After a slight pause in posting (but not in building!), we have internal walls and ceiling going up! All the smaller rooms – office, kitchen, loos, and shower are now clearly defined with timber framing and all the external walls are insulated and panelled. More or less any gaps in the exterior you can see now are left for doors and windows.

Exciting discussions are now underway to tweak small details, like exact positions of storage hatches and cupboard doors, plus the community-based Kitchen Cabinet group are meeting to spec our final kitchen!

Work continues, despite the heat! We’ve had a minor obstacle to overcome this week. An issue was discovered with one element of the steel frame – a squared-off top of one of the main uprights, which should have run diagonally with the line of the pitched roof. Some discussion was required to determine the best way to rectify things, but in the end, a simple “cut the corner off” approach proved the most economical. No real time lost fortunately – TRF were able to press on with the side and front walls in the meantime.

Front and side walls are now insulated and boarded up on the inside, and damp proof membranes are going up on the outside. Next week, TRF will be free to get onto the rear and perhaps even internal wall framing.

Work continues on the walls… At the end of this week, we’ve got the east and west wings of the build looking solid from the front and sides. We’ve even got a huge stack of insulation on site, which is already going into the walls as the guys are building them. Not doing its job just yet though of course, what with not having a roof yet…

Green Heat were back on site this week completing the end connections for their pipework into the outbuilding. This means TRF will soon be able to get the foundations for it done and can be working on both buildings in parallel. Work continues on the walls next week, and maybe even moving up to some ceilings…!

We’ve got walls! Ok, not all the walls just yet, but the first solid sides to the main hall are up! Gordon from TRF is on leave for a couple of weeks, but he said he’s almost sad to miss out on the action of the next couple of weeks. The rest of the team are fully prepped and the plan is to make as much progress as possible on the “timber kit” for external and internal walls. We may well have our first “rooms” by the time Gordon is back!

Gordon mentioned a while back that when the time came, he would offer open site tours to people from the community to come and see what’s going on. Once we get the walls up and we have an “inside” that you can’t see from the green, we will look to get these sessions going on Gordon’s schedule.

Concrete week! The Big Concrete Pour went ahead as scheduled on Wednesday this week. A slightly dodgy weather forecast turned out to be overly cautious and sunny Oldhamstocks delivered perfect conditions for laying a LOT of concrete…

The reinforcing steel bar was laid at the start of the week in preparation for the entire subfloor for the whole main building to be poured and smoothed in a single day. Heavy work for sure, but the experts did a fantastic job and we now have a lovely flat surface for TRF to build on.

And they have not hesitated in getting on with that! We already have our first timber frame elements in place, lining the blockwork foundations and the steel structure. The next couple of weeks should see fast progress on getting the timber kit in place to start forming our walls!

This week we also had Eldon from CWP Energy come to site to check on our progress. Gordon and OCA were happy to show him round and have a walk on our new concrete floor together!

There’s been a few delays recently around sequencing the connection of the borehole pipework into the outbuilding and laying the foundations for it but we are back to progressing with the main hall building in the meantime. Damp-proofing has now been installed as well as some of the steel reinforcements, the foundation for our front steps is complete, and we’ve even got the first signs of the timber framework appearing!

Next week, the Big Concrete Pour will be done on Wednesday, which will lay us the base of our flooring through the whole building!

Lots of sand this week! A large stack of white and orange ton bags are gradually being diminished and the level of the ground inside our walls is slowly rising. We now have a compacted sand layer throughout the building, with more to be added. This will be followed by damp-proofing and concrete.

Trenches for ducting between the main building and the shed are now being filled in, and shuttering is being put up in the trench at the front of the hall, ready for concrete foundations to be poured for our front steps.

OCA also attended the open day at Be Green in Dunbar this week, where we met with visiting staff from CWP Energy, Catherine, Rob, and Sarah. Rob Fryer visited the site and was pleased to see the progress!

It’s been a week of heavy digging by hand and by machine for the guys at TRF. The end result is that we now have the first layers of the subfloor basically complete within the main building. Many tons of type 1 hardcore have been levelled and compacted, as well as sand on top of that. We also have trenching started for the foundation of our front steps to be laid.

Next week, the sand layer will be finished off, damp-proof membrane will be added, and hopefully, towards the end of the week, the full concrete slab will be poured. GreenHeat Renewables will likely also be back on site to joint the remaining ends of their pipework and lay them in their final positions within the outbuilding before TRF put foundations on top.