Week Thirty Five – Doors, Windows and Ducts

Another flight, another picture. I really should beg borrow or buy a decent camera ... Still, you can just about make out the barn in front of the wing, with the farmer's fields behind the barn and our field to the left.

Back on terra firma, the external door frames have arrived on site.

Heat Recovery Ventilation requires ducting to every room, either to extract 'foul' air or to inject 'clean' air. This means running some fairly large pipes round the building. The original design specified rigid plastic ducting. We couldn't see how to do that given the constraints of an existing timber frame building with steel beams, wall plates, sole plates, 8 by 8 trusses and posts all over the place. So we opted for a flexible ducting system which is more ... well ... flexible. It'll still have to be boxed in, though, which is a bit of pain but there's no real alternative.

 

Large, silvery insulated ducts connect the heat recovery units to the outside air vents, in and out.

Narrower, red, ducting fans out to all corners of the building. The narrow ducting is connected to what they call a 'plenum box' which is a sort of multiple adaptor. It has a big silver duct at one end connected to the heat recovery unit and all the individual red room ducts connected to the other end. The plenum box is just that, a box. There's nothing in it except air.

 

Electric first fix is done. Bit a spaghetti junction in places.

 

Big milestone this week - some of the glazing has arrived.

And some windows have been glazed.

Another glazed window. Great isn't it? Real windows, real glass. Amazing.

 Out the back the crop is already sprouting.

And here's how it looked literally 2 days later. It has been so warm this year.

Our phreindly feasant still with us.

Plasterboard between the studs. Takes longer but the end result looks good.

The open studwork between the main bedroom and the double height area is disappearing as they fill in the gaps with plasterboard.

Apple trees in the neighbour’s garden. We're thinking we will plant a few ourselves once we're in. Maybe an orchard in part of the field.

Some blackberries from our garden, such as it is.

Painting the boards as they go up.

 

Postman pat’s car round the back

Issues considered this week have centred around :- how much studwork and purlins to show and how to do the painting of the weatherboarding in a heatwave. (Even took my shirt off on site on the Saturday afternoon - figured, if it's OK for the guys during the week, it's OK for me.)

And finally