All wrapped up

May 2010, at last some progress. This is taken from the road.

We hadn’t speced membrane on the roof to start with but the architects changed their minds. I guess this will re-inforce air-tightness. I can’t see from the pictures if they have taped joins or not. There should be an on-site control this week as a lot of quite fundamental jobs have been done:

• The steel portal (not visible on this pic)  has been put in place
• Redesigned roof trusses erected, and
• The corridor joing the front to the back of the house
• Oh and not to forget the most important: the shed!

I guess we’ll have a whopping big bill in soon.

Starting on roof

This house will not blow down that’s for sure. I hope they have pinned the wood frame to the foundation properly. So it doesn’t slip .

I don’t really like seeing that wood out in the rain, especially when I know it can stay like that for weeks in the driving rain!

But it’s not the first house they’ve built on Skye.

View from the living room

Kit going up

In March 2010 the first part of the kit was delivered and erected.

WE can of course see the bedrooms and bathrooms near the camera, and, facing the loch, kitchen, dining and living room, all joined in the middle with the hall, store room and study.

But I guess you’ll just have to take our word for that!

Have we been waiting for this moment!

Next step for Microsoft I fear will be to stop FAST as an independent product only bundling it with other packages, Sharepoint in particular.

I think this move will boost open source search initiatives. Why would anyone want to invest in expensive vendor licenses when they have no guarantee whatsoever that the product they build their search systems on will survive an acquisition. We all remember Verity and we’ll all remember FAST.

I must spend some time researching semantic web applications built on Solr to see if we can drop a Jena layer over hurisearch.

Panels under construction

So here is proof, I am told, that work is progressing. Looks more like coffins then a house to me.

But maybe I’ll need them before the bloody house is finished!

Well, what can I say?

On the build there has been progress, mostly with paperwork and some slight movement on the plot. We now have a fence! and I have photographic proof that we have an access road (well of sorts) and work has started on the foundations.

Of course I did chose the coldest winter since 1914 to build the house so I shouldn’t complain if progress is kind of frozen.

But as you’ve all guessed we did in the end get planning permission but what a fight.

The planning officer is of the opinion that horizontal cladding is urban, and that we should use rural vertical cladding! Never heard anything quite so stupid but then…

He also decreed that roofing should be black. I could go with that apart from the fact that when I look at most of the buildings visible from the plot they have grey roofs, just like what we want!

In the end though, after no small amount of argumentation and lobbying, we got permission for a grey roof and horizontal cladding with just a splash of vertical on the visible road side.

We also have a contractor, Portree Slaters, everyone I met said they are the best!

Now only two details bother us: The planning officer decreed when he gave permission that the timber cladding could not be horizontal but vertial and the roof colour had to be black not silver. The architects thought it would be a formality justifying the horizontal cladding and pointing to precendents, but no he refuses to a change his mind even if there are lots of houses like that in the highlands, even on Skye. We’re still some time away from cladding so we will keep on fighting for that. Sounds odd to me that planning can look at such detail for this house when I see some of the things that have been built recently.

Going back to Skye next Thursday to sign contracts with the builder and get the job started. Hope to get some socialising done too of course.