floor screeding

Self-Build Timeline – Stage 4, Turning Your House into a Home

04/07/2014

self build timeline stage 4

You can now take the scaffolding down and behold your beautiful new self-build home – from the outside…

The first fix

Now it’s time to call in your tradesmen and move inside for the first fix. Sort out the electrics, the plumbing, the carpentry and any underfloor heating etc. so your home is serviceable.

Walls, floors and ceilings

Now you can continue with the aesthetics of the inside of your property. Your team can now apply the floor screeding, ready for the flooring to be fitted. When you put in the main flooring will depend on your choice of material and whether you can do it before or after decorating. You will need to choose between dry lining and plastering to finish the walls; your choice of insulation may affect your decision.

Finish the services and carpentry

With the floors, walls and ceilings ready for the final decorations you’ll need to connect up all the mains services and complete the wiring and plumbing so your house is fully serviceable, complete with a functioning kitchen and bathroom.

Decorating

Now you’re getting very close to completion and you can decorate and furnish your house to turn it into your perfect home. There are lots of things to consider here… lighting, which curtains / blinds to choose, how to design your perfect bedroom and what flooring  will suit your needs. Getting the interior design right is so important for your future enjoyment of your new home.

Back outside

With the inside now beautiful and ready for you to move in you can complete the outside. Put in the driveway and landscape the surrounding gardens so you can start to create an outside space to match the inside. You may need to put in patios or decking. It’s likely that you will have a fair amount of clearing up to do to repair damage caused by machinery and lorries.

The final inspection

Once you’re happy you can arrange for your house to be signed off by the building regulators. They will check that it conforms to regulations and the original planning permission.

Moving in

The only thing left to do now is to move in! The house is now your home. Don’t forget to put the building process behind you and just enjoy it as it is for a couple of years before making any further changes… unless of course you’ve been bitten by the “self-build bug”, in which case go back to the beginning, learn from any mistakes you made and do it all over again!

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Priestgate – a case study

31/01/2014

plastering wallWe work on a wide range of projects at KJ Hill, some may be just a few hours’ work and others could take months. Whilst we offer a project management service, we are also happy to work as part of a larger team and offer specific services that dove tail into the overall development.

For example we were contracted by Lindum Sturgeon (a subsidiary of Lindum Construction) to work on 29 new flats as well as two city centre listed buildings and two new builds in Priest Gate, Peterborough.

We started on this project in June 2013 and completed it in December 2013. At any one time we had somewhere between 3 and 15 people working on site. As we were taking care of the dry lining, plastering and floor screeding we needed to be flexible and adapt our workforce according to the needs of the project and the timescales that our fellow contractors were working to.

All jobs have their own particular challenges and on this occasion we were working on a mixed development of old and new properties, added to that two of the buildings were listed, which quite often brings associated delays and issues for us to overcome.

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Beech Cres & Housden Close – a case study

29/01/2014

construction worker silhouette at work vector illustration
One of our recent projects was taking care of the plastering, floor screeding and dry lining for a small development of six properties; two semi-detached houses and four flats, however the houses and flats were a mile apart! These were new builds and on this occasion we were appointed as sub-contractors to Parrott Builders in Wheathampstead in Herts.

Work such as this means that we have to maintain a flexible approach as we need to be on site at just the right time. Also, as final stage suppliers we’re sometimes asked to complete our part of the job quicker than was initially required, so having extra people on hand to speed up the job is a benefit that we’re pleased we can provide.

We had around six people on site at any one time and although the developments were only a mile apart, it was an added complication that we were able to manage on a daily basis.

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Welcome to our blog

01/10/2013

Welcome to our new blog where we propose to discuss the many aspects of plastering, drylining and building in both the residential and commercial sectors of our industry. We look forward to showing information on domestic conversations, extensions and new builds, as well as renovation of care homes and offices.

For your convenience we have provided a tag cloud in the right hand column which should bring up related posts as we add them to the site.

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