Lots happened and more happening...

As I mentioned in the last post we hired professionals to do the drywall on the first floor. Unfortunately it ended up to be a challenging and conflictous experience. However, we put that behind us and are moving forward. I would dare to say things have picked up in speed lately, compared the hick-up rhythm we used to have. We are very happy about that. Here some pictures to get an idea ;).

Just before Christmas we got all the floors in and got hooked up to the electricity network and water!!! That was super exciting and such a life style change ;). The weeks before Christmas were very eventful and positively tiring. We really enjoyed the holiday in the new acquired comforts!
Feeling a bit more energized after the holidays, I decided to give it a try to do some wall tiling in the bathrooms. This morning there is also the plant filtration (septic) system happening!!!

The drywall on the first floor is happening!

almost done, it looks good, but unfortunately many
mistakes were made...however they were fixed as well
as possible and we are moving on...

And the outdoor cladding is coming along too...

more cladding

All the cladding done!!!

cork floor in the attic in progress...

cork floor in the attic done...

Electric installation !!!! 

Plumbing!!!!

The temporary staircase is gone and the new stairs are in!

Solar Panels!!!

Railing along the staircase whole, for less scares ;)

Terracotta tiles, from earth from over the hill and locally
baked in fire ovens.

And the kitchen floor is in!!
(And we also oiled it but it is not really visible in the picture.)

Parquet for the living room:

And it is in, it was as well oiled.

Some of my wall tiling!
(The floor was done by professional at the
same time as the terracotta tiles.)

Septic system in progress...

Septic system done, several layers of sand, gravel
 and pebbles and reeds, which
are still small but it works
already!

Slowly but surely advancing

It has been an a long time since my last update. So here finally one again! It is going to be a summary as usual.We have been slowly  working away. There has been a lot of  repetitive detail work, and also the usual unplanned waiting times. The waiting times seems to be trickiest for us.
We have ups and downs as expected. However, we have come to realization that it is getting more and more difficult to keep our spirits up. The learning curves are steep and we are getting impatient to advance a bit faster and to have more comfortable living space for when the colder seasons are coming. For this and other reasons, we recently decided to take a bit more professional help than we intended to finish the drywall of the first floor.

Here some snippets of our the progress: 

The second layer of insulation and the  rails are in to screw on the drywall...

While we were working they came to dig the trench
for the electricity. But the house is still not hooked up,
it will be hooked up only at the end.

The electrical cables are coming in...this is just the beginning.
We must have given up taking pictures, because I don't find any
with more cables, but there were many more...

The first door!!

The drywall!

Another door :)...

The plastering! We didn't do the plastering ourselves,
but the sanding... I will just say, I am glad it is over...

This is the first floor. Our first plumbing is in!!
After this came the ceiling, and now the walls. 
Pictures will follow...

The ceiling!
More coming soon...

Here we are again

It has a been a long time since our last post. Life continued to happen, as in, sickness and exhaustion started to kick in, as well as the winter. As much as we are enjoying the much milder winter then we are used to, to camp in winter is just a bit more work than in summer. It would not be too big a deal if we wouldn't have all the house building on our plate ;). However, this is part of the adventure and the learning curve, and it is a big privilege to be able to have this experience.

There has been an improvement in our living situation. We aren't anymore in the caravan, but in the house. We still call it camping because we still have our facilities such as cooking and toilets outside, and there is nothing really yet except the insulated walls, which is already pretty good! We made some progress, but given the sickness, exhaustion, and holidays, things where a bit slow. In February we are planning to leave for a couple of weeks and take a break. We are looking forward to it; meanwhile, here's a photographic summary of some highlights since the last time. There was also a lot of detail work which doesn't look like much but takes lots of time. 

Here the pics from November-January. Mostly chronologically, we lost a bit track of the exact order: 

The big triangular windows upstairs!

and from the outside...

The big sliding doors, there is still a gap at this point...

...gap closed and siliconed,  around this time we started to sleep in the house.

all front windows from the outside

The dry wall came some time in November, it is dark, because we
had to carry it all in the house and by the time we finished we 
were sore and exhausted and it was dark. It took us several hours
to carry in the literally 5 tonnes of material,  that we had
to bring in asap to protect it from the wet weather.

We laid out the porch slates. They are not yet screwed in but we can use it.

We hang our clothes and the kids enjoy their hummocks on sunny days.

Brackets for the second layer of insulation and the dry wall. This is in the

second floor, but we did them on the ceilings of both floors. To the right

the christmas tree we made with the window transportation protection.

Start of the second layer of insulation upstairs.

The wood for the outside cladding arrived...

...and we decided to put it in a more protected place, under
the house, since it will be a while until we are going to use it.

And back inside in the attic: the second layer of insulation of the
roof is in and the tubes for the electricity cables are in.
Exciting!!!

