water gets in

Well, a little bit has got into the new house, and quite a bit more into the kitchen of the rental - *properly* flooded, silt everywhere, garden a wreck, favourite cookbooks now have kitchen roll between every page in the hope of rescue... Could have been worse though. At least we don't care about the wallpaper coming off the walls or the vinyl flooring curling up!

In the lovely new house (oh how we can't wait to be in there!) there's a leak from the newly started skylights and from the openings made for the new kitchen windows (each is 170x100cm).. So nothing too worrying really.

One of the big south-facing bedroom window openings is completed on the outside, the other in progress - you can see the blue engineering bricks.

Insulating and making airtight upstairs is continuing apace. You can see the process - PILES of insulation inserted after the bitumen board and outer membrane are positioned between the rafters (and there's fancy phenolic foam insulation you can't see in the top corner) ;
the insulation piles are then boxed in with OSB Then the really posh (=expensive) airtightness membrane (I think it may actually be intelligent...) with equally posh and expensive tape

So there's still the insulated service void to go before the plasterboard...

Having a little rest before being put to work next week are the new hot water tank (green in the corner of this pic) and the flat panel solar thermal (hot water) thingies.

So we'll leave you with two images - more piles of insulation (there's still more outside) and the builders' portaloo in the courtyard

Hope you're drier than us! More after the next site meeting this Friday.