Deck the hall with...

Lindab ducting, fa la la la la, la la la la
And the garage with
Lindab ducting, fa la la la la, la la la la

The grand plan was that Richard would install the ducting over the Christmas holidays, but as the new roof is not on yet, the ducting will have to wait. And Richard will have to console himself by eating, drinking and being merry during the holidays instead.

For something more technical on MVHR units and ducting.... read on

Christmas is coming....

Well, as far as I'm concerned, Christmas has arrived already!

We now have a lorry-load of very beautiful Ecopassiv windows, most of which are being stored in the lounge of our rented house due to lack of suitable storage space on site.

The lead time on making and shipping these high-tech windows was less than we had anticipated. Anyway, it's nice to know they are being kept warm, dry and clean until the builders are ready to install them.

Handy hint - if you do refurbish a house and rent somewhere to live while you are doing it, get somewhere big. The place that we are renting is twice the size of the house we are refurbishing - and the extra space has proved most useful.

The other handy hint - these triple glazed windows are heavy - 40kg per square metre. We had the good fortune to know someone with a handy warehouse and forklift for unloading the windows, and then used their lorry with tail lift to bring the windows to our rented house. Unloading these from a curtain-sider in our fairly narrow street would have been a nightmare.

1950's houses have cavity walls, right?

Some people have expressed doubts that our 1950's house would be solid wall as houses of this age were supposedly all of cavity wall construction.

Well, 2 layers of brick, but no cavity here...

Ground floor insulation progressing

Steadily, the insulation of the ground floor is progressing.

Conveniently, there was a nice flat layer of concrete about half a metre below the lounge and dining room floor joists. The kitchen floor, on the other hand, needed to be dug out to a depth that would allow for the 300mm slabs of insulation. (It's quite a step up to the back door right now)

Beneath these slabs are downstands of the same insulation around all the walls (as deep as the underlying concrete would allow). These downstands are to minimise the heat lost into the ground through the walls by insulating on both sides of the walls as far down as possible.

And finally, upstands secured and taped, and expanding foam trimmed ready to receive the concrete.