Serious action in the last week has seen the house take shape. I am starting to get a little excited though still finding managing the details of it all and all the deciding very tricky being at heart a perfectionist. The house has been such a long time coming and we will live here for so long to come, choices must be compromised between two people’s taste… and as the choices are made the budget inevitably rises. No wonder Grand Designs is our favourite TV programme.
My favourite photo so far! The dark is the finished colour.
The hebel guys have been here working for the last week or so. This has involved screwing the hebel panels to the wall and layering plaster and rendering over it. You think it looks good at each stage but the final coat , a finely textured layer, renders the coating into a lovely finished form. Unlike many of the practices and materials being used in the build, the tools and skills they use are essentially those which my father had when her was apprenticed. I have them stored carefully in the shed. ( Of course the light weight concrete panels and the gib panels internally make a huge difference to his day of lathe and plaster).
The final coat is then painted - Murray chose Half Masala , the colour specially formulated from a sample, painted on a test pot, sent to Dunedin and recalculated into the Hebel Supercoat . Its looking well with the old house and looks good with the window colour. We have been wrapped up but today I stepped out of the house just as the plastic came off the living room windows. It was a nice moment.
Plastering has also been going on inside and I especially like the reinforced palster corner papers. Again, layers of varying plasters are being layered to get a good finish.
Yesterday the concrete guys came back and ground out the high bits ready for the tiler to come after the painters. Yes, it’s beginning to come together. The grinding would normally be done with a water system but these guys don’t usually have to come back and they were using small hand held thing. Understandably the gib stopper left !
"Fog" in the living room.
Things progress in the kitchen refinement but the subject is a tad raw as the joiner is not prepared to start without all in place and there are a few bits nad pieces - like what is going on the top cupboards - stillin flux. Check back soon!
Oh… and I found the perfect tap @ $1299 plus gst…. Regretfully I think it is better spent on the deck.
Not quite the same one as on Grand designs... but close