A whole gang of the cheery chaps here!

 There are several systems for fitting underfloor heating. With our wooden joist system we are going for a pug screed. “Trays” made by plywood (from the temporary floor we have used to date) will be supported on battens shown here. Then 50mm Cellotex is dropped in, the underfloor heating pipe clipped in place and then a cement sand screed applied. So ahead of doing the stud walls the battens are put in from the underside of each floor.

 Yet another variety on the roof.

 We’ve had a weeks holiday, hence all the pictures of the sedum while we were away! Meanwhile the carpenters have finished fitting all the windows and doors (except the three we are having carved in Spain which should come end of July).

The interior of the house is pretty conventional in the walling system, apart from some of the walls being covered with 2″ thick cedar “log siding” to make some of them look as if they are made of solid log but for a fraction of the cost and with the advantages of fitting the services (electrical wiring etc) to the stud wall. The other good thing about using  siding rather the more conventional plasterboard that we will use elsewhere is that siding is very easy to fix picture hooks into!

 Here is another one, just starting to flower.

 And here is another close up of another variety in the sedum blanket.

  Here’s another cheery fellow. It’s a great shame that we will not be able to enjoy close up views like this in the future.

 While we are taking a few days break from the build we will keep you amused with some sedum close ups.

 We got to be a bit addicted to watching the sedum grow while we had the luxury of scaffold to view it from. If you enlarge this shot you can see the droplets of water on the sedum, which get adsorbed into the pods on the ends of some of the varients and are used as a reserve for the plant and give it better resistance to drought. Indeed, over watering can encourage weeds and grasses that need more water than the sedum to survive.

 As the scaffold is taken down the down pipe for the gutter needs to be installed while we can stand on the lower level and the upper level scaffold has been removed. It takes about a full day for all the scaffold to be taken down. We bought this gutter system in Germany a few Christmases ago – like a lot of self builders we have been accumulating things that we saw that we liked before the building started, along with tearing out pages from magazines that had things we thought would suit the house.