After our Christmas and New Year celebrations, we resumed work this week with the outstanding task of sealing all the cement boards covering the walls of the house. We resumed the grinding operation and washing tasks to clean and smooth the joints. We completed the remaining segments, namely the J, K, L, M, N, O and P1.
Just before Monday’s lunch, we started rolling on the flashing tape, 3inch wide and extra heavy duty bitumen backed tape, to seal the bottom edge of the cement boards to the concrete blocks (to deflect any rain running down behind the cladding away from the joint). It was cold and the bitumen glue wouldn’t stick by itself so we got out our hot air gun and warmed it up and rolled it hard to the surfaces. We got this all done by the end of the day at 5pm in the dark!!
Wall-base-Flashing-tape
The following day, Tuesday, we then resumed the other half of the job of rolling on the shiny aluminium tape over all the joints of the cement boards, completing those last parts of the walls left undone since before Christmas.
We also used our new cut-down platform modules to help gain access to the two porches, the front door and the side door porches and got all the joints covered too.
Walls-all-taped-up-1
Walls-all-taped-up-2
Walls-all-taped-up-3
Front-gable-taped-up
Finally, to complete this job, we spent the last hour in filling in the window hole on the B wall (we decided that this window was no longer needed), this is the left hand four feet sticking out portion of the Front Door and Leisure Room structure of the house. We sliced off 30mm of the existing cement board around the window. This left room to put up two pieces of fresh cement boards cut down to fit which then we glued and nailed both bits into place. The final job was to cover these new joints with the aluminium tape to make sure it was air tight.
Now-you-see-it
Now-you-dont
Oh yes, we decided to seal up the joins in our Conservatory as well so we were truly air tight as we won’t be able to work on the Conservatory when we got the internal rooms all done and we needed to perform the pressure test procedure.