks over windows etc go vertically), this is very important.

So lots of thinking, measuring, then finally cutting a gluing with a special cement glue.

The entire back is now covered in... polystyrene :D looks total class! We still have thinner insulation to glue to the edges of the windows, screw everything down, then glue the tile-bricks.

We can't wait to move on to work on the inside, the kitchen (!!!) and the dining room. We will have to, soon, due to the weather. We've already ordered the tiles for the floor :)

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Finishing the terrace

Wow, it's been a while!

We did finish the terrace this summer. The most involved thing was to build the brick wall (it was Pim's first) and apply the grout (a laborious three man job: Pim, his dad and me). We chose a sand toned grout.

Putting on the floor was easier. Pim had already pre-prepared the substrate with garden earth and cement some time ago, and the rain and people walking over it for months hardened it considerably. Several centimetres of "river" sand (it appeared to be washed beach sand, with lots of shells in it!), packed well with a plate compactor we rented, a layer of bricks (I really enjoyed this fun and quick job!), some more sand and compacting, and it's done :) the most laborious part of this process was to cut the bricks around the angled edges, which Pim did with an angle grinder.

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Terrace

Terrace coming soon!

Pim has been putting a stabilised sand floor (chape? screed?) as a base for the terrace. This is sand from the garden with some cement. He's reinforcing it with some wire meshes that are like mini-rebar. I'm sorry, our English building terminology is failing us hard here :)

All this underfloor is now delimited by a concrete and rubble (we're going Roman here) frame he poured to be the foundation of a future greenhouse/conservatory thing.

Brick floor soon!

Picture dump

I'll edit this later because blogger is giving me lots of grief today.

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Edited to add captions.

This is the "box" Pim made to hide the cables.
The roof in the next room is much lower, and there are
lots of cables, and we thought this to be the best solution.
Here, shown with a layer of green "primer".
We actually just used a green paint that was on offer.

Supervisor

Pim's dad has been working a lot on the back building.
It's cold in there :( there is no heating yet, but he is
putting up all this insulation and closing the gaps.

There was a gas "bias" chimney in here, and no tiles underneath, unfortunately.
Pim filled the sandy hole with concrete. It will mostly be covered by furniture.
This was and will temporarily be the kitchen, and a living room at a later time.

Covering bricks with plaster in the laundry corner.

The laundry corner's other... corner. Already with water
collectors and beginning of outlets.

Lots of progress

I've so much to post about, I might have to split the posts today!

Lately, when I want to post here, I can't even recall what we've done, I just go to the camera and see what I've been taking pictures of.

I'll start with the oldest stuff I haven't posted about:

More shellac layers to the bedroom floor.
I mentioned this on the previous entry.

We started laying down the attic floor! We actually installed all of it in about 5 hours. Much faster than the bedroom floor! 

We got lucky though, we barely had to cut any boards. Three boards fit almost perfectly along the length, missing a little bit at the end.

Since this ends up at the very edge of what is going to be a built in closet, we did not waste huge amounts of boards just to fit these tiny bits, that are barely going to be visible and never stepped on, in the groove of the boards already placed. So we just cut pieces from two boards to fit the gaps, fitted them into each other's grooves and nailed them. The join to the main body of boards was then less than perfect, but I filled it with wood paste and sanded it down, and it looks great now :) I mean it doesn't really look like anything!

I did also lightly sand (120 grit) down the entire floor, and gave it one layer of oil. I am using the same oil I used for the dyed boards (V33 waterproof). Since the boards in this room are not to be dyed, I decided to treat them when already laid down. The dye is water based and it really did raise the grain of the wood, the wood was rough after one layer of oil over the dye. However it looks very nice and feels very smooth on the natural boards!

Left, oiled, right, bare

Brings out the figure

All oiled. At this stage it really reminds me of olive wood :)

After this, I will give two or three layers of shellac, then we install the baseboard and the room is finished!

Next: washbasin.

We realised we also needed to make an inset for the drain hardware to fit on the marble.

Pipes

Due to the location of the vessel sink (covering a large rust stain in the marble),
the drawer could not be made to still work, with an inset or so. We took it
apart, and nailed/glued the front of the drawer in place. We didn't destroy
any parts, and I've kept them for now. I am sentimental. And cautious.

Uncomfortable to work inside a cabinet, but hopefully worth it.

Bonus:

A cat looking for the other cat behind the mirror