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.