Day 70 - plastic wrapped again

We finished putting in the floor joists into the main section of the house, leaving only the area around the octagon and a lot of the blocking to be done later.


We then put up two temporary frames along the length of the houses and stretched a large sheet of polytunnel plastic over the top of the houses.

This is a fair amount of work and a considerable expense, but it will help to keep the structure dry and more importantly the insulated ground floor slab. The plastic will stay for the few weeks that it will take to build the remainder of the wall frames, and then we will take it off during a spell of dry(ish) weather, put up the next set of frames and if necessary put it up again.

Once the houses were covered, we pulled up the plastic that had been covering the ground floor slab for the past week to find that over 80% of the surface had got wet. We don't think that much or any of the water soaked into the insulation below, though it would have if we hadn't done anything.
The black builders plastic that we pulled from the floor was reused to cover the walls that the clear plastic sheet didn't reach.

It doesn't look great, but the wooden structure and floor will dry out and remain dry for the next few weeks allowing us to continue to work on the blocking and framing out of the wind and rain.
Neither of us like using so much plastic, but at least with the polytunnel plastic, it will be reused for many years in the gardens and allotments!

Day 67 - finishing the ground floor structure

We had a fair amount of rain overnight, and we have found that our strategy for keeping water off of the wood floor slab is not working. We lifted the plastic in a few places and found some water sitting on the surface of the OSB board. At the moment it does not seem to be doing any damage, but it will eventually leak down into the hemp/lime insulation. We can't wait until the rest of the frames are up and the roof on before doing something, so we have decided to finish putting in the first floor joists and structure and then to cover the entire frame with a big sheet of polytunnel plastic.
We spent the day finishing putting the top plate into position and preparing for the joists.

Day 48 - floor slab finished, varnished and covered

We finished all of the remaining small pieces of the flooring, and now the structural slab is complete.

We decided to varnish the surface of the OSB board in order to protect it in case some water came through the plastic. Also, there is a good chance that we will move in to the houses before they are finished, before the final hardwood flooring is in place, and the varnished OSB board will be a better floor in the interim.




We covered the entire floor slab surface with two sheets of silage cover, reusing the old one and adding a new one on top.


We hope that this plastic will last until the roof is in place and plan to place the wall panels directly on top of the plastic. So we secured the edges with batons and covered the surface with pallets and sheets of wood to prevent the plastic from billowing up too much in the wind.