Well, it was a nice sunny Tuesday morning, but foggy! There weren’t any
obvious changes to the exterior but inside, things were definitely making
progress.
I don’t think I’ve taken any photos of the house from the top of the property
since the exterior looked so complete, so I thought I would. The fog/clouds
are crazy today. To give you an idea, below this photo is the usual view that
you would see from the orchard looking toward Tisnov.
This is what you can usually see behind those clouds.
The wooden frames that were in place to hold the concrete stairs in place are
gone on the top and the stairs are usable. The under-structure will remain in
place for awhile longer though.
Long before the house was ready to build, the designers had to put together
plans and there are about 10 different versions of the plans. One shows
water lines, another shows electric, others are structural. In theory all of
these should match and be consistent, but we have humans working on our
projects and some things get missed. We discovered that there was a hole
missing between the main floor and the technical room for the pipes to go
through so over the weekend a few more holes needed to be drilled. This one
was already there but accidentally ended in the wall, so that needed to be
fixed but it’s now good to go and the pipe is through.
This is one of the new holes that had to be drilled, and as you can see, the
new pipes are already through, which you’ll see when we get to the next floor.
Pipes for the downstairs toilet.
So this is standing in the entryway and looking toward the back of the house.
You can see the edge of the doorway to the bathroom on the left in the photo.
You can see the new long hole that was drilled and the pipes. What you see
here are water and radiator pipes (small white flexible pipes with and without
the gray insulated covers), sewage (gray pipes) and central vac (bigger white
pvc pipes).
What you also may realise (as I did) is that this means that the flooring
won’t be going directly on the cement, but rather there will be some sort of
structure that will need to be build above all the piping that the actual
flooring will eventually be installed on. In addition, on the main floor, we
will have radiant floor heating so that will eventually need to get installed
as well before the final flooring goes down. Of course, that is ahead of
us, so we’ll get there when we get there.
The next two photos are the kitchen. The central vac that you see in this top
photo will be a little “door” that is hidden in the baseboards under the
cabinets that you can open and with a broom, sweep directly into, rather than
having to sweep into a dustpan and then into the trash.
Also the kitchen. You can see that the plumbing behind the walls for the sink
is done and on the far left is the water to one of the outside taps.
Upstairs again, and here you can see the central vacuum lines and one of the
differences between upstairs and down, which is that we opted for
radiators upstairs instead of radiant floor heating. Downstairs we are going
to have hardwood floors but really wanted carpeting upstairs on the landing
and in the bedrooms so that it’s cozier. Radiant floor heating doesn’t work
nearly as well with carpeting, so we have radiators up there. That’s what the
small, flexible, white piping is for.
You can see here the pipes coming out of the wall for the landing radiator.
Again, this is the bathroom - toilet, anyway. (I wish there was a better way
to describe this in english because saying we have 2 bathrooms upstairs is
simply untrue. Bathroom and toilet room? I don’t know…) Anyway, you can
see that the piping for the vacuum cleaner runs through here, and I think the
white pipes with gray insulation are just water..
This is the shower stall, which is directly behind the toilet-bathroom. They
started plumping the drain pipe.
You can see the location of the bathroom here, off the landing. The wall in
front of you is where we will have two sinks with a cabinet underneath.
Another thing that’s quite different here from US is that, while I suppose
you could probably get them if you were determined, generally, the
bathroom sinks aren’t a separate unit from the cabinets. When you buy a
bathroom sink, it’s a combined unit with an undermounted cabinet and a
sink built into it, which is then mounted to the wall. Typical American
style sinks which sit into a countertop on top of a cabinet standing on the
floor just aren’t common here. (I’ve never seen one in any homes as long as
I’ve been here.)
I think the two photos below do a better job showing the guest bedroom than the
last ones. This is still standing in the doorway but you can see that the
chimney runs through the room. There will be a bit of a bumpout there, but
we’ve been doing research and are considering different options like
installing a pull-down bed and cabinets or something similar so that we can use
the room for other things when we don’t have guests. We haven’t made any
decisions, but it is interesting because I’ve found that due to the fact that
so many European homes and apartments are so much smaller, there is a bigger
market for clever design and spaces that have multiple purposes. I found an
Italian company the other day that has designed a combination
bookshelf/pulldown bed which I think is simply the coolest thing. If we had
something like that, then we would have more book storage (always needed) but
also a really comfy place for our guests. Again, that’s much farther on down
the line, so only thoughts at the moment!
You can also see that the radiator lines have been run in here as well.
And last but not least, our bedroom also has radiator pipes plumbed!
