We only had the two jobs to focus on this week.  The first job was to put down the under floor heating pipe work on the first floor.  We had to roll out a reflective foil across the entire floor area, rolling it across and between all the joists.  While I rolled it out and stapled it, Stu followed along fixing all the pipe clip holders into position.  This all sounds nice and easy, but Stu and I were doing our very best tight rope impressions!  We couldn’t put any boards down anywhere to walk on as this would then stop us from getting the foil down.  So we had to do all this work balancing very carefully on the joists which are spaced out every 600mm and are 2 inches wide, with a nice 3 metre drop down to the ground floor.  But we got all the foil and clips into place with no scares.

The next thing was to get all the under floor heating pipe work laid and clipped into the holders.  We had 6 zones to do, with each pipe run starting and finishing at the manifold in the utility loft area.  Once again we put our tight rope skills to the test as we laid the pipe.  I was in front of Stu feeding him the pipe while he was clipping it into position.  I nearly had a moment where I tripped over the pipe and nearly took a dive down to the ground floor.  Fortunately I quickly turned into Spiderman and managed to land myself onto two joists and stopped myself, Stu, the foil and some of the pipe work all disappearing to the ground below!  It certainly made the heart rate quicken.

By Wednesday pm we had all the under floor heating installed, so it was now a case of getting the two tonnes (90 sheets) of floor board delivery from off the drive area and up onto the first floor joists, ready to be laid.  Come Thursday morning we were ready to make a start.  We got the first 8 to 10 down and fixed into position.  We now had a safe working area, so Stu passed up the rest of the sheets and I took them off him and stacked them up.  By the end of Friday we had all 90 sheets fixed down, and we now had a proper first floor, floor area.  The new build has taken another big step forward and starts to take shape.  Next week it’s the ground floor pipe work and the sand and cement screed.