The vapor barrier is in and taped everywhere. We did that everywhere in the house.
And there is still taping to do in other places, it will never end ;). 

And ta-da!! The drywall of the ceiling in the attic is in!!!!

Days 38-48: Moving right along! Thick insulation done! More windows/doors in!

Day 38 we resumed getting the first (thicker) layer of roof insulation in, which was starting to wear on us--it's a lot slower than the downstairs ceiling was, due to extra non-full-depth studs being in the way just about everywhere.

Day 38: Getting more chunks in toward the apex.

Day 38: We found chunks of thick wire like this one embedded in the insulation when we went to cut through sometimes.  Thankfully only two or three, but we still raised our eyebrows.  

Day 39 was very exciting.  It was a nice day out, the construction crew showed up early, and they had picked up the last of the roof tiles on their way (so apparently those were ready finally, who knew?).  They set to work and soon had them all in.  So meanwhile we did little things downstairs and then started on the last third of the roof insulation, which now we were allowed to do since that section was rapidly getting covered in tiles as we worked.

Day 39: Got the last custom row of these brackets in (going around the staircase opening.)

Day 39: Sadly, whole pads of insulation continued to fall out of the roof--even ones we hadn't deemed needing taping.  (Also it turns out we should use string when needed.  That tape is highly specialized and expensive.  It also doesn't work well for this application.)

Day 39: Since our previous strategy of notching the pads of insulation to make space for protruding half-studs didn't seem to be working out (it's hard to put them in properly and then they don't stay), we decided that for parts like this, we would cut everything piece-wise.  Here though this is the same as on the other side so far--we've stuffed insulation through so some hangs out outside.

Day 39: Now with the tiles up, it's dark on this side!  But we'd bought a 2100-lumen LED work light anticipating this, so that's what we worked by.

Day 39: We made some progress here.  Still lots to go, though.

Day 40 was nice out again so we thought we'd take the tarps off the insulation that had been delivered in the rain, and see what the damage was.

Day 40: The thin second layer of insulation for the walls and roof.  As you can see, on some packs, water got in everywhere.  Here's our attempt to let it dry out, but it's a slow process in the cold, even if it's sunny.

Day 40: However, there was enough warmth for some bugs to wake up again.  We hope they don't get too comfortable there...

Day 40: Still not dry at the end of the day, so we had to pull it back into the house to avoid it getting dew (or even rain) on it overnight.

Day 41: We got all the remaining insulation loaded into the house and organized.  More importantly, two more doors are installed!  (The one on the right is the one we previously had just cut a hole in the black paper for.)

Day 42: Roof insulation is getting done, in large part.  There will be a lot of final little details to do though thanks to our new cutting strategy, but at least these are holding up a bit better.

Day 42: The new door from yesterday, from the outside.

Day 42: The other new door.  Watch that first step!

Day 42: Today we were very proud to install the two simpler (squarish) windows upstairs ourselves, without our general contractor present.  

Day 43 was a milestone for us.  Many things depend on each other, so we had a side-quest and built ourselves a staircase, which we thought turned out rather well given that neither of us had built one before.  The reason we did this was to make it a lot easier on us and safer to load all that new insulation upstairs, which then meant we could reorganize the downstairs and tidy it up to get ready to put in the biggest two window-doors.

Day 43: Staircase!

Day 44 saw yet more falling insulation.

Day 44: Two fell out in the corner, and a third one tore itself in half falling out, in the next column over.

Day 44: Here's how you string them into place.  Seems to hold well despite the cruddy, overly fluffy texture of these pads.

Day 45: Just about done!  We decided that rather then let the remaining fluffy insulation go to waste, we'd put it in over top of the big apex beam, so the beam could hold it in place.  It worked rather well!  In the end we had some full packs of insulation left over.  (You can see a few details that will still need filling in though overall.)

Day 46: Drum roll please...it's all in!  Every little gap!  We can (literally) breathe a bit easier now.  (We were wearing masks, but still, the fibers get everywhere.)

Day 47 we didn't take any pictures, because it was a lot of little detail stuff.  We'd expected our contractor would come to help with the bigger and more complicated windows, but he couldn't in the end; meanwhile we had prepped the windows by getting all the packing pieces unscrewed and away, and cleaning up the space around the windows.  We also did some more silicon application around the installed windows, and where we had already done that and let it dry, we put the final layer of special tape between the black paper and the silicon.

Day 48: With the upstairs insulation done, we started putting these long brackets in (which, unlike the downstairs ceiling, will hold a layer of those thin pads of insulation in addition to wiring and drywall.)  Got almost half of it done.  Most of the time was spent setting up the corners and end rows, which had to be done once for each of the four sections of the overall space.  The rest should go pretty fast, within a day.

So that's it for now...next time you read this, we hope our windows are all finally in, the vapor barrier and brackets are done, and we're putting up drywall.  :-)