Day 334 - Cladding to north elevation begun

Battens completed to north elevation, and cladding begun...

Day 332 - Climbing plants planted

The front elevation (north-east) and north-west elevation are intentionally quite blank.  This is to prevent excessive heat loss through openings / glazing facing north, which receive little sun / heat gains.  The majority of windows are designed to face south instead.

To add interest to the front and north elevations we are planning to grow climbing plants up them, so in time they become 'green walls'.  As the cladding is now complete on the front elevation we decided to give the climbing plants a head start (as they will take time to establish), and plant the 'Parthenocissus Henryana' (virginia creeper).

Day 330

Battening started on north elevation...

Cladding finished on the front elevation!

Day 329

So close...

Day 328

Getting closer...

Day 327 - Cladding continues

Putting up the cladding on the front resumed on Friday.  Nearly half way now...  The 'hit and miss' boarding over the bathroom window is also complete.

Day 319 - More clay!

More clay rendering this weekend.  Yesterday rained again, which is becoming the norm for Saturdays!  Good progress today, we have now completed stripping off the frost damaged render and just need to patch in some cracks which have appeared in the render as it is drying.

Day 317 - Cladding the front elevation underway

Cladding begun on the front elevation yesterday.

Day 309 - Guttering complete

Guttering complete on both sides.  The downpipes are yet to be fitted, once the cladding has been fitted.

Day 307

Guttering erected on 3/4 of the other side.

Day 306 - Guttering begun

...one side virtually complete

Putting up the aluminium guttering started today...

Day 304

More external rendering today.  We finished the south elevation yesterday, and today we got from the road to the stair window on the north elevation.

We think the clay on the east (road) elevation has held up well under the poor winter weather conditions and does not need to be replaced.  We will do some final inspections next weekend, but our fingers are crossed!

Day 303 - external clay finished on south elevation

Where we had to knock the render off, we took it back to the clay slip coat.

We have now finished rendering the south elevation, hopefully it will have a chance to dry this time!

Another example of where the frost has blown off part of the previous coat of render.  Whilst some of the render is still on the wall, it has lost its key to the render below.  It was sole destroying but we had to knock a lot of it off, particularly at high level.  If we hadn't knocked it off, it would have been pulled off by the application of the next coat of render.

We carried on with the external render today, we had to take off a lot of the previous coats as the frost damage was quite bad and large parts had fallen off.

Day 302

While we await more clay to continue with the external rendering, we spent a day carrying on with the hemp and lime insulation to the eaves, above the straw bales.

Day 301 - first part of the internal scratch coat

We completed the internal scratch coat on the internal side of the straw bales in what will be the utility / plant room.  We will put studwork in front of this wall to fix all the plant back to shortly, so we want this to dry out quickly.

We have changed the mix of the clay render / plaster.  On the dry external plaster, when the clay was aggravated it 'dusted off' the wall.  This is undesirable, particularly on the internal walls, where we don't want a lot of plaster to end up on the floor everytime you touch the walls.  To try and avoid this we ave increased the quantity of clay in the mix.  The disadvantage of this is that will shrink more and may crack.

Day 300 - external rending resumed

We were back on the external rendering today.  We started on the south elevation, which was the last area we rendered before the freezing weather.  Since last year, some of the render had fallen off and a lot of it had lost its key from its backing and become very flaky and crumbly.  We had to strip back a lot of the old render before applying the new coat, which will hopefully escape the sub-zero temperatures this time!

We completed half of the south elevation today.