Despite the mud and poor weather, we managed to get a large truck on site today to pick up the scaffolding.  We took this down before Christmas and we have been tripping over it ever since!  There was a lot of it and now that it has gone you can start to see a difference in the overall site.  It won’t be long and the back field will start looking like a field again!

We are now in the final stages of the outside work. There really is only pointing left to do. Today, the scaffolding was collected and this has cleaned up the site tremendously. We still have so cleaning up to do, but there was a awful lot of scaffolding piled up in the back field.

We are getting to the stage where we need to start sorting out the finishing touches.  There are a lot of decisions to be made here – doors, handles, lights, tiles, etc.  This is also the stage of the project where the costs start to mount up quickly – often on items that you might not have thought about.

All of the door furniture was delivered today.  This included all of the door handles, hinges, latches and bath room locks.

We are using a brushed stainless steel finish through the house.  This means not just the door furniture, but also the electrical sockets and switches.  All of these components are from the Schneider Get Ultimate range – screwless face plates in satin stainless steel.

We are using engineered oak internal fire doors throughout the property.  We don’t need to use fire doors to meet building regulations, however, these doors are thicker (44mm) and heavy than normal internal doors. These heavy doors have more of a quality feel for only a small additional cost. These have been bought from Oakwood Doors in Huddersfield.  They are going to be pre-finished (with a sation matt lacquer) and should be delivered before the end of January.

Due to the size and weight (around 30kgs) of the doors we are using 3 hinges per door (each hinge is 4″).  We have 20 doors in total, so we need 30 pairs of hinges.

The handles are from Zoo Architectural Hardware.  They are called Florence and we have already used them on the 2 pairs of external doors to the property.  It turns out that this model is end of life.  This is good news as they can be picked up very cheaply – £8.50 pair rather than £20 a pair.  I have bought a couple of spare handles since they are going out of production, but still a great buy.  We could have easily have paid twice as much for an alternative.

We have selected bathroom thumb turn locks so that they match the Zoo handles above.  They aren’t from Zoo, but the finishes are a good match.

We are using EuroSpec latches on all the internal doors – the latches are larger for the bathrooms to accomodate the bathroom lock in the same machanism.  All of the latches are 3″ latches – latches come in a variety of sizes with 2.5″ and 3″ being the most popular.

All of the door furniture came fromt the Door Handle Company who were extremely helpful in finding all the rights bits.  The delivery was very quick – taking only 4 days from ordering over the phone and the items being delivered.