Shaping up nicely

The interior of my house is looking more and more like an interior now the internal walls are going up. The walls and the doors as well as the windows seem very high but that’s because the floor is low and will be raised by something like 3 inches (7.5 cm) when the second layer of concrete is poured as a screed to completely level the floor and the floor tiles go down.

When I went up to take a look at progress half-way through the day all of the doors bar one had been installed and a good start had been made on putting up the internal partitions that will form the interior walls. When all of the doors are in I’ll then have to remove them from the house to ensure that they won’t be damaged during the work that follows.

As yet none of the internal partitions have had plaster-board fixed on both sides because several will have cables fed down through them from the ceiling and from the unopened rolls that are standing around, I assume that insulation will be inserted between the wall surfaces as a sandwich that will also act as sound deadening. Here are the shots that I took at lunchtime.

The next shot was taken looking across the kitchen with bedroom 3 on the other side of the partition.

The following shot was taken looking towards the bedroom end of the house through the utility room and bathroom. The coloured heating pipes sticking up in the foreground will end up being in the back of the cloaks cupboard.

The following shot was taken looking into bedroom 3 with the kitchen beyond.

It was dull and wet all-day today and by the time that I went up to check on progress after the workmen had finished it was really dark inside the house. Although there’s a power socket available in my ‘coffre de chantier’ (site electric box) that I installed before work began on the house, these guys haven’t been using it and I’m thinking that they could hardly be seeing what they were doing by the time they finished work in the late afternoon.

For some reason I can’t get my phone camera flash to work either and many of the shots that I took were unusable as a result. The ones that follow below are heavily edited and of rather poor quality but are the best of the bunch.

The first was taken from the middle of the living room and shows the door into the separate WC behind the front door with the cloaks cupboard beside it. I will be fitting a pair of bi-fold doors on the latter with a shelf inside.

The next one is from the living room looking down the corridor towards the bedrooms. All of the doors are now installed and have been removed ready for me to take them out to keep them safe.

The next shot was taken from inside what will be the bathroom looking across to the entrances to bedrooms 1 (farther doorway on the left) and 3. Bedroom 2 is on the left of the position from where the photo was taken.

Next is a shot taken from inside bedroom 1 looking out across to the doorways of bedroom 2 (on the right) and the bathroom.

The next shot was taken from the kitchen looking out through the opening (that will stay open) into the living room. I wish now that I’d specified a curved/arched top to the opening but I was told that it’s now too late as they would have needed to cut the plaster-board to shape before fitting it.

And finally a general shot looking back from the living room towards the corridor leading to the utility room, bathroom and the bedrooms.

Although the interior still has a way to go, it’s beginning to look remarkably like the ‘walk through’ that I did of my computer model. When it’s finally completed it’ll be interesting to do a proper comparison.

The plaster-work duo will be back tomorrow as should be the electrician. The latter will start on installing all the cabling for the lighting and power points and will need to climb up into the roof-space. While he’s there I’ll also ask him to drill a hole through the southern-facing wall for my satellite cable.

It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to him as we discussed it the last time he was here. I assembled the satellite dish today so we can work out exactly where the hole should be with the dish as close to the roof corner as possible without breaking above the roof line. If he doesn’t want to do it I’ll just grab my drill and ladder and do it myself 😉