At last our wood burning stove has arrived. With a log house there are lots of wood off cuts to be disposed of, so a wood burning stove was a no brainer. Also with underfloor heating, a system to respond to sudden changes in temperature (which underfloor heating is not good at responding to) was required.

This is a HWAM Monet stove, with a “pizza oven” at the top, which made the unit quite tall and createf further installation problems down the line which we will update you on soon! If you want more details on these stoves go to www.euroheat.co.uk

The unit has thermostatic regulation via a bimetallic strip which controls the airflow (and hence rate of burn).

Here is our lovely 6 way light switch, with the 6th switch being the control for the lounge uplighters on a dimmer. It is in the middle of the Lounge-Diner-Kitchen area, and we have two way switching in the lounge and kitchen for the lights at each end.

This was a one off special made for us by Hamiltons, and their web site is at www.hamilton–litestat.com

 Apologies for the break in the blog, we have got very close to finishing the house, so time has been sparse for blogging. We have a load of pictures on the camera to download and update you all with about progress with our log house which is creating increasing amounts of interest from many of you.

Here is a small tip but it might save you wasting a door on a kitchen cupboard or similar. When marking the holes for a door handle with two holes, just put the handle alongside after marking out with a rule and pencil to check you have the holes in the right place. It can save considerable embarassment later, especially if you have lots of differing handle sizes in places. We certainly found this useful.

A long, long time ago, we did the rounds of the self build home exhibitions and at one of these, we saw a beautiful carved gold leaf door, with a classic sun motif. It looked stunning but the “antique” style would not suit our largely contemporary theme in the house.

Later, as we drifted towards non standard window sizes (despite the advice of our architect to go for standard sizes to avoid exhorbitant costs – he was right!) during the specification of the log house kit, the doors were left for us to source independently from the main kit. We looked at various European doors, costing upwards of 3,000 Euros, but felt that this was taking up too much of the budget and the doors whilst stylish were a bit mechanical in their look, because they are produced on the door equivalent of an infinately variable production line, variable that is in size (in 3 millimetre steps) in colour, handles etc but not design.

After some scrabbling around on the internet we eventually found the agents for the original carved doors. By now this Irish couple had moved to America and were working with craftsmen in Spain and Italy.

Instead of having one carved door, caution was thrown to the wind and we (OK, I!) decided that all three single external doors would be carved, one with a sun, one with a moon and one with a star. We would have some glaze quarter panels in the moon and star doors to improve light into the kitchen and utility room, which with UK building regs would need to be double glazed. The door locks would be espagnolet three point and just to make sure, we sent the locks to the door makers in Spain so that they could fit them.

Well, 7 months late, after many iterations to the carvings trying to get the look right, the doors arrived. The carvings were the least of the problems. The rustic look of the carvings extended to the construction method of the doors, the fitting of the locks, the warped shape of the doors etc. The method of construction with softwood tongues between iroko “planks” with no rail and stile construction meant the doors would almost certainly continue to warp and bend if used in an external environment where one side is warm and dry and the other side is exposed to the elements.

The agents had been working with the Spanish Artisan for several years, had clearly had similar problems in the past and this was the last straw. They wound up their business and could have left us high and dry. But in a credit to their business ethics they gave us a substantial refund on the doors and we have managed to use them in the house as rather expensive internal doors.

To reduce the risk of distortion our builder routered out chanels in the backs of the doors, fitted steel strips and covered them with “rails” which had a similar radius to the logs on the house so that the door looked appropriate to the internal face of the adjacent logs. Time will tell if this bends much.

Of course in a blog this makes one entry, in the real world this whole sorry saga from the doors arrival (seven months late) took a further eight weeks.

We replaced the external function of these doors with some “production line” doors from the nice people who made our aluminium clad windows and doors on the rest of the house, but more of these and what happened to the star and moon doors later.

From an early stage in the design of the house it was apparent that a larder would create a lot of storage space in an otherwise smallish kitchen for things like bread makers, food mixers, foodstuff etc. Also, using up a small corner cut out of the utility room it would not cost much in terms of space. The sliding door works well, saving space in front of the larder.

With inexpensive racking from www.screwfix.co.uk and some surplus joist material, the larder cost very little to make. The tiles on the floor were reduced from £30 per square metre to £10 from Porcelanosa. The joist material was taken to the local joinery shop and planned down from 2″ to about 1.25″, a round edge routered on the outside face, and the lower two shelves had an extra bit added to make them deep enough to take electrical appliances.

We left out the shelving to the right of the sliding door to leave space for the central vacuum hose, a brush and other tall items.

After a lot of sweat and tears the shower for the en suite bath room is close to completion. It has a mosaic style floor which was built into the main floor so that the water runs down to the back corner with a slight slope. The glass was cut to size, and apart from a few problems because the bracket manufacturers had changed the size of the fixing holes from their published information sheet, all went well. The Hans Groehe I Box now has it’s thermostatic control valve fitted and the shower head is in place so we can turn it on and test it.

 Here is another use for the lovely sheepswool insulation we got. With a few left overs we can fill the settlement gap above this outside door before fitting the architrave around the inside. We started with about 2″ of settlement gap above door and window frames and in many places this has already reduced to about an inch. Hopefully there is not much more movement left in the logs after nearly 18 months since the build started.

 We have had three custom built iroko doors made to divide the kitchen diner from the louge. In normal use there is a single door at the right hand end that can be opened on it’s own. The sun door behind our joiner is a story or two for another day.

 By dropping two catches the three doors can be folded right back until they are flat against the wall

 So then you can see all the way from one end of the house to the other. We have had the top panels on the doors made in wood for now, but they are removable if we feel we want glass in them instead, patterned, plain or whatever. The advice was to live with them first for a while and see how often they are open and how often closed.

 Of course with a log house nothing is straightforward as you constantly have to work compensation for settlement into your design. So the head of the doors “floats” verticallyon five steel posts that are fixed to the upper head and a generous inch has been left for the upper head to settle down towards the main head. This main head had to be made from two bits of iroko as 9″ wide was the maximum width our door maker could source.

 With the wood cut to size and the access tower in place we can now work on the fixing of the balconies. First up are the 5 cedar planks. Next are the hand rails and posts, which we have had made in iroko. The spindles are in western red cedar.

 So with most of the internal work on the house coming to a close we can get some of those outdoor bits done that we left for later, like finishing off the balconies. These sit on steel I section beams and have 5 8″ x 3″ cedar planks as the walking area. So these are given a couple of coats of the protection treatment applied to the main house logs before being put up.