Blower Door Test & Pre-Delivery Inspection

Today was a long day, as we set off from home just after 7 a.m. to be at the house with time to spare before the blower door test technician arrived at 8 a.m. We wanted to have another look at everything, to see if we had missed any points off of our list for the pre-delivery inspection meeting.

The blower door test, which tests how airtight the house is under pressure, was easily passed, with a result of n₅₀₌0.69 (maximum 1.5 to pass the test for being a KfW40 house).

The n₅₀ value is the air-tightness and is a measure of how many times air volume of the building is exchanged in an hour, with a pressure difference of 50 Pa.

Our construction manager and his assistant were also there (and seemed quite happy with the result) as today was also the ‘Vorabnahme' meeting, effectively a pre-delivery inspection where we went through the house in detail together, looking for things which still need doing, or need doing better.

Even though we had quite a long list of things prepared in advance, almost all of them were very minor points (e.g. scratched window handle in the cellar, a small dent in the wall which needs filling, the silicone around the downstairs WC and sink is not done yet, light switches that are upside down, the shower tap is the wrong one and so on).

All of these points have now been noted and photographed by the construction manager and marked with yellow tape. Ideally, these will all be resolved by next Wednesday when we have the final handover meeting, but because of Easter, it could be that some of these will take longer (time will tell how much longer) as there are only two more working days until then!

Some of these have already been addressed during the day – the interior door installer turned up for a few minutes to fix a small broken off corner of one of the doors and the staircase installer turned up to touch up the paintwork.

Only two slightly more serious points remain open –

• the electric shutters are not in-service yet and are currently half closed
• the satellite dish is not correctly aligned.

We made it very clear that we will pay the final invoice in full, only when these points have been addressed, which the construction manager seemed to accept. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few days. Hopefully, the thought of not getting paid for what has not been delivered yet will help with ensuring the correct priority!

On the whole, we are extremely happy with the house at this point, almost all of the contractors have been really great and Viebrockhaus have kept to their commitment with the timeline. Reading some other peoples' blogs, we can be happy that we built with Viebrockhaus and that nothing really went wrong along the way.

The initial cleaning, which was done yesterday, surpassed our expectations and the windows are really sparkling, there is no more dust everywhere (nor pieces of plaster, cement etc.), but over the (long) weekend, we will clean the house some more (and we still have a lot of packing to do, ahead of moving in about 12 days time!)