With some of the rooms now pretty finished we are ready to prepare the floors prior to putting down the wood flooring.

To level the pug floor screed we use some latex floor levelling compound. With the underfloor heating switched on this will dry quite quickly.

 Having given the siding a week to acclimatise to the heated house, we can now start to fit it. It is 2″ thick, and our skirting is about 4 inches tall, so we pack out the bottom (first) piece of siding with some 4 x 2 reduced to 3.5″ which also sets the siding so that it is at the correct hieght to the logs on the walls and therefore looks like it is part of the log wall.

The house has several 7″ square posts supporting the roof through the floors and one of these just falls in the wrong place for the siding, which cannot be slid into position because of the post protruding in th adjacent side wall close to the corner.

 So we have to cut the siding lenghts slightly short and will have to fit a trim to cover this up later when all the siding has been fitted.

This particular stud wall has siding on both sides so we have to come up with a clever way around things to avoid showing any fixings on the log.

 So we fix battens to the back of the siding, lift the siding in place and then screw through the battens to fix the siding to the studs. As each piece of siding is put in place, sound insulation is dropped in place to fill the gap as we go along.

Prior to the internal architrave being fixed to the window linings, we will need to fill any gaps with can foam to complete the insulation and avoid any air gaps etc.

 After allowing the foam a day to expand, any excess is cut off and then the architrave can be fitted. With Architraves, you either use the same material as the logs, or something that is noticeably different so that it does not look like a poor attempt at a match. We have settled on American Oak to go round the windows and doors as it will take the knocks better than Western Red Cedar.

 Some of the internal walls in the house will be plasterboard, and some will be log siding, which is like a slice of wood that has been machined to look like the inside face of logs used for the house external wall. We have pre-painted lots of it with a wood treatment and now that the underfloor heating is on, we can bring it over prior to using it on the walls at the left back part of this view.

By bringing it into the house a week or so before, it has a chance to settle down and dry out a bit more before fixing, reduing the potential for settlement after fixing.

 We have a few dry days to get the extra window work finished off. The jigs we used to guide the router on the main doors and windows have to be modified because the return on the wall is quite small and the dovetails get in the way as well.

Here we have finished the routering for the architraves and header and just need to give the routered surfaces some protection treament before fitting. We will also put plenty of silicon to help seal the log to architrave and header faces.

 Ho Hum, we have some heavy driving rain the other day and found damp patches on the inside of some of the logs. Looking on the outside it looks as if there are cracks that extend along some of the logs for a considerable lenght, and in some places go all the way through the log. This cracking or “checking” is normal as the logs dry out. We experienced similar problems with water penetration in our earlier log house, and it sometimes needs and exact combination of rain and wind direction for the pesky crack to be found and the water to be pushed through it. So it really is a one or two day a year issue, but much better to discover it now, while we can fix it.

We contacted the North American log house supplier and they will be sending us a repair proceedure they recommend to deal with this.

 Before we could have the heat pump commissioned the other week we had to make sure the heat pump could control the pumps for the underfloor heating manifolds. As there is one manifold for each floor of the house, each with it’s own pump to drive the warm water through the floors covered by each manifold, you cannot connect lots of pumps to the heat pumps “P1” terminal, you have to use a relay with sufficient “ways” on it to deal with the number of manifolds and pumps that you have. It is a normal 230V relay, which sits on a base and has a cover to protect it.

 Adjacent to the two full height sliding glass doors our original house design had a full depth window on the return wall. The North American log house supplier was not happy to combine this with the two sliding glass doors to provide a truly panoramic view, but wanted to put a dovetail corner between the full height window and the sliding glass doors.

By the time the log kit arrived, the technician who helped with the build had told the production department responsible for machining the logs to leave the window opening out. He strongly advised we should leave the full height window out because there was considerable chance of the remaining short logs cracking.

So we decided to compromise and put in a half height window (similar in height to the other windows in the house) and make it narrower, so that less material was taken out and the remaining log ends were a bit longer. We also, because of timing, were able to leave doing this until the house had settled down for 6 months during the build, so was hopefull a lot more stable and less likely to start any cracking.

 Having cut the outline on the outside and the inside, more material is cut away until the log in the opening can be removed. There was also a tensioning stud going through the opening that we had to cut through and then “re-install” as a top stud and a bottom stud.

 Now we are ready to modify our routering templates to work in such a small space to be able to route out the surrounds for the architrave and header. To add this window takes about 4 man days!

 We are having wall hung toilets in the bathrooms, which means that the cisterns can be hidden in the studwork walls, saving space and keeping the lines of the bathrooms clean.

Here is the first cistern going in, with it’s blue steel framework. The frame is rated to be able to take 400lbs on the toilet, quite a heavy person! 

 Virtually all the ceilings in the house are plasterboard. After the plasterboard ceilings have been dry lined we can paint them. To protect the log walls from spatter we have covered them in black plastic sheets held up with staples.

We apply a 50% water and paint first coat and then two full strength coats after that. All the ceilings will be white as we want to combat the darker colour of the wood walls. Some of the internal walls in the log house will use log siding and some will be plasterboarded and painted to help increase the internal lighting.