Stars' End : version 4.0

Progress: [ west | east | north | loft | garage | tree ]

Soham: Oct 1999 -- ???

• 17 July 2002 -- the Space Garden, and the beds at the front of the house, are finally planted. (Earlier garden progress is also documented.)

• 11 March 2001 -- The hearth ventilation grille is fitted. This is the last internal item -- the interior is FINISHED!!
• 9 Jan 2001 -- The boarded loft felt a bit stuufy, so we had an extra ventilation outlet added
• 1 January 2001 -- beginning of third millennium. 200th anniversary of the discovery of the first asteroid, Ceres.
• now at 9280 books

• 30 December 2000 -- we fit mirrors in the bathrooms
• 21 December 2000 -- winter solstice

• 7 October 2000 -- the bend in a piece of network conduit is fixed, by installing a new socket. The lights over the kitchen sink are installed. The final kitchen wall tiling, around the cooker hood, is finished.

• 21 September 2000 -- vernal equinox

• 25 June 2000 -- the downstairs loo basin cabinet is tiled, and the floor grouting is finished.
• 21 June 2000 -- summer solstice
• 18 June 2000 -- the floor tiling (if not the grouting) is finished in the downstairs loo and utility room cupboard. We put up our house sign.
• 10 June 2000 -- the patio doors' lower panels are changed from solid to glass (which they should have been all the time)
• 3 June 2000 -- CABINET -- after a long hiatus, and lots of nagging, progress resumes. The rainwater tank pump is boxed in. This allows the tilers to resume.

• 30 April 2000 -- the electric towel rail is installed in the downstairs loo. Blanking plates are fixed over those network conduit sockets currently unused
• 23 April 2000 -- the utility room cupboards (finally) get their handles
• 16 April 2000 -- the downstairs loo floor is (mostly) tiled.
• 9 April 2000 -- some door handles and door stops are attached.
• 2 April 2000 -- the loft stair doors are stained.

• 26 March 2000 -- the utility room cupboards are painted and the loft stairs are stained
• 21 Mar 2000 -- spring equinox
• 19 March 2000 -- WARDROBE -- the shelves are fitted in the utility room cupboards, the wardrobe is fitted, the stair and landing carpet is laid. The front door loses its protective board and becomes visible for the fist time. We tidy up the garage and shelve the loft.
• 12 March 2000 -- the showers are fitted (at last!) and the tiling is even closer to completion.
• 5 March 2000 -- the bathroom and floor tiling nears completion...

• 27 February 2000 -- the kitchen splashbacks are tiled, and progress is made on tiling the bathroom and the hall floor.
• 20 February 2000 -- GRANITE -- the kitchen worksurfaces and proper taps are (finally!) installed, the new tiler tiles the en-suite floor, the loft plasterboard is taped.
• 13 February 2000 -- the loft carpet is laid, and all our junk is now up in the loft, instead of sitting on the landing
• 6 February 2000 -- a very small amount of bathroom tiling occurs, but the tilers decide they do not want to do any more. The utility room cupboard doors are hung.

• 30 January 2000 -- a small amount of bathroom tiling occurs. The utility room cupboard walls and area around the loft staircase are plastered.
• 23 January 2000 -- LOFT DOORS -- doors now cover the small stairs up to the loft storage space.
• 15 January 2000 -- LOFT STAIRS -- the small stairs up to the loft storage space are installed. Work starts on the utility room cupboards.
• 9 January 2000 -- BEAMS STAINED -- the shower doors are installed, and a little more bathroom tiling is done. The decking over the garage workshop is laid, and the ceiling fitted underneath it. The fake beams are stained dark brown.
• 2 January 2000 -- no building work happens this week (well, it is a holiday!), but we do install the first part of the Ethernet.
• now at 9031 books

