Stairs - Going Up

On Tuesday the stairs to the first floor were put in. It only took a couple of hours and it makes things so much easier now we don't have to climb up on the ladder.

We celebrated by carrying down about 100 of the around 200 excess roof tiles Allkauf left after they finished the build (they said these are our problem, not theirs). We have to take them all out of the house before the scree is laid. Another frustrating point Allkauf could easily deal with at little-to-no cost but a big undertaking for Steffi and me.

Interior Construction

It's been a busy few weeks on site. On Monday 2nd November the interior construction company arrived. They took delivery of more plaster boards and the rockwool insulation bales and when we arrived they quickly talked over what they will do and let us point out where fittings like sinks and the toilet will go.  One surprise for us was that they said that although in the architects plans, the wall that is supposed to be set forward for where the sink will go (next to the toilet in the upstairs bathroom) is not included in the house price and we would have to buy the frame for this ourselves. Strangely the toilet will be set forward and is included in the price.

It is these small things that don't cost much that are a little frustrating with Allkauf. We have no idea what we need, how big, etc. so it's not so much the cost but the time researching and finding where to buy it.  In any case, we said to plan for there not being a wall set forwards there, although this might look odd having the toilet set forward and the sink next to it not. We can hopefully still add this later.

The soon got started and by Wednesday the ground floor was fully insulated.

Kitchen/dining area

Part of the living room

Downstairs bathroom & utility room

Office

The guys said they didn't need us to go on site over the next couple of days so we decided to take a spontaneous holiday to the UK and drove over the same night for 5 days!

We drove back on Sunday night and as we were just crossing the German border received a call from the builders manager to say that our cellar was flooded. After our previous flood we feared the worst and made a detour straight to the site to see the damage.

On arrival they were already pumping out the water, which was from the mains so at least it was clean. We were given a story as to why the water was left on over the weekend (which may or may not be true) but they accepted responsibility and will cover the costs of the clear-up so we left them too it and tried our best to put it out of our minds.

By Thursday they had finished and the cellar was dry again. We inspected the work, which to our untrained eyes looked fine so we signed off on on it. Here's how the house looks with walls:

Kitchen

Dining area

Living room

Entrance hall

Sophie's bedroom

View on to the landing from Sophie's room

Landing

Master bedroom

Spare bedroom

Spare bedroom in the other direction

There were some issues we noticed:

1. All the windowsills were damaged
2. Some of the electricity and network cables were damaged (but not down to the metal)
3. Some of the network cables had been cut shorter meaning the labels on them are gone. It will be guesswork to find out which cable goes to which room.
4. there were some panels with too few screws that they are a little loose.

After talking to the manager and our Allkauf contact, the windowsills and panels will be replaced/repaired.

DIY Cabling

On Sunday Joe and I headed up to Heimerwegwiesen to lay some additional cables in the house. As the electrician wanted an extortionate amount for laying the cables to the satellite dish I decided we could do this ourselves. It didn't take long as we just had to measure out eight lengths of cable then bundle them together and poke one end outside under the wall, which was not yet sealed. We then left the other end taped together and hung next to the internal TV cables where we plan to put the sat TV multi-switch.

I also bought 100m of Ethernet cable with the plan to run cables in to the living room and downstairs office but with so much cable we decided to wire up all the rooms in the end.

Along with the Ethernet cable I bought 30m of speaker wire to run cables to the four corners of the living room for a surround sound system.  Unfortunately as we couldn't manage to nail in wire holders to the concrete floor to run the cables directly from the fromnt to the back of the livingroom so we had to run them parallel to the electric cables that went a long way round the room.  This meant we were about a meter short of  cable so had to literally cut a couple of corners to make it work.