Water and sewage

Me and Angelica made a quick visit to the house this morning, before work.

We noticed that two city workers was there digging a hole in the street, to hook the house up to the city’s water and sewage systems.

This was supposed to have been done a month ago, so when the builders needed water to mix the concrete glue used when building the outer walls, we had to ask the neighbors for water.

It was a good thing we where there, because they told us that “they would only run the pipes to the lot boundary, not all the way to the house. So we needed to connect them to the house ourselves”…

When we left we said to each other; “Wasn’t that exactly what the contractor said when doing the water/sewage-line installation in early January?”

We called him up, and yes, they had indeed already run their (our) end of the water/sewage pipes from the house out to the lot boundary, in order for the city to connect to them later.

Which of course meant that the city workers today should be connecting to the pipes already in place!

Our contractor said he would clear this misunderstanding with the city, and we assume that we saved ourselves a bit of trouble (another hole in the street) and money, by turning up at the house at the right time.

Panorama-o-rama

I got my hands on some software that could generate panoramas from a series of closely related pictures. Could not resist to make a few.

The garden…

Indoors… 

And we wish this was the view from our house, but it is from the nearby hills overlooking the Öresund strait. Isn’t it a nice view?

The first room

When we visited today, the walls of the first room was in place! It is the ground floor bathroom. Bastian checked it out, but was happier playing with the sawdust while dad took a million boring photos.

Beatrice wanted to help …

… gather a lot of sawdust, that is. ;-)

The roof tiles

As you can see, the roof tiles are almost laid now. The square “hole” is where the roof windows will be. The other side of the roof is also done, except for the two roof windows on that side.

The tiles turned out just the kind of medium gray we wanted, not too dark, and not too bright. It’s not the same to only see a few of them in a catalog, so we were happy they looked like we had hoped.

The Beam in the Eye

Seldom do I quote the bible, but it seems appropriate here, sort of.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Matthew 7:5

When looking around the house early February, after the roof frames was put in place, we could not help but noticing one tiny little detail in the living room, that stood out as being, shall we say, “a beam in the eye”.

Perhaps you can spot it too?

Indeed, we’ve done the drawings of the house ourselves - but those drawings was drawings of the desired floor plan, and of the desired exterior of the house, and contained no construction details like, say, the placement of the roof frames relative to the windows. We’ve had no other requirement here than the living room being open to the second floor.

Those drawings have been made into proper construction blueprints by the general contractor, and supposedly looked over by a proper architect and a proper building constructor. One might think they would have spotted a thing like this? Note that the beam does not even look like the other ones, it’s much thinner.

We obviously have told the general contractor we are not happy about this, and they are “looking into a solution”, as they say. (Please note that Dan the Builder is not the constructor, so no blame on him.)

If we’re lucky, they will be able to completely remove the beam, without compromising the stability of the house. We’ll just have to wait for the general contractors solution proposal, I guess.

Almost weatherproof

Now most of the windows have been fitted. The ones still un-fitted are the roof windows, because they have yet to cut out holes in the roof.

This is what a corner of the living room looks now like. Considerably less “construction site”, and more “room”, don’t you think?

And this is the long side of the house.

Note the absence of the front door. The doors have not yet been delivered, so the front door and the side door is what currently remains in order to get a weatherproof house.

I imagine Dan the Builder & Co really looks forward to this, because it is quite chilly now in mid February, mostly windy and temperatures bouncing above and below freezing.

A thin layer of snow also fell yesterday, as you can see.

Of course, before they can stay mostly inside, they have to face the freezing cold climbing around the roof putting the roof tiles in place. I’m not envying you, Dan! :-)

A Round Window in a Square Hole!

We took a few moments to visit the house this morning after dropping of the kids to school , and we found that Dan the Builder and his colleague have somehow managed to fit our round window nicely into what used to be a square hole in the wall!

It looks really, really good already, if I may say so! And this is even now without the paint.

When the rough edges are smoothed out it will look great from the inside too. We hope it will be eye-catching when you turn around the corner from the entrance.

Dan told us that when they fitted the window, a small boy and his mom walked by outside, and the boy shouted “Look, a round window!”

So I guess it’s eye-catching from the outside as well! :-)