• 26 December 1999 -- LOFT BOARDED -- The bathroom tiles are finally delivered, and some are fixed. The side walls in the loft are insulated and boarded. The secondary loft ladder is fitted. We put up lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of shelves.
• 21 December 1999 -- winter solstice
• 19 December 1999 -- The vent hole for the tumble drier is cut, and the misplaced vent hole for the vacuum cleaner is filled. The final consignment of furniture and books is delivered from store. We put up lots and lots of shelves.
• 12 December 1999 -- Some of the kitchen worktops have made their way into the kitchen, but one piece is too small, and so nothing can be fitted! The utility room splashbacks are tiled, and the sink tap fitted. The final part of the loft insulation is laid. The gas fire is connected. We put up lots of shelves.
• 5 December 1999 -- The kitchen worktops are delivered. The vacuum cleaner unit is fitted -- so now we can get rid of some of the plaster dust that's everywhere! The second consignment of furniture and books is delivered from store. We put up lots of shelves.

• 28 November 1999 -- DINING ROOM FLOOR -- The drive is gravelled. The roof tilers finish their work: the final ridge tiles on the garage, and the slope on the chimney. The groundworks are finished with a sophisticated overflow from the rainwater tank. The dining room floor is fully laid, sanded, and waxed, and there are enough boards left over to use as matching skirting. The kitchen units have gained their own skirting. Despite some work remaining, we have some furniture and books delivered from store, and try to fit old shelving to new walls.
• 21 November 1999 -- DRIVE -- PVCu bargeboards are fixed to the garage. The drive hardcore is laid, so we are no longer tramping sticky black mud into the house (building regs says the drive has to incorporate a "double hammerhead", to be big enough to allow a fire engine to turn!). Less mud means we can take up the protective polythene from the floors, making the house feel more like home. But until the kitchen and utility room are complete -- we're still living out of the hall. The dining room floor is about two thirds laid, with sheets of ply laid over the polystyrene, then the tongued-and-grooved floor boards stuck onto the ply.
• 14 November 1999 -- KITCHEN FLOOR -- The kitchen gains a floor, and cupboard handles. The utility room gains a shelf, a worktop and a sink, but only temporary plumbing connections. The ventilation system is connected up, with vent covers appearing in all the rooms (and a special bonus exploratory hole in the landing ceiling), pumping fresh air into the living rooms, and sucking stale air out of the "wet "rooms, which means we can now close the windows. The rainwater pump is plumbed in -- and fires up every time we flush the loo -- and the downpipes are fitted, to supply the tank. The vacuum cleaner connections are fitted, but not yet the machine itself, so we can't use it to clean up the grunge left from fitting them. The decorators progress, with a first coat of stain on the balustrading, which brings out the grain nicely. The gangplank makes way for a front door step, making access a little less exciting. The garage roller doors are installed, although only the keyhole pads are visible from the outside.
• 7 November 1999 -- GROUNDWORKS -- more progress on the ground works, with tanks disappearing, and oodles of manhole covers appearing (the foul water system and rainwater recycling system converge at this point). The sewage system pump is now connected, with its own fusebox and control panel in the garage. Although the rainwater tank is installed, the pump that allows the rainwater to flush the loos is not yet, so the downpipes are still not connected into the system. The dining room floor has been delivered, and now the discussions start about how to fit it. The kitchen progresses slowly: an oven and hob, a sink, and some handleless cupboards (but no work surfaces or flooring yet). Other essentials are installed: the TV aerial, and the telephone point. We even have our first curtains up; so, although we still have to walk the gangplank to get in, the house is nearly finished, compared to the garage, anyway.

• 31 October 1999 -- MOVED IN -- the hot water tank is fully plumbed in and the gas is on, so we have hot water and underfloor heating (bliss!). The sanitaryware and the sewage system are in place, but the pump is not connected, so only shallow baths for now! (We have a largish pumped holding tank, because the sewer connection is slightly uphill). Plasterboarding the loft has started. The fireplace is finally complete (just waiting for the fire now...). The kitchen is not yet finished, so all our white goods and stuff are in the dining room for now. But at least we have the essentials of life.
• 26 October 1999 -- we move in, to a very unfinished house (electricity in places, and some cold water and drainage, but no heating, no gas, no kitchen, no baths...)
• [25 October 1999 -- builder's September estimate of completion date]
• 24th October 1999 -- the electric fuse boxes are all finished off, some sanitaryware has appeared, the hot water tank is partly plumbed in, the boiler is installed (but no gas to run these, yet). The fireplace installers, who first appeared on the 18th with an incorrect hearth, have returned, with an unmodified hearth, but have managed to install some of it this time, leaving the rest in kit form for now.
• 17th October 1999 -- FAKE BEAMS -- the groundworks for the foul water system have started, although there's still a lot of pipework to be laid and inspection chambers to be fitted. The electrician has started fitting the fuse boxes. Not on the critical path, the fake beams are attached to the render, and the staircase spindles are being fixed. We have moved in a few essentials, but are staying in B&Bs until the house is habitable!
• 15 October 1999 -- we move out of v3.1.
• 9 October 1999 -- the 4500 litre rainwater recycling tank is on site -- but due to a scaffolding problem, none of the groundworks that were to have been completed this week, including the deep hole in which to bury the tank, have even been started! Inside, the floating floors have been laid over the polystyrene: chipboard in most rooms, and two thicknesses of the more rigid Fermacell in the rooms to be floor-tiled. Downstairs we have internal doors, and in one room at least, skirting board. The kitchen carcass has appeared.
• 2 October 1999 -- SCAFFOLDING DROPPED -- the scaffolding has been (mostly) dropped, letting us see the house properly for the first time. The underfloor heating is now laid everywhere, adding the pipes into the upstairs manifold and more pipes into the master control panel. The chipboard flooring gets laid directly on the polystyrene. (We had never thought of polystyrene as a structural material, but now it forms our floors as well as our foundations!) The hot water tank has arrived, waiting to be fitted. One of the advantages of building your own house is designing in the little features -- like a drain under the washing machine, in anticipation of those unfortunate overflows (although it isn't yet going anywhere sophisticated).

• 25 September 1999 -- PLUMBING -- the flooring has arrived, but so far is installed only in the loft. The underfloor heating is being laid: it comprises red plastic water piping laid in polystyrene. The triple pipes run to local small manifolds, which feed into the main manifolds upstairs and downstairs, and thence to the master control area. This complexity makes the ordinary hot water plumbing look relatively simple, and requires a lot of criss-cross piping.
• 21 September 1999 -- vernal equinox
• 18 September 1999 -- ARTEXED -- the front door is hung. Second fix electrics have started, with a plethora of light switches, sockets, smoke alarms, burglar alarm keypads and detectors -- but it isn't quite finished yet. Nearly all the ceilings are artexed (it has a very peculiar smell). Floor boards are up in the loft, if not yet fixed.
• [13 September 1999 -- builder's May estimate of completion date]
  The Moon, along with Moonbase Alpha, is blasted out of Earth's orbit.
• 11 September 1999 -- RENDERED AND GUTTERED -- second fix has started -- the carpenter has boxed in the ventilation tubes, the plumber has started work on the waste outlets, and the staircase is continued round to edge the gallery. The outside is partially rendered (the colour should lighten up as it dries) and guttered. The apples are getting past their best. And on the way back from viewing, we spotted these his'n'hers Tardises.
• 4 September 1999 -- plastering is now complete downstairs, too, requiring cables to be hung up out of the way. The impossible-to-photograph staircase is being installed. (Vertiginous view from above -- below front view from front door -- view from below side of Dalek hiding place). The underside of the "porch" has been weatherboarded in uPVC. [And finally... spotted on an industrial estate whilst shopping for sanitaryware -- where do they keep their stock?]

• 29 August 1999 -- ROOF TILING FINALLY FINISHED -- roof tiling has finally finished with the last bit above the front door done. Plastering is complete upstairs, and just starting downstairs, with the corners being done first. Even with larger tile samples, it's hard to judge what the bathroom will look like. The garage is making the most visible progress. And the apple tree is ripe for harvesting.
• 21 August 1999 -- ROOF TILING (ALL BUT) FINISHED -- roof tiling has all but finished. The colour of uPVC bargeboards, worry about which caused all the delay, looks fine. The ventilation system is being installed, with high vents in the outside walls, outlet holes in the ceilings, and shiny concertina tubes running up first floor walls, from ground floor ceilings into the loft, where the pump and heat exchanger resides. The vacuum cleaner system, from the same supplier, has smaller pipes and lower vents. The staircase and front door have been delivered, waiting for installation. The downstairs ceilings are now completely plasterboarded too, and wet-plastering the walls has just started, making the walls silky smooth to the touch, but much less interesting to photograph. Outside, the garage is beginning to take shape.
• 13 August 1999 -- ROOF TILING RESTARTS -- roof tiling has restarted, at long last! First fix electrics are nearing completion: here we have a double power socket, a TV point, conduit for computer cables, a telephone point, and another double power socket. Life must have been much simpler before electricity! The upstairs ceilings are completely plasterboarded, but the downstairs ones only partially, because first they had to rebate the wiring. The garage's concrete slab floor has been poured.
• 11 August 1999 -- total eclipse of the sun
• 8 August 1999 -- and the tiles still aren't on the roof. Inside, first fix electrical continues: there are there are even more wires everywhere, some of which are now properly conduited and boxed, and some of which are ready for the outside lights.

• 31 July 1999 -- and the tiles still aren't on the roof -- apparently there has been a delay with the bargeboards and soffits, but everything is due Real Soon Now. Inside, first fix electrical has started: there are wires everywhere, and we've added our own hand-written notes to the electrician. MDF windowsills are held in place with giant staples. Lots of little holes have been drilled in the exterior walls, to insulate the cavity with blown fibre. And it's difficult to decide on tile colours when the samples are so small.
• 24 July 1999 -- the tiles still aren't on the roof. There has been some internal progress: "first fix" carpentry has started, which means door frames, some battens on the concrete ceiling, to attach the plasterboard to, and some more battens crossing the rafters. The liner and reinforcing mesh for the garage slab are in place. But that's it for the week ... and they still claim they will be finished on time ... which is now only seven weeks away!
• 20 July 1999 -- 30 years on from that "One Small Step" -- so when are we going to do it again??
• 17 July 1999 -- CHIMNEY AND FINAL WINDOW -- the chimney and the final bit of the roof structure are finished. The roof and window over the front door have been complicated enough, both inside and out, to delay the roof tiling by a week -- as have the rather complicated varieties of ridge tiles. The roof steel beam is no longer supported on a scrappy pieces of wood [as it was earlier on], but on little pieces of something stronger. The driveway is temporarily covered in strangely patterned concrete, and work on the garage has started in earnest.
• [mid July 1999 -- builder's January estimate of completion date, before piling hiatus.]
• 10 July 1999 -- ROOFING STARTS -- roofing has started, with much battens, felt and strange rafter vents, but the only tiling (with "pre-aged" look tiles), so far is half of the back, with other tiles poised ready to lay, which can be seen only from the vertiginous top scaffolding. More cross pieces have been added to the roof trusses, to strengthen the structure -- which leads us to ask, what is holding these two halves of the roof together? And the apple tree is in fruit.
• 3 July 1999 -- GABLES AND WINDOWS -- the gable ends are bricked in, showing us what the ladder-like end roof pieces are for. The roof tiles and ridge tiles are on site. The windows are fitted -- all except for the one that will go above the front door. But the patio doors are wrong -- they should be all glass. If we had had better 3-D imaginations, we would have left the roof space open in this room -- we'll have to remember that for the next one we build! Currently our staircase is a little narrow. We get a great view from roof level; looking back in the other direction, we can just see the roof trusses through binoculars, but not with the the camera zoomed to 50mm. (If this was the movies, we could just magically zoom in with the computer and see them; in real life all we get doing that is bigger pixels.)

• 25 June 1999 -- we have received an offer for Stars' End 3.1, so have told the builders we are now holding them to their end date. Then ... nothing happened all week!
• 21 June 1999 -- summer solstice
• 19 June 1999 -- ROOF TRUSSES -- the roof trusses are in place. The last piece of steel, part of the roof support, is in place, but is itself not that well supported yet. That open attic roof trusses will give us space in the main loft. The other parts of the roof are more complex shapes. The "wall plate", significant as a stage in the mortgage, appears to be this scrappy piece of timber screwed to the top of the wall. We can now see the shape of the whole house from the front.
• 12 June 1999 -- WALLS UP TO ROOF LEVEL -- a third course of scaffolding takes the brickwork up to roof level. The builders decided they didn't like the lintels over some internal doors [as they were originally], so have replaced them with a much stronger beam. From the front, it's even beginning to look like the drawings.
• 5 June 1999 -- INTERNAL UPPER WALLS -- more scaffolding is in place, ready for the outer brickwork. It is covered with piles of bricks, which hide the fact that inner walls have appeared upstairs. All this blockwork should give better sound insulation and bookcase supports than flimsy plasterboard.

• 29 May 1999 -- SOME UPPER WALLS -- the walls grow some more, with the now-completed concrete first floor being used to support as yet only potential upper walls (and how did we get up there to photograph it when there is no staircase yet?). The brick soldier course at first floor level provides subtle relief from the mass of brickwork. The roof trusses are already on site, if not on the house yet. Progress might look good, but not much has happened to the garage since early April, beyond a crop of buttercups.
• 22 May 1999 -- FIRST FLOOR -- our vantage point is not high enough to show the concrete first floor nearly completed, but the view from below shows the beams and blocks over our heads. Big steel lintels run across the corbels to support the overhang, and more steelwork supports the landing floor. With the ceiling blocking out the sky, the downstairs begins to take shape with rooms, not just walls.
• 15 May 1999 -- HIGHER WALLS -- the walls grow higher, up to the level of the corbelling (which supports the first floor overhang), and interior walls appear, too. The hall brickwork is nearly finished. No lo-tech carrying of hods up ladders nowadays: a forklift lifts the pallets up to a hi-rise platform. The pre-made insulated lintels look quite hi-tech, too.
• 8 May 1999 -- A LITTLE BIT OF SCAFFOLDING -- nothing more has happened except a little bit of scaffolding appearing. The builders must be concerned about progress, too, because they are working on a Saturday. This corner to corner view won't be possible once the interior walls are in place.
• 1 May 1999 -- MOST OF THE GROUD FLOOR WALL -- much of the ground floor cavity wall is in place, a few courses higher than last week around the kitchen window and dining room doors. The front door takes shape, from the outside and from the inside, with interior brickwork. The fireplace is a hole in the wall, and we won't get this view up the chimney again. There seems to have been a small accident with a palette of bricks.

• 24 April 1999 -- OUR FIRST WALL -- the exterior wall is constructed to ground floor level, and somewhat higher around the kitchen window and dining room doors. The fireplace begins to take shape. And plumbing 'stubs' are being integrated. The apple tree, looking a bit crowded, is in blossom.
• 17 April 1999 -- GROUND FLOOR -- the suspended concrete ground floor is laid, comprising inverted-T shape concrete beams laid on the brickwork at 18" intervals, filled in with very light "aircrete" blocks. The red exterior wall bricks (carefully machined to look 'hand made') are on site. The overall crudity of the process is further illustrated by the protruding basis of all the site level measurements.
• 10 April 1999 -- 4 COURSES OF BRICKS -- the ground beams have 4 courses of foundation bricks laid on them, up to the damp proof course, ready for the floor to be added. The crude and low tech look is improved by the nice square brickwork.
• 6 April 1999 -- GROUND BEAMS -- the trenches are lined with 50mm polystyrene (to provide a buffer against growing tree roots), and the latticework added for reinforcement. Then concrete is added to make the ground beams. It all looks surprisingly crude and low-tech. Anyhow, we are now back where we started: level ground!

• 27 March 1999 -- TRENCHES -- the garage trenches are dug. All the trench bottoms have a skim of concrete, and the piles are cut off to a level, leaving strange cylindrical spoil, like fossilised dragon droppings, where the piles had been filled with too much concrete. Birds have been having fun in the drying concrete.
• 22 March 1999 -- trenches to hold the concrete groundbeams are dug: it's beginning to look like real foundations now, although not all the water problems have been solved! Hand-crafted steel lattice work are to provide reinforcement in the groundbeams between the piles.
• 21 Mar 1999 -- spring equinox
• 14 Mar 1999 -- PILING FINISHES -- all of February's yellow circles have become driven piles, no longer hollow, but filled with reinforcing steel and concrete. And one day, this pile of topsoil will be our garden.
• 6 Mar 1999 -- 16 more piles piled. Our plot has awkward access, and the builders had expressed concern that they might not be able to get their piling rig on site. So we were expecting some massive, lumbering juggernaut, not a cute little escapee from the SF film Short Circuit. ("Number Five is Alive" and well, and driving piles in Soham?)

• 27 February 1999 -- PILING STARTS -- spring has sprung, as have piles of piles, 15 of which hollow steel tubes are driven deep in the ground.
• 20 February 1999 -- Piling is due to start soon: 29 9"x5m piles (doncha just love metric units?) for the house, and 12 6"x5m piles for the garage, are to be driven over the next three weeks. But at the moment all we have are some yellow circles.
• 11 February 1999 -- Neptune: furthest planet from the sun, 1979 -- 1999. After its 20 year foray inside the orbit of its neighbour, today Pluto once again regains its title of outermost planet of the Solar System.

• 27 January 1999 -- The architect, the builder, and the structural engineer dig a second hole: the building regulations inspector says it's nice stiff clay, and we don't need to go deeper than 2m after all. But this hole rapidly fills with water, too. And so we need to stop thinking trench-fill foundations, and start thinking pilings. Both holes are filled in again, while a new design is drawn up...
• 14 January 1999 -- TOPSOIL STRIPPED -- ... and then stops almost straight away: the building regulations inspector worries that the surrounding conifers will leach all the water out of the ground, and that we might need 3m deep foundations, rather than the planned 2m ones.
• 11 January 1999 -- Work starts on the building site, by stripping off the topsoil ...
• now at 8798 books

• December 1998 -- PRE-BUILD -- The plot just before work begins
• December 1998 -- we find our builder
• Royal Greenwich Observatory, 1675--1998. R.I.P.
• Spring/Summer/Autumn 1998 -- we search hard for another builder...
• April 1998 -- after a slight hiccup over sewer access is fixed, we finally buy the plot. But by now our builder has evaporated.
• 21 March 1998 -- we visit the Home Building and Renovating Show at Birmingham NEC, and find our roof tiles
• 5 March 1998 -- East Cambridgeshire District Council grants planning permission
• Jan 1998 -- now at 8560 books

• November 1997 -- we apply for planning permission
• November 1997 -- the vendors accept our second, de-loomed, Tudor-bethan house design
• October 1997 -- the vendors reject our first proposed design as too "looming"
• October 1997 -- we identify a suitable builder
• 20 September 1997 -- we visit the Self Build Homes Show at Alexandra Palace, to get our momentum going again, and get some detailed ideas
• 9 September 1997 -- we make an offer for a quarter of an acre in Soham, subject to planning approval, both from the Council, and from the vendors (who are to be our neighbours)
• much of 1997 -- we continue searching for a plot, visiting lots of patches of scrubby grass, and a few old barns
• Jan 1997 -- now at 8225 books

• October 1996 -- we make an offer for a lovely plot in Balsham, at which point the vendors withdraw it from the market. Apparently they were simply trying to find out how much it was worth. Grrrr.
• 1996 -- we decide to "self-build", and start searching for a suitable plot

• As our story "progresses", we include the odd astronomical event in our log, to give a feel for the similar kind of timescales involved.

Earlier Stars' Ends

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