Withington Co-operative Eco-house - plastering

A non-eco update

Robert — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 18:53:15 +0000

Since the last blog post, some things have been happening at the house, but of a non-eco variety. Most of last week the plasterers were in, and we've now got all but one of the rooms skimmed. Today, Roy the cornice man was doing some repair work to the cornices:

The occupants have been busy designing their kitchen, and have done an excellent job of sourcing things carefully, reusing materials where possible and using eco-friendly products elsewhere. It's been really inspiring seeing this response to the opportunity to design an eco-kitchen from scratch. In order to facilitate their chosen kitchen layout, we've had to move the fireplace into the front room (which was missing its original). The fireplace has now been carefully removed and taken off-site for cleaning - turns out that under all those layers of landlords' Dulux it's a lovely white-flecked grey marble piece.

However, in between all this the main contractors haven't made any progress. We seem to have come to an impasse with them, where they are suddenly demanding more money from us. More on this next time, when hopefully we will have ironed things out with them one way or another.

Beginning external wall insulation

Robert — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 19:13:36 +0000

The builders have now started fitting UdiReco to the external rear wall of the house:

Note that the right-hand wall (with the bricked-up window) has deliberately been left, as the insulation is on the inside there. The job is waiting for scaffolding now.

The smaller basement door has been inserted, as can be seen in the photo, but the larger one (which would be off-camera to the left) is awaiting arrival of RSJs.

Meanwhile the builders have been preparing the remaining rooms inside for skimming, with plasters due on-site next week.

I have been concerned at lack of progress with the electrical installation, but a new electrician is coming in tomorrow, so we shall see.

This week's progress

Robert — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 10:59:08 +0000

Progress has been a bit slow this week. The builders have been doing general making good and plasterboarding work, in preparation for the plasterers coming in and putting the skim coat on the remaining rooms.

I've been down in Exeter this week doing some non-eco-house-related work, so have picked up a van-load of UdiReco insulation from Back to Earth to bring back up to Manchester with me. However due to a fault developing on the van I've ended up stranded in Exeter this weekend, so the builders won't get the UdiReco delivery until a week on Monday now.

Speaking of deliveries: United Utilities have now opened the stretch of road in front of our house, but because they've moved their road-closure compound further down the road, and everywhere is choc-a-bloc with parked cars, we still can't get any HGVs up to the house for major deliveries of eg skips, EWI, scaffolding, etc.

More discoveries

Robert — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:09:02 +0000

The plasterers have had a productive two days on the top floor, with about 75% of the surfaces finished now. Meanwhile, the builders have been stripping and preparing the first floor rooms. Upon stripping the wallpaper, we found that our "Banksy" has a precursor:

However, they also discovered this crack:

Fortunately, this is "bread and butter" to the builders, who seemed confident that they could fix it up by inserting some steel straps and then bonding it. There was absolutely no sign of this before we stripped the room - it's amazing what woodchip wallpaper and a dozen coats of landlords' Dulux can hide!

Withington Co-operative Eco-house - plastering

A non-eco update

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Beginning external wall insulation

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This week's progress

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More discoveries

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