During the early stages of the build, back when the block walls were being built, our brickie decided not to put any blocks under both the kitchen and lounge doors. When we quizzed him about it he babbled on (incoherently) about how this was always done to accommodate the patio. We really didn't understand what he was going on about but the more we asked him about it, the less sense he made.
Every builder we've spoken to since has found this equally baffling and when it came time to fit the patio, our landscapers also had no clue why it had been left like that, so just bricked it up like it should have been done in the first place.
We still had some old blocks left over from the build...
... and at last the gap was filled and the door had some proper support. The lack of anything supporting the door for all this time had probably caused it to flex and crack the render around the door frame... grrr!
Once the landscapers had filled the gap, they built the brickwork to support the patio steps.
The brickwork for both steps was filled with hardcore.
The back of the house needs a full repaint, but that will have to wait until we have had the render repaired.
A whacker plate was used to compress all the hardcore in preparation for the patio slabs.
It was beginning to look much neater already.
We'd ordered several small samples of different tiles and after trying them all out in situ, decided on the white porcelain.
The first tiles seemed to go down relatively easily...
... and progress was surprisingly fast.
Like the flower beds in the front garden, we wanted a drainage channel around the edge of the patio where it meets the house, which we will later fill with gravel.
The white tiles outside echo those inside, so it does feel a little like the room continues into the garden when you look out of the window.
The winter weather was a bit unpredictable so newly-laid tiles had to be covered up for protection from the rain showers.
We did originally want the tiles laid out in an offset pattern but, once again, the landscapers were much more keen to do a grid pattern (probably to reduce the amount of tile cuts they would need to do). We got the feeling they weren't confident of getting clean cuts at the edges so this way it would guarantee the whole patio had a crisp edge all the way around the perimeter.
The final row of tiles going down.
The steps and the smaller tile cuts will be done a bit later as we ordered bullnose profiles for the steps themselves and they were late being delivered.
We were really pleased with the tiles. They are slightly off-white and have a light textured finish so despite being made of porcelain, they are not in the slightest bit slippery to walk on (even when wet). They dry really quickly after it has rained too.
The landscapers didn't work over the weekends, so that gave us a chance to do additional work on the garden. Stepping stone paths were going to run along both sides of the house, with gravel filling the space in-between. Just having the gravel going up to the grass banks would have looked rather untidy, so we decided to use some of the old quartz stones we'd excavated during the demolition to make a neat border.
In order to maximise the width of the path, we cut away the bottom of the bank and placed the stones inset - as if they'd always been an integrated part of the bank.
It was hard work digging out the bank to fit each stone, but we felt it was worth it, because it looked so much neater than just placing the stones in a line alongside.
In the midst of all the landscaping work, we finally had the air conditioning fitted. We had originally got quotes for this a couple of years ago, but YET AGAIN got messed around for months by a tradesman who did the estimates, agreed to do the work, and even said he'd ordered our units... before vanishing and refusing to return our calls... Aaaargh!
Luckily
the company we'd first contacted agreed to do the work at pretty much
the same price they'd originally quoted (over two years before). There was a slight urgency because we wanted to get all this work done VAT-free before the house was signed off and also aimed to conceal all the wiring for the units under the new side paths.
Overheating in summer is quite a common theme with new builds. The house is so well insulated, with a lot of glass, so passive heat from the sun becomes trapped inside and just sends temperatures soaring.
We were going to have air-con fitted to both the kitchen and main bedroom (both south-facing with large windows).
The work didn't require too much disruption. A mounting plate was fitted in both rooms for the internal air-con units, with a hole to carry pipework out to the external units drilled through the wall.
The internal units look reasonably discrete and certainly work effectively. An added bonus is not only do they rapidly bring the temperatures down, but also have an air cleaning feature to remove odours. We tried it out when the farmers did muck-spreading on the fields nearby and it really worked!
The external pipework was 'concealed' using large, surface-mounted white trunking. Not ideal, but it was always going to be a compromise when trying to fit air-con to a house that had already been built. If we ever do this again, we will integrate air-con into the fabric of the building.
Our electricians did a neat job wiring up the external units.
It was easier to take a power feed from the consumer unit in the summer house than from the main one in the house (long story)... but that meant we had to bury a considerable run of armoured cables that stretched under the route for the side path and all the way to the back of the garden.
Digging trenches by hand is not much fun... especially in compacted hardcore!
And more digging...
...and more...
...all the way to the new consumer unit fitted above the water filtering equipment in the summer house.
Once we'd filled in all the trenches, the landscapers rotavated the soil to get it ready for grass seeding.
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