Author: Shaun

Vapour Barrier Plastic Membrane Installed (Part 1)

To finish off filling in the outer walls, and to provide a vapour barrier too stop moisture getting into our timber elements, we proceeded to cover up the glass wool with a layer of a plastic membrane, from top to bottom. We used the thick heavy duty DPM polyethene material, comes in rolls of 4metres wide by 25metres long. We started at the Front door again (like for the glass wool) and cut strips off the roll, either 2.75metres or 3metres lengths, depending on whether we had a wall going right up to the floorboards of the first floor or to the underside of the joists of the first floor. The Great Room has another length of 3.2metres to reach the roof rafters as there are no first floor structure hanging over the Great Room.
To ensure a tight seal to the timber framework, we decided to use a line of thick high quality double sided glue, namely butyl .. .. .. that comes in rolls of 25mm width. We stuck it onto the freshly sanded wooden surfaces of the bottom footplate and along on the top-plate timber that support the first floor. Where there was plastic already up there on those sections of the wall supporting the joists of the first floor, we used another sticky tape, this time an acrylic based glue that is much thinner (and cheaper) but still very sticky to join the two layers of the plastic together.
So over the week, we proceeded to shape, cut, glue and staple the plastic membrane up going around the house to cover up the glass wool. Windows we went straight across and then cut out the middle and used the side flaps to wrap towards the oak frame of the window but we stopped and started again at the doorways.

Vapour-barrier-installed-Front-door

Vapour-barrier-installed-Great-room

Vapour-barrier-installed-H-wall

We had to pause in the middle of this, while the Conservatory Air Duct was Built Inside Wall was installed but it was fairly easy in covering the wall.
The only complicated bits were the corners and places where an internal wall meets at right angles the outer wall. They needed the plastic to go around the obstacles but also seal onto the membrane coming along the walls. That took a while to do each one in turn.
The final task left to do was to seal all the conduits that had to pierced through the plastic membrane so we used a very conformable 60mm wide butyl glue tape to wrap around the conduit and stretch flat onto the plastic.

Vapour-barrier-installed-duct-exit

Vapour-barrier-installed-sealed-up-penetrations

This concludes Part 1 of this job, Part 2 and perhaps Part 3 will be done when we have managed to get access to the sandy soil outside the window of Bedroom 1 to install more underground conduits and junction boxes, used up a lot of the CLS timber in the Great Room, move the tools and supplies in the Utility Room and finally all the roof rafters upstairs needs filling up with insulation foam board, glass wool and more of this vapour barrier membrane.

13 July 2021
Conservatory Air Duct Built Inside Wall

We spent a day or so making an air duct that will extract the hot air from the Conservatory. It needed to go inside the wall between the window and the door, going all the way from the concrete floor level and right up to the top of the wall and beyond.
We used more of our supply of 25mm thick aluminium coated insulation PU foam board, careful to retrieve ones that had no defects or wrinkles in the surfaces and sliced them up into various width strips so we build the four sides of the ducting.
But first, we had to dig out old insulation boards because we filled the space up before we remembered that we were always going to have an air duct here! It measures approximately 250mm wide by 150mm deep in the interior which is equivalent to very nearly five 100mm diameter pipes so it will have a good capacity to carry lots of air at minimal pressure loss. We even “bent” the last foam board to provide a sweep bend at the bottom of the shaft, to help the air molecules to change direction smoothly. We did this by slicing every 30mm through the back paper layer and snapping the foam to make it wiggle and still be attached to the front layer of the shiny aluminium paper, then taping this floppy piece around a large circular drum that had about a 500mm diameter and finally, spraying tiny amount of expanding PU foam into the opened up cracks to glue it all back together again.

Conservatory-extract-duct-in-P-wall-back-and-sides

We put aluminium 50mm sticky tape across all the joins inside the vertical shaft to reduce turbulence and air flow rates and finally put on the front lid, made up of three pieces and joined with more of the aluminium tape.

Conservatory-extract-duct-in-P-wall-complete

Conservatory-extract-duct-in-P-wall-exit-under-the-floor

Conservatory-extract-duct-in-P-wall-inside-the-duct

Eventually, we will make a chamber at the bottom to translate the rectangular duct into four 100mm pipes that will go across the floor towards the corner of the Great Room with the Kitchen and go back up to the first floor to join into the main air duct running down the whole building. The upper section will be finished off when we have working platforms positioned for when we need to fill in the roof rafters with more insulation foam boards.

10 July 2021
Glass Wool Fills the Air Space in Outer Walls

In preparation for filling and covering the walls we went around and planed off any of the plywood spacers between inner and outer wall posts which were sticking out from the wall, this will allow the horizontal rails to be nailed on without damaging the vapour barrier.

Sticking-out-plywood-web

Web-planed-off-smooth

It then only took a few days to insert the horrible irritating glass wool insulation into our outer walls, to fill in the airspace void between the rigid existing foam boards already in the walls and the room’s wall boards. We didn’t want to have lots of hollow sounding walls so we went around filling in this void with various thickness of glass wool. We started first with the lower section and we put in a mixture of 100mm thick wool but sometimes we needed 150mm thick. We used our spray gun foam glue to help stick these vertical strips of the wool material but we also fired 2inch long staples to mechanically hold the wool into place too.

Final-insulation-at-base-of-walls

The next job was to do the upper sections of the walls, this time using mostly 200mm thick and occasionally 150mm thick glass wool in places we had originally inserted thicker rigid foam pieces. Again, we used the PU spray glue to stick the wool in but this time we deliberately had much longer pieces and all the excess length were pushed up and through the gap at the first floor floorboard level and piled on top of the rigid foam. We did this to provide a fire break in the vertical direction just in case the PU foam causes a path for the flames to travel up and into the roof space but for the glass wool acting as a barrier. It will also protect the roof from a fire on the outside of the house getting into the roof through junction of wall and roof.

Final-insulation-in-the-walls-1

Final-insulation-in-the-walls-2

Insulation-rising-above-the-first-floor

There are sections of the walls that we cannot do right at this moment in time, mainly in the right hand end of the Great Room because of the huge pile of CLS timber, again in Bedroom 1 because we haven’t installed the conduits through the wall to the outside world and finally, in the Utility room because it is full of our tools and supplies. These sections will get done later on when we have used up much of the CLS timber and removed the obstacles outside Bedroom 1’s wall. All the left-over rolls of the glass wool are now located upstairs at the back of the house.
The next job is to cover all this yukky stuff with a vapour barrier .. !

6 July 2021
Extra Framework and Insulation Over Doors and Windows

We spent these last four days putting in extra insulation foam boards over the top of all the doors and windows. We needed to do this first because when the vapour barrier plastic membrane goes around the walls, they will go over the doors and windows, and below the windows too. So we put some extra CLS pieces horizontally, aligned to the door’s (and window’s) upper frame and then inserted a slab of OSB board pieces to provide a platform for the insulation to sit on.
The insulation was the standard PU foam boards, three layers of them so it filled from back to the front and high enough to reach the approximate level of the first floor floorboards.

Window-header-and-insulation-installed-1

Window-header-and-insulation-installed-2

Some of these regions we had to do from the first floor level itself and slide in the foam pieces in like a jigsaw but we managed it. The next job is to put in glass wool in the walls to fill the airspace between the rigid foam boards and outer surface what will be the room’s wall structure itself.

1 July 2021
Work Continues on Construction of First Floor and Its Floorboards

We resume the week by collecting up the sand we had spread across the kitchen to dry and sieved it through the finest mesh we had and lugged up six trug full of fine sand, to pour into our sand box surrounding the air duct pipe coming out of the Entertainment room. We estimated the amount almost exactly correctly .. Wow!

Box-full-of-sand

Then filled in the space between the joists with 200mm thick glass wool, we did this now because we won’t be able to access this space after the floorboard goes on. The glass wool is there to provide some additional sound dampening effect between downstairs and upstairs.

Sound-insulation-over-entertaiment-room

After that, we had one more little job to do, that is to test for water leaks in the new sewage pipework running through the joists and we fitted our adjustable bung to the bottom of the stack at a convenience T-junction to block the pipe against the water. We started filling the pipework up using the garden hose but suddenly the rubber bung lost its grip and flew down the pipe and splash water all over the place! But fortunately, we had tied a piece of string to the winding wing nut mechanism of the bung and it stopped it from completely disappearing deep down in our sewage pipes. But unfortunately, we couldn’t reach it by hand and pulling the string didn’t work either so we had to cut into the vertical stack to dismantle the T-junction piece which allowed us a better access. After rescuing the bung, we reapplied the bung but this time, much higher up at the top of the stack and poured in the water .. and after all that, we had no leaks! We put in a new piece of 110mm pipe to replace the one removed and using a inline slip connector, we got everything back together again. That was a unwanted diversion! Phew!
Then we drilled hole through some joists and installed a waste pipe from Workshop 3 to the bathroom.

First-floor-wate-pipes

Oh yes, we glued and screwed down a restraint bar between the middle pair of the steel Skylight legs as required by the structural calculations and instructions. It is a 5mm thick metal bar, 50mm wide and 2.4metres long and it is bolted to the steel legs on sticking out tabs that we welded on the legs years ago which we had designed to line up to the surface of the floorboards and hey presto .. there was only a 3mm or 4mm alignment error! The floorboards were slightly too high so we just put in a couple of steel washers on the bolts and everything came nicely together.
At last, we could resume laying down the tongue and groove chipboard and we proceeded by continuing around the stair hole where we got to last week and completed a dozen more rows, making several adjustments to clear obstacles like air ducts, steel skylight legs and arrive at the next major transition point in the house design.
For safety reasons, as soon as we done around the stair hole, we screwed down a ring of CLS timber and mounted a hand rail to protect us from falling down the open gap in our floor.
Plus also, we installed the second restraint bar between the third pair of the skylight legs like before.
The last section of the first floor, situated over Bedroom 3 and Utility rooms, had a line of noggings put down the middle to do the usual job of stiffening up the wobbly joists and then we proceeded to finish off all the remaining floorboards.
The next job was to install the four restraint bars around the thick skylight leg that is holding up the far end of the Skylight, the structural calculations requires this leg to be restrained too so we put on the prepared metal strips in the four ordinal compass directions, with the longest one pointing towards the external wall. These were again glued and screwed to the floorboards and bolted to the steel leg itself.
The final task of the day, and of the week, was to tidy up everything off the flooring, all the tools, cut off pieces etc and sweep all the sawdust and glue fragments too.

The-complete-first-floor-1

The-complete-first-floor-2

The-complete-first-floor-3

The-complete-first-floor-4

The-complete-first-floor-5

The-complete-first-floor-6

The-complete-first-floor-7

The-complete-first-floor-8

The-complete-first-floor-9

The-complete-first-floor-10

This concludes the construction of the First Floor, its joists and its floorboards. We have about 19 sheets left from our original 150 sheets we ordered. We didn’t have much in the way of cut-offs as we managed to re-use many pieces again. We are planning to use these 18mm thick chipboard material to make our return air ducting channels that goes around the edge of the house on our freshly laid first floor, but that is for later on.

and for your enjoyment the whole month in a few minutes…

Next is to install the glass wool into the walls downstairs and put on the vapour barrier membrane and that will clear away the pile of glass wool rolls, at which point, we can build the staircase, if we can get hold of some nice quality plywood material to make the steps and risers. There is a world wide shortage of this kind of wooden material due to the Covid and high demands in USA! Phew!

26 June 2021
Fiddly Hidden Elements Completed in First Floor Joist Space

This week was a chop and change kind of week, working on lots of different elements that needed to be done before we can continue in laying down the floorboards across the first floor joists. One of the last remaining tasks from last week was to glue and and nail the final four long I-Beams into place (these are going down the long hallway from the central part of the house and heading rightwards to the Utility and Bedroom 3 rooms) and put in the noggings to secure them at the ends. Talking about noggings, we looked at the structure of the first floor and counted how many more noggings we would need which came to some where around of figure of 60 individuals. We had 16 still left over from the last grand nogging creation so we sliced up three I-Beam left-overs, about 3metres each and then sliced up one complete 10metre I-Beam, to generate additional 44 noggings.
With this done, our slicing machine have mostly finished all the bulk work so we dismantled the working area under our Front Door Porch, tidied away all the equipment and moved the slicing machine into Bedroom 1 for any odd jobs. Then we moved the final two 10metre I-Beams over to our Swimming Lane storage area for the long term (we will find something for them we have no doubts!!), folded up the tarpaulin, moved twelve concrete blocks and tidied away the wooden bearers. The front of our house is all clear again – hurray – Smile!

So having done that, we could resume laying down floorboards but only a couple of rows. It took us almost an entire afternoon just to do one row, because it was the transition of entering into the larger space plus also there was two metal legs of the Skylight to navigate around too and we reached the next challenge. This is where we needed to install additional hidden elements that lives inside the joist space as follows ..
The Cold Water Header tank Support lintel being the first one, we had made provisions during the construction of the walls by putting triple posts in the location where the ends of the steel lintel will sit so we just needed to hoist up the steel lintel. This steel object is another one of our left-over piece, this time, it is a 2.1metre large fat steel leg measuring 160mm wide by 80mm thick. These steel elements are supporting the Skylight hanging over the Great Room and we got three of them lying around in the Garage so it is ideal to be used as a lintel to support the large header tank and transfer the weight down directly to the concrete floor and not into the first floor structure. It weighed about 60kg so it took a bit of lifting from both of us to haul it up to the first floor. We then chopped eight pieces from a 2by6 timber to form short stumpy legs to lift the steel tube up so it is flush with the tops of the joists and the floorboards when it finally get laid. These stumpy support posts were 160mm tall and after slicing tiny bits off to get everything level, we glued the two set of four to form the two pillars and we stuck down the freshly scrubbed steel lintel into place. Finally, then we put small pieces of noggings down on either sides of the steel to make sure it is locked into place and won’t fall over or twist under the load of the header tank.

Water-tank-support-supports

Water-tank-support-all-level

Water-tank-support-installed

The next job was to connect a waste water pipe that we will need for the upstairs bathroom’s basin and shower. But we discovered that the boss adapter we had already previously connected together into the large diameter waste pipework was a different size