Walls nearly finished

Karen is out of action due to minor finger surgery, so Dave came today to help finish the walls. All of the funky geometry came together at the front corner, made more interesting by an on-site decision to move the west window to the front wall. Nonetheless, we got the east wall finished and got all of the final blocks and reinforcing steel in place. I will try to finish the cutting on Monday so we can start putting the roof on!

Dave and Rob get a feel for the final size of the room

Tea break between carefully located windows

Why Durisol?

A brief explanation of the Durisol  blocks. I only recently learned about this product, but it has several attractions for the green DIYer. The blocks are made of 80% recycled wood (mainly pallets I think) and are low energy in manufacture.They can be partially filled with insulation; the rest of the void is filled with concrete and any steel reinforcing required. They can be cut with woodworking tools, including a hand saw, which was used to produce this tricky corner:

The U(insulation) value of this block is 0.15, which is about 40% better than the building regulations require for a house. They are laid without mortar joints, and the concrete fill locks everything together and provides strenght and thermal mass. The blocks are vapour permeable, and when finished off with lime render and plaster will be airtight but breathable. Durisol will take back the off-cuts and re-use them to make more blocks. The roof will be standard timber rafters with hemp insulation between and a wood-fibre board underneath. The floor will be insulated with 140mm of polystyrene insulation, so there will be very little heat required, We will postpone installing the woodburner until we see a need. Things are moving slower with a smaller workforce.

 

Karen finishes another pour

Find out more here: http://www.durisol.net/ 

Raising the walls

Ruben stops by to check the inventory

Mark Collings gives confidence to the team

Paddy and Tom under the streetlight: dedication!

Amandine show good vibration technique

Karen said, "make sure the DPM is big enough."

The brothers are still competitive

Dave joins us for lunch - sunny and warm

Paddy points out where the view is: put the window here!

Irresponsible person on a dumper

Chris, who knows what he's doing, helped me by putting in the reinforcing steel for the back retaining wall on a Thursday after work. There was no photographer on hand to document this stage. Saturday dawned with the concrete delivery arriving at 8.45 instead of "between 9 and 11". Chris was going to drive the dumper for us, but he was called in to work, so I took the job. With no training, I did nearly turn the thing over by driving backwards down Dave's terraces and through the hedge into the street below, but no equipment or workers were damaged, just one ego.

Paul arrived to lend some credibility to our work force and we placed the 3 cubic meters in no time. There was about a 1.2 ton left over, but we put that on the floor excavation as blinding. Better than coming up short - I would have heard about that one longer than the dumper incident.


Ian came from Creedy Park and helped throughout, especially keeping the tone lighthearted during the more exciting moments and taking his turn running the poker (vibrator) throught the concrete. Karen demonstrated her skill with a garden rake keeping the concrete moving around the trench. We think we levelled the foundation to plus/minus 10mm ( 1/2 inch) which should do. The Durisol blocks arrive tomorrow morning - this time I have arranged for a machine and a man to drive it - this time a telescopic handler to unload the pallets and deliver them up to the studio site. I think Karen will lose another shrub or two making a wide enought access for this new machine.

Dave, can you dig it?

The summer has flown by, and after two-and-a-half weeks in glorious France, we were back meeting Dave the digger driver to start moving some earth. First was the foundation of the studio, which I carefully calculated to get the building down below the neighbour's hedge. A LOT of soil came out:

Then Dave found the main power supply to the house buried a few inches underground. Fortunately, he saw the warning tape and there were no bangs or sparks. This caused a re-think of the depth of excavation and I realised that tweaks to the roof design meant that we were probably low enough. The door sill will be a bit high, but we have enough material to raise the whole lawn up to it!

While we had Dave and the digger, we decided to strip and terrace the vegetable garden at the front, which yielded more pile of red Devon soil.  Dave is an artist with a machine and the terracing is looking great. He placed most of the turf he cut just behind the hedge to form the (well cushioned) base for the path at the bottom.