Wall Finishes & Starting on Second Fix
As first fix draws to an end and the walls get closed in, Chris Bates finds some works sail ahead, while others need a little more attention
Right: Until the internal fit-out begins, rooms can feel cold and even a little too large. Getting the kitchen cabinets in has helped the house to feel much more like a home
At this stage of the build, most days your site will feel like a hive of activity, with the wind in everyone’s sails, the whole team in good spirits and progress visible everywhere. You can literally see the dirt and detritus of the main construction stages fade away, and the shell of your building gradually transforming into a bona fide dream home. Other days, you’re inundated with fiddly jobs that don’t give the effortreward ratio of, say, plasterboarding an entire room. And, just occasionally, nothing much can happen at all because you’re busy waiting for plaster or tile adhesive to set.
In many ways, running a building project is a moveable feast: you’ll never hit every deadline you set, and accepting this (without letting on too much to your trades!) can take a lot of the stress off your shoulders. Not everything will quite be done in the ideal order you read about in the self build manuals, and some little things will inevitably go awry. Perhaps you’ve changed your mind about a detail and the work needs redoing; a trade or supplier hasn’t delivered on time; or your team’s encountered an unexpected problem that can only be solved over a cup of tea and a head scratch. The golden rule is to try to keep communication lines open, ensure everyone’s got the same goal in mind
and to not let issues in one area hold up momentum elsewhere (unless it really can’t be avoided).
Over the 11 pages of this month’s update from the Education House site, I’m looking in depth at some of the major works we’ve undertaken as first fix comes to an end, the walls are tacked and plastered, and second fix begins. This period brings blurred boundaries, with jobs like the kitchen fit-out progressing whilst some elements you thought would be finished weeks ago are still being wrapped up. Through it all, your job (whether as client or project manager) is to do what you can to help keep things ticking over. With that in mind, here’s a taster of just a few of the other tasks we’ve been pressing ahead with over the past few weeks on the Build It House: