Insulation II

I realise I never posted about the "finished" result of the insulation of the back building. I say "finished", because we consider it finished for the time being (and we stopped working on it about mid November). The insulation is on, the bricks are on, all gaps are closed, the gutters are on, and this is going to be all for the winter. There is still grouting between the bricks to do, but that will be a summer project. We're now moving on to the inside of the building.

So this is the "finished" result:

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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!

Kitchen window post

This post was a long way coming. Since I have a lot of images to post, I have been experimenting with some code added to the blogger template in order to have galleries to display the images. It is very clunky but it does the job. I should seriously consider importing this blog into my main website blog, but I have to think how and if I'd still like to keep it more separated.

Meanwhile, let us continue.

It has been cold, wet, and miserable. January and February are not pleasant to work around outside here. Luckily Pim and his father do not seem to mind too much, I have bad joints and I just can't work in these conditions, so besides a coat of paint in a small surface while wearing a Peruvian oversize pullover (what a wuss right?) I have done nothing of this project until the windows were in. By March however I have started gardening ;P

In the gallery below we pick up where we left in the last post:

• Sliding door beam concrete-d, bricks removed, edges redone. First time we can really see some of the garden from the house. In this case, a big pile of bricks :D
• Dining room window (where the shed door used to be) beam placed and concrete-d, bricks removed to widen, bricks added to make door into window, edges redone.
• Bit of wall where the radiator goes gets painted, green of course, and the radiator put up (it was in the way, this is one very large and 100 kg heavy motherfucker).
• Existing door widened, some bricks added between the pre-existing door and window for a stronger structure.
• Existing window narrowed and lowered to be as low as the kitchen counter.
• Outer windowsill stones (Belgian blue sandstone) placed. Some of these are very heavy... unlike other windowsills in the house, we had them delivered, but Pim and his dad installed them. I was able to help moving a couple ;P
• Threshold stones placed, same as above.
• After some delay, windows, door and sliding door/window? placed by the window guys today!
• And now PHEW!

And now, onto other kitchen things... walls, floor, insulation...

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