Blenheim Grove video 15 – Railings & brick slips

The railings have started to go in at our custom build homes in Peckham, and we’ve chosen them carefully to have an up and down design that mirrors the split level design that is inside each of these homes. The brick slips are also going up, and Gus talks about why it’s necessary to use brick slips on a timber frame house like this one.

Check back often as we will be posting videos of our progress throughout the build.

Video transcript:

OK so we are back at Blenheim Grove, it’s been… it’s been quite a few weeks actually since I last came here and did a little video. The progress has really really come on, and we’re getting that close to it being finished. Of course when I say finished I don’t actually mean finished, because probably by now if you know anything about these houses what we’re doing is we’re building the structural shell and letting our customers fit them out how they want to so they can suit their needs, and their desires, their lay outs, their specifications, and their budgets.
You can see our graffiti hoarding is down, our kind of contribution to the art scene on Blenheim Grove is finally nearing its end. There’re a few little pieces, but we’ve stored some of it so if you’re interested in a piece of street art, come down. We’re thinking of chopping them up and giving them away. So come down to our open day whenever that might be, let me know, just comment or send us an email if you’d be interested to come and see these things in the flesh.
You can see that the garden walls are all basically built. Behind those you’ve got things like the bike sheds and the bin stores. All the windows are now in, the railings are starting to go up.
So the really exciting thing today is that these doors and windows are in. And that’s a big moment, it means that the house can begin to dry, we can really get a sense of what this feels like, and also the noise. If I’m just quiet for a little bit, let’s see if we can hear much.
Not very much at all.
So we’ve got some windows here, this is a nice little ventilation window. This is our bricks that have been sliced into thinner bricks, and they go upstairs onto the terrace. This is battening so that you put your plaster board on, and then you run your services sort of in these bits between… effectively between here and here, so it all runs behind the plaster board.
So in here, I’ve talked about this room before how you might have a couple of bedrooms, you know lots of possibilities. But on the floor here, you’ll see these grey kind of planks. What those are going to do they’re going to be cladding the stair core, and the idea being that that’s a rain screen. I think these are made of a kind of reconstituted concrete coming from Germany because Germans are quite good at making this kind of stuff.
So here is the stair core, you can see this has been framed out by some wood, I think there’s some aluminium going on top of that, and that’s where those grey planks will be going so they’ll be going across I believe like that. And then over the roof so it all comes in one.
These are the brick slips. This is a special kind of membrane that they sit on and then they get pointed up so that effectively it looks like a brick wall but it’s a way of getting it much thinner and much less heavy. Because of course we’re quite high up, and this is a timber frame building, because we wanted to look at kind of ways to increase the sustainability of it all, and timber’s an interesting structure because of course you can grow it quickly, and you can make it very airtight very easily and we’ve talked about the airtightedness membrane in here before. But the downside to it is that when you want to attach heavy things like bricks, it’s quite complicated so you have to do these brick slips.
OK, so we’re outside on the terrace of no. 64, and this is where we’ve got a couple of the railings in which is exciting. You can see that it has this idea of the kind of up and down look, basically mirrors the sort of split-level that we’ve got inside. And it’s this idea of kind of making space sort of more efficient and utilising it better. It was quite a work to get it so that it wouldn’t wobble, but now I’m glad to see it’s very nice and strong and that isn’t going anywhere.