We're moving in about a week....

Yes, we're planning to move next Sunday!!!

And it feels unreal as there is still quite a bit to be done before that:
- carpenters will install all 10 inner doors, sauna benches and all lists for windows, doors, floors and roofs
- sauna stove is not yet installed (can be also done after that but before Christmas please)
- electricians have to finalize quite a bit of stuff: garden lights, electricity for 2nd floor, put room thermostats
- install TV antenna (and satellitte dish)
- get Internet connection working
-  plummer has to install one missing toilet and kitchen sink connections
- we have to finalize the assembly of our kitchen, finish painting 2 remaining walls and finish the brick wall in the sauna. Also assemble lights, and couple of new clothing cupboards :).

And above all, pack our stuff from old place to be ready for the move!

A deadline serves its purpose even in house moving and ours is to move before Christmas and latest before year end as by 1st of January we should be out of our old place.

More updates...

I left it in previous post at the status as at the end of August. Pictures tell the story a bit although we have not been taking many pictures especially that my phone got some water under the lens and started taking rather blurry pictures :(.

A lot of work was done to tile the bathrooms' walls (upstairs/ downstairs), sauna, etc. We had the tiles laid by same mason that built the brick walls as he claimed he "can do" tilling as well. He turned out to be ok at laying tiles but really messy in keeping work place tidy. He's also been staining things with water insulation (vedeneriste). And then he screwed up with the silicone so bad that we had to take the silicone out from all places and have somebody else come for one day to finish the work.

The beginning of upstairs bathroom. Looks small but there will be a toilet, double sink and a bathtub :)

Retro Pukkila tiles ready for bathrooms

work in progress

downstairs bathroom floor

2nd floor bathroom coming up

sauna room wall that we were really happy with

1200 kg / 150m2 of laminate for our floors from Byggmax.fi

For our wooden panel walls we choose a white color "eco" paint Uula that is marketed as "latex-free and odourless water-borne natural oil paint". And indeed it was easy to paint and did not smell of any chemicals or plastic. My father did the big job of painting about 130m2 of wooden panels. He's our HERO!

We used about 18 liters of paint. Other choices of paint we've been looking at were wood wax Osmo Color and Bloom. Osmo Color wax did seem to have in it quite a lot of VOC which made us avoid it. When looking at prices for it we did find that prices for same paint were almost 50% less in Germany and they deliver also to Finland!

Bloom wax was also an interesting option but was more expensive than Uula. As we did not want to see the wood paterns of the panels Uula was the right choice for us as it is pretty much fully covering the wood grain. Some like it semitransparent but we already have the outside house walls with lots of wood paterns to look at :).

white painted wooden panels versus laminate floor and roof panels

the white corner for the house have been added

also balcony was done out of the wood I painted white

We have not had time to update the blog as often as we'd have liked, as building a house and having a regular job leaves little time to spare...
We'll post more about the rooms, kitchen etc when we get tofind the time.

It's been a while, but here we go...

PART 1 of catching up articles:

We did not publish updates to the works at the house since beginning of July. In the meantime a lot has happened at the house, besides being a lovely summer! The carpenters  were working on the house about half of this period and the rest of the period building other houses (no holidays for them:) or so we've been told).

I listed the events told by pictures in chronological order:

The fireplace was delivered (real soapstone - vuolukivi) and I carried the 1.5 tonne thing piece by piece inside. Strong (office) man!

 ...and this was the result after being installed:

This will look differently in the end because the surface will be tiled with white classic tiles and will get fireplace and oven (black) doors.

Then the inner brick walls were finalized one by one:

wall towards shower room

kodinhoitohuone (washing/ cleaning room)

coming sauna

Then there was the issue that the floor materials included in the house package from Lapponia house for second floor were not fitting very well for the floor heating option. We had these wooden chip boards (lastulevy) which we decided to replace with floor gips boards. Luckily we could sell the chip boards on tori.fi.

The floor heating is transmitted evenly through the floor by aluminium plates. The initial installation of the floor heating pipes went wrong because the installers did not seem to care too much where walls were going to be, were pipes should not be (like in the cold area of the wall) or to leave space for clothes dropping vent  :)...so they had to come back and redo part of the work.

upstairs before floor heating

Vital wood fibre insulation (40 cm)

we live in a wired world...

fire escape installed

also rain water collectors and snow stops were put in August

The upper floor where you can see an organized mess and the gips board floor and the wind paper covering the ceiling. Do you see the hole on the ceiling next to the 2 windows on the far left? Through that hole the ekovilla (recycled wooden fibres) was blown on top of the paper to make up about 40 cm of roof insulation.

The living room has been paneled (roof and walls) (August)

the west side of the living room

busy summer day at the house

storage/ car shelter foundation iron work

storage/ car shelter foundation

my parents helped us a lot, especially with chopping the wood

...to be continued. This is how things were in the end of August 2011.

Got wallpapers for kids rooms ordered from Holland and they are gorgeous!! We have Eijffinger and Room seven but there are several interesting. Can recommend www.behangstore.nl and www.kidsbehangstore.nl

One more month to go and it feels that now things start to fall apart... inside doors were all wrong and have to be ordered again (bad case senario is 4months delivery time), plummer is still missing, fire detectors are totally missing from downstairs and our current house is not yet sold due to... greeks... financial situation in the world.

But hey, we are still happily married, healthy and going strong...

Last delays, I hope

Airco-machine was ordered only today... and it takes 3 weeks to be delivered. How convinient. Somebody is not doing their jobs too well. And in 4 weeks we are moving in, or were planning to. So we felt totally abandoned by Nord Energy. Have to check our agreement tonight and discuss with wiser people how to proceed.

Our kitchen machinery was delivered today and the freezer was all bumped and need to be changed. Luckily we donot need it desperately since kitchen will be delivered on coming friday and been put together during the weekend (Ikea; 160 packages and 1 million screws...)

All the wooden pannels will be painted twice and that's what we are busy with right now. We choose ecological paint UULA and with two painters it is going really fast and well. Cip's dad is here to help.

iam back!

As you have noticed we are totally running behind. House got ready outside this week and next week we should get the heating on. Not everything has gone smoothly... Our KVV-vastaava (person who is liable for plumming, heating etc.) has vanished, gone hiding, left the country, god knows, but he is not to be reached. So Juuso Pelkonen, if you are reading this, pls. give us a ring :D

Foundation of the storage is finally done accordingly but we have no longer time nor money to finish it before winter. Cannot recommend to anybody ME for making foundations unless you enjoy calling everyday begging them to do the job... After threathing them with a lawyer, things started to move on but honesly we have spent hours and euros trying to get them to do the job agreed ^Ö*&@¤??!!

But as I am the most positive person on earth, our new home looks and feels exellent and I cannot wait to move in and start living there. Sauna is very nice and the retro tiles I choose for bathrooms are super next to blue metallic showers and tabs. Got lucky again and found tabs on sale.
Land around the house is finally flattend and all the holes/ ditches closed: MUD everywhere.

Will post you new photos soon.

Yes, building a new house but how about the current house?

This site is more about building a new house, but one of our concerns is also selling our current semi-detached house (paritalo).

We are trying at the moment to sell it by ourselves on www.oikotie.fi and hopefully we can get it sold soon We plan to move directly from the old house to the new one somewhere in November.

I would be interested to hear from other house builders how did you manage the sale? And the “bridge” financing? Any tips welcome.

Having two house loans at the moment does not feel very good/ safe. Luckily, at least the bank agreed that we can pay interest-only and no loan repayments for an extended period.

I have found at this website which explains quite well in English the steps in selling your house by yourself without real estate agents. This site belongs to Finnish consumer protection agency.
http://www.kuluttajavirasto.fi/en-GB/housing/selling/

summary of the last month

We have been a bit busy lately and did not update the site for a month now. You know, all those trips to swim by the lakes leave no time for blogging :).

So in chronological order a summary of the happenings at the house:

First the insulation for the floor was laid with quite a delay as the carpenters have done an error when installing the walls. Walls should have been installed on 5 cm higher beams, but they forgot to put an additional wooden piece of 5 cm between concrete beams and the wall foot. The plan was to have 25 cm of EPS polystyrene insulation. However, due to this error there was only space for 22 cm of insulation. Hhhmm! The solution was then to put 15 cm of EPS and 7cm of SPU. SPU is a better quality insulation material as it's harder, water proof and insulates better. The idea is that 7 cm SPU insulates as well as 10 cm EPS, or so. Below you can see the place for the fireplace and chimney with the SPU insulation on top.

450m of floor heating pipes were installed

Then the concrete floor was done (about 8 cm of concrete that covered the floor heating)

Thereafter chimney was built from prefabricated Schidel pieces. I took a day off and helped with lifting the pieces to up to 8m on top of the house.

View from the top of the house: There are 2 chimneys holes: one for the fireplace (the bigger one) and the small is for the sauna stove. It was interesting to lift the 25 kg a piece elements on the roof!

Also there has been work done on installing the ventilation ducts in the house and on top of the house and the 2 teraces are almost done.  Also the ceiling insulation for the first floor was installed (10 cm wooden fibre).

Then the windows were made ready with white iron trays and also the white wooden planks were attached under the roof edges as below:

Brick colored roof

After 2 and 1/2 weeks from the delivery date our house has gotten roof. More or less in one day 8.5 tonnes of tiles were installed on the roof. That's a positive example of Finnish efficiency :).  Our carperters then took a break from work on our house and went to bring another house to the same state as ours...

Check out the pictures:

before

and after...

Last weekend we visited Porkkala peninsula in Kirkkonummi. The place is beautiful and scenery is great if you can cope with the winding/hilly road. There we photographed this small cottage below which is resembling the inspiration for our house.

week 20: work on the house goes on

The assembly crew made of father and son (plus their Lapland Shepherd dog) continued working on our house and they're doing a good job as progress looks good.

Here are some pictures of the progress in chronological order:

This is how it looked inside after 3 days

House is getting rain cover (sateelta suojaan), our team working even on Saturday

Et voila!

some serious woodwork happened inside too, here's the upper floor

new generation of carpenters is getting ready...

the brick carrying wall in the making, next to which sauna and bathroom will be built

our wall wooden panels apparenlty are called URSUS. Let's  drink a URSUS beer to it :)