GO SLOW

It has been quiet on the house front for the last couple of weeks. Money has more or less dried up, and we are awaiting a home loan application approval before we can recommence in earnest. The loan application is somewhere in the innards of Nedbank's Home Loan division. It seems they don't know how to pigeon-hole the application as all the construction thus far has been cash funded. The bank bureaucrats are not sure which box to check: is it a Home Loan, a Building Loan, or Self-Build Loan? One would think that having built the structure with cash would ease the loan application process, but oh no, that would be too logical a conclusion to draw when one is dealing with [b]or[w]ankers. They don't seem to know what to do, endless to-ing and fro-ing. Hopefully they will make their minds up soon. So much for Nedbank's much vaunted “Ask Once” advertising promise....

In the meantime we have been doing a few small things ourselves. We have built a temporary staircase to ease access to the first floor. We have also started to fix the plywood sub-floor to the first floor joists. We are using 18mm pine shutterply. As part of our noise mitigation attempts, we are stapling strips of Airothene foam underlay to the tops of the joists, and screw fixing the shutterply over these strips. The Airothene should help to inhibit sound transmission through the timber structure to the rooms below. In addition, we will be filling the void above the ground floor ceiling with more acoustic insulation.

The temporary stairway to heaven

The Master Suite in waiting

18mm shutterply on Airothene on EcoBeam

Table Mountain from the first floor