Author: Shaun

42 square pieces of stainless steel mesh was cut and stapled over all the holes previously drilled a couple of days ago. The metal mesh will reduce the possibility of animal life getting into our roof cavity and getting stuck!

The mesh covering the holes for the air conditioning system (on the left side of the garage) were additionally stuck down with a ring of construction bulk glue to ensure a complete seal. The iBeam immediately next to these holes now has similar holes more or less lining up. These will have a microfiber cloth (using a heavy weight geotextile material) stapled and glued to provide a secondary filter layer to further reduce large dust particles and micro insects from getting through and into our fresh air supply!

Our middle wall inside the Garage is assembled and is UP! This wall is ready for the iBeams (roof rafters) to be thrown up, sit on the supports and fixed down!

The sub-dividing wall between the garden room and the garage front part is made of two layers, in total 30 posts spaced 300mm (a foot) apart alternating from side to side. The reinforced top and bottoms beams have the extra 18mm OSB strips inserted, works quite well especially allowing us to position each post hard up against it and offering good support for the nailing gun!

The two side walls came together very nicely and there was only a small leaning over offset of about 8mm so we pulled it vertically and tied it down waiting for the boards to be fixed on to lock it all up. In fact the roof boards will provide the racking in all directions! Front to Back, Left to Right and North to West too!!

Well that’s the major load bearing wall finished, let’s roll on the moment in a day or so, when the roof goes on!

Yesterday and today we bolted down the two side walls, there are over twenty thunderbolts in each wall! We pulled out a string to make sure the walls are straight and Stephen went along with the SDS drill to cut the holes and I came after screwing down the bolts!

Today we drilled air holes for both the roof ventilation and the air conditioning “source”.

The side wall has 21 114mm holes to allow fresh air to enter which will be drawn down into our earth tubes for cooling before entering into the house. Well this will be what will happen when we have built the house! Each hole will have a covering of stainless steel mesh to protect against insects and larger creatures and another layer of fluffy geotextile to filter larger dust particles and stop those sub millimetre bugs and creepy crawlies! The 21 holes adds up to over 210000 square millimetres which is double what we need but with the extra barriers of the two filters (mesh and geotextile) we need to make sure the pressure and speed of the air supply is not too badly affected.

We also drilled another 21 holes along the front of the garage to allow air to circulate in under the roof boards to make sure it never gets damp and rot. This is all in the building regs! These holes will just have the stainless steel mesh covering them.

You will not be able to to see these holes in the long run as there will be another cladding layer using the pretty Cedar wood!

Finally we have started building the middle internal wall that divides the garage from the garden room. We reinforced the sole plates and to improve the tie down structural strength by inserting 170mm high 18mm thick OSB strips in between the two halves of the wall. This is needed as there could be a potentially large “up” force in high winds blowing across the roof or blowing into an open garage door or doors causing a significant upward force inside the garage! This is why all the roof rafter themselves needs to be tied down using metal angled brackets. Our structural engineers had calculated all the numbers and this is what we have to do!

We have bolted the sole plate down and it is now all very solid and ready for the rest of the wall to be constructed tomorrow!

(close up of reinforcements of sole plates)