Work restarted on the house

Over the summer Doug has been focusing on the animals and land and his helpers had other work so progress on the house stopped.

Doug has restarted work this week. We hope to be able to move in to this temporary downstairs living area (is now the garage, and will eventually be a workshop and heating/laundry room) and the real bedroom upstairs from it sometime during the winter. It will have the new heating system in it and a shower supplied by this (solar hotwater and wood burner)

Currently work is progressing on getting the bottom of the walls prepared for the hempcreate (wall insulation) so that screed can be layed. It has been a fiddle to make sure that the whole inside of the wall will be insultated given how uneven the stones are. 

It will look like this

A - Wall

B - Insulation under floor (polystyrene sheets)

C - Concrete

D - Screed

E - Same as under the floor round the edges

F - Concrete with some insulation as the aggregate eg clay balls or cork. Needs to be an aggregate that can cope with damp.

G - Hempcrete (mixture of lime concrete and hemp)

E and F could have been the same thing. We discovered after we had the floor down that the hempcrete should not be inside the screed (ie where F is) because the screed is not breathable and would cause the hempcrete to rot so work is under way adding F at the same depth as the screed will be. It is a big job getting it level.

There was a slight accident while doing this with one of the pipes in the floor being drilled through. So it had to get dug out of the concrete. There is a silver lining that it will be easier to fit the shower tray with a little more play in that pipe. Luckly it wasn't as difficult as expected to dig it out.