Second visit from the Huf Haus blokey

So we had the second official appointment with the nice Huf Haus rep chap, who had come down from Hartenfels especially to review progress thus far.

Claudia and I arrived separately, so I rather rushed in with little time to simply look at the progress. By the time I'd caught up with the party, the discussion had just about reached the Bastelraum... the hobby room that we'd arranged to be built into the Keller with a couple of extra windows down there for natural daylight. Good thing too, because in my mitts were samples of the floor laminate that I'm going to be putting down myself into about a third of the Keller area (that's the Bastelraum plus the bottom of the stairs area. Seems impossible at first, but the thin laminate board plus a sort of skinny underlay rubber stuff adds up to about 1cm in total. And thus the Huf Haus work of putting down the underfloor heating pipes, plus the stuff they put down on top of that, has to be exactly 1cm short of the final desired height.

Obvious stuff, but yer'd be amazed how many people stuff this up.




Anyways, said laminate passed the Huf Haus inspection, and I left it down there in case the rest of the Huf Haus people needed a further scratch and sniff session. It's that sort of whitewashed wood grain stuff, expertly chosen by Claudia (heh heh) to bring yet more light in and look clean and smart. Should look good, even if the bloke wot's gonna shove it down has little idea what he's doing as he works in a bank. Hmm, must be careful not to lay it down over anything bumpy, like one of the kids.

One thing that I couldn't help noticing were the snaky floor heating pipes that were, well, snaking their way all over the place. The shapes they made were interesting to look at (for a few minutes, anyway) and as always you could see the love that went into laying them down. I took a few photos for the rest of the world to peer at, so one hopes the images do the snakes some justice. Note I sneeked in a photo of the gorgeous, pouting Claudia 'cos she's far more photogenic than me. Ditto the hairy-arses doing the hard work.

As we ascended to the ground floor, and later the upstairs, it became clear that the floor heating work's been fully completed throughout... and it looked like a lot of work indeed. One believes they'll be laying some sort of gravelly stuff on top of that to fill in the spaces, before it all gets coated in a nice flat surface of (I suppose) concrete. Or is it cement? Oh lordy, I have no idea.



There was another pause in the bathroom, where we committed to have the wooden box thing that covers the sink pipes trimmed down to standard Huf Haus height. Not sure what happened, but it may be that the drawings for the non-Huf Haus sink unit that we've chosen (From some fancy bathroom company calling itself 4B. Really, 4B. Bloody pretentious name, unless yer a pencil) had an example wall box shown on it, and this was taken literally by the ever helpful Huf Haus people. They increased the height of the wall box on the assumption that's what we wanted, so it's now too high to allow us to place a mirror against the remaining wall above it. Well, maybe a mirror for giraffes would work.

Anyways, it'll be cut back down to size when the carpenter people descend on us sometime in the new year. Case (almost) closed.




There was something else I thought I'd share with you lot. Somehow the underfloor heating pipes, even if not exactly what we'll be seeing when we move it, still gave us a visual sense of scale of the interior for the first time. By golly, this is going to be a bloody big house. Yes yes yes, I'm well aware that all houses look bigger when empty of furniture, especially those with large open plan spaces, but this was on a bigger scale again. The photo above gives a sense of what I mean, but you've really got to be there, as they say. We might have to set up a semaphore system for communication. And carry mobile phones with us. And a flask of hot tea in case we get isolated from the group.

Simply huge.

Oh, and some progress in the grinds. Wassa grinds? It's a posh word for gardens, innit? Anyways, the main house steps are built and as my fingers pitter-patter on this keyboard, the last of the outside floor tiles should be going down. Some daft sod forgot to take some outside photos, didn't he. Anyway, trust me; they're down. Just in the nick of time, as the forecast's somewhat bleak as the dreaded snows descend upon us this weekend. Ooer, down to 500m and probably lower. To interpret: a sprinkling of snow happens at 500m, snows worth sweeping away at 600m, and snows worth italicising at 700m. And we're at 726m. This simply means it's highly unlikely we're going to get our parking area paved until the thaw in March.

Buggah buggah buggah.

Incidentally, yer might have heard that Switzerland's a somewhat mountainous place, and thus its weather forecasts are three dimensional. Really. "Snow down to 500m" and "Freezing above 1,000m" being familar weather items to digest and talk about over a beer or three. Makes the forecasts a tad complicated to get yer head around, but it seems to work. And as there are plenty of people in this country that really do live at altitudes higher than Ben Nevis, it's a necessity.