The land

We’ve recently been given some photos of the build from our neighbours.  Here is a picture of what the land looked like before the houses were built…

Coming together

After almost a year’s planning and building, we’re within 3 weeks of moving in.  The house is almost there, with just the long process of perfecting the remaining rough bits.

All cupboard doors have been fitted (though a few are being moved to get better alignment.  This means the space is now as we planned, and we’re delighted with the result.  Planning every last detail on paper, as is needed in this type of construction is hard but we’re both really glad we spent as long getting it right as we did.

The house is still under a layer of paper and sheeting protecting the floor, and the steel kitchen work surfaces.  I’ve got a job coming up to seal all the grout in the floor – the materials are waiting for me at the tile-supplier.  After a few weeks of heavy rain the clay-soil is waterlogged and the gardener is trying to drain it before starting that job.

The bathroom waits for it’s etched glass screens and the bottom section of the sinks.  Apparently the wrong piece was ordered, so a new one is coming.  Sinks are from Duravit – the Bathroom Foster range.  Taps are Steel by Axor.

The photo above shows the almost-finished bathroom mirror that I showed in its raw state.  The builders have managed to do a good job of getting the mirror flush with the wall, and there are a useful set of shelves behind the door.

Whilst we were away

We’ve just got back from an almost 4 week holiday, visiting friends and travelling in Singapore & Australia. It was good to get such a nice long rest though I do admit going away worrying about what was going to happen whilst I was away.

The builders have made great progress in our absence. We had a look last night – one advantage of the changing clocks is that it’s light in the evening. The kitchen has been built and fitted, though as you’ll see from the photo below the doors covering the hidden air extractor have been removed to enable its fitting. All the storage has been fitted, though without doors at the moment.

 

The floor is now hidden under thick paper protection and the kitchen / storage is under sheets of plastic, however the storage has really changed the feel of the house. Many of the walls were designed to hold the storage units and where there were once alcoves there are now flush lines.

The custom-built storage did add a pretty decent chunk onto the build costs of the house, but these will offset furniture costs and enable us to conceal the vast majority of items in the house. Many of the electrical plugs etc are built inside these units and a decent number of the units have cooling channels built in, in the same way as you’d build in cooling for a refrigerator. Items such as computer printers, stereos etc will all be hidden away out of view, alongside more usual items such as clothes.

The staircase has been fitted, and swiftly covered by paper. We can see the oak from the underside. Walls have had the painting started – it looks like an undercoat is on – and the lighting has started to be fitted. Both are likely to be the subject of further posts.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

When we signed off the house designs back in November we thought that all the decisions had been made.  By that stage we had decided on the details of the electricals, the kitchen, the sanitary products etc.

 Little did we know that the process would continue at the rate that it has done.  Here are a few things that have been occupying my time of late:

 Paint – we thought we had selected the paint and the veneers to match.  What we hadn’t counted was that the painter didn’t really want to use German Keim, preferring his usual Swiss Kabe Farben.  So a 7am meeting last week at his offices to discuss the technical details of the two paints.

Grout – we have had what seems a long, ongoing saga with the tile grout.  Again, far from the most interesting subject.  Do we have coloured, or grey, if grey which grey.  I then say it need sealing to much tutting from the tiler.  He then investigates and comes back with products… We’re not quite there yet, but it looks like I’m spending a weekend sealing grout.  (The Swiss way of putting you off a job is to add a ‘premium’.  Sometimes this is a ‘risk premium’ othertimes it’s just a ”I don’t want to do that’ premium’)

Kitchen splashbacks – OK so I was being optimistic thinking paint would work.  So we had to go for a new solution.  Problem is that it must be plain white.  And the white must match the other whites (paint and veneers) and must be joint-less.  We’ve found something, again almost certainly at a cost.

Then there have been a series of conversations regarding the details.  How the frame of a door meets the wall, exactly where taps are positioned, where the joints of tiles should be.  These things need site visits and time studying detail diagrams.   They also make a huge difference when there is so little to see.  

view a few weeks ago from kitchen area towards living space. 

Tiling

In our quest to reduce the palette of materials and increase the simplicity of line throughout the house we decided to use a single flooring material.  Given the under-floor heating and the need to have the flooring in the wet areas such as the bathroom we decided to have a hard stone-like flooring. 

Our initial quest was to have a concrete, probably of a similar colour to the floor we eventually used.  However, the number of suppliers in Switzerland was very limited and the cost was high for the desired quality.  After that we explored options with stone (issues with staining) until deciding to use a large porcelain tile, which looked similar to the stone.

The tile is 60cm square with a 3mm gap between them.  Grout (not done on these photos) is going to be a light grey colour, which matches the tiles better than a beige.

 

The downstairs area has been finished – apart from the grout – and the warmer colour of the tiles compared to the concrete is warming the white plaster on the walls.

 

The tiling on the first floor had been started late this week and was to continue probably into the early part of next week.  The newly installed bath is the guide for the tiles on the floor, and the same tiles are being used on some walls in the bathroom.

The only flooring in the main living areas that won’t be tile are the staircase, where tiles could crack if the staircase moved.  The staircase goes in in 3 weeks time. 

Plastering continues

There seemed less progress this week.  Not that we couldn’t see changes, just that after the bigger changes the preceding weeks the changes were felt somewhat less monumental. 

Most of the changes had been continued work to the plastering.  The plastering started at the top and has been continued downwards.  Again, on Saturday there were plasterers in the house.  

 Our son was particularly impressed by their movement around the room.  Standing on towers resting on wheels they used them like enormous stilts to move around the floor.  Effortless, and obviously well practised it was amusing to watch. 

 

Plasterboard mounted

Plasterboard has been fitted this week, changing the overall perception of spaces in the house.  It’s also changed the way light is reflected around the house, arguably diffusing the light somewhat through a greater quantity of reflected light.

Like all panels, plasterboard has been fitted with a thin layer of foam between sheets, presumably to reduce the transmission of vibrations.  Whereas the internal plasterboard had been stapled, new plasterboard has been screwed into place.

  

At the moment the house is starting to unfold in front of our eyes.  It’s now possible to get a really good idea of the spaces and proportions, how the light will fall and where the shadows will gather. 

All these walls, along with the ceilings, will be painted the same white (more on that later).  The final floor has a similar level of luminosity, therefore the rooms will look at least this bright in natural light.   

The garage is partly constructed

The exterior of the building is almost finished.  After the scaffolding was removed work on the garage started.  I guess it could be finished in the next week.  

 

The garage will be clad with the same larch as the main house and the final cladding of the house will be completed.  When the shutters are mounted and the garage door hung the outside is finished.

The shutters were needed for planning permission.  The council will decide on the design of the garage door!

Costs and work prioritisation

It seems that if you ask any homebuilder what they remember about the build then costs, or at least previously unexpected costs come to mind. I guess it’s also one of the deterrents for people considering building – it’s really hard to go into the project knowing how much it’s going to cost.

I think most cost changes can be separated into 2 main camps – unexpected costs due to material price changes / project complications and costs added because of design changes. Of the latter these can be subdivided into changes pre-project sign-off and those when the build has started. The latter always are surprisingly expensive and ideally should be avoided. Saying that, both my wife and I, used to project management as part of our jobs, so know the likely effect of ’scope creep’. Our changes have predominately been done pre-signoff.

Where we’ve added additional costs has been due to three main areas:

• A desire to move from residential quality materials to commercial quality with the aim of reducing long-term ownership costs
• To add extra functionality, usually reducing the need for purchasing furniture to do a job (e.g. storage designed as part of the scheme rather than as furniture placed in the room.) I guess converting the attic into a usable room would fall in this category.
• A few design aspects – e.g. our commissioning a lighting designer or specifying custom-made doors.

The latter changes can generally be grouped as costs to take things away rather than add them. The technical aspects or craftsmanship needed to do things simply is a real eye-opener. Being determined in the level you want the details is one of the hardest challenges we have faced. At the moment we’ve compromised in a few places, but done so knowingly. There is an underlying feeling that details that we’d appreciate, would cost a lot, but would be unnoticed by others were too extravagant for a house which must be realistically costed in terms of the local market. If this was a house that we built as our long-term home maybe some decisions would be different.

The other issue that we’ve faced is that the project is far more highly interdependent than we’d assumed. This has made prioritisation difficult. As an example, we decided that at some stage we’d like to plaster the attic. We had this as something we’d like to do in the medium term, however to get the plasterboard to the attic was best done by craning it in place before the roof went on (access is tight through the ladder-like staircase), therefore there were pressures to do this early on. There have been many, many other similar scenarios The implication is that this makes phasing the build an unattractive and difficult activity.

So what is the outcome of all this? Well, the house itself will be closer to the end-goal when we move in than we previously expected. At the same time, some things, such as custom furniture, is being pushed back as we’ve had to use allocated budget for more permanent items. In the end the total budget will be about the same as we expected, just that phases have been led far more by technical considerations than we thought.

Lots of interior work happening

The door frames from the last post are fitted, and very nice they look too!  They’ve been primed ready for painting and there is obviously work needed to plaster around them but it’s pleasing to see them in place at last.

We went, as usual, on Saturday morning to see the weeks work.  There was a builder on site, fitting the plasterboard to the attic.  With all the interior carpentry work this week for the first time we saw a less-than-spotless interior. 

 

For much of the house the wooden wall frames had been put up to mount the plasterboard (next week’s task).  In the attic a wall frame had been built along the gable end.  There was a pipe – the air from the bathroom – rising up along the wall at the right.  Initially we had thought of putting a half-height wall to hide the pipe, in the end we elected for a secondary wall along the whole height, with a cut-out above the top of the window so we can recess the blind fitting.

 

The cables for the lights are ready.  In the end we chose to use 5 lights, evenly spaced.  We couldn’t get six to fit nicely with the cross-supporting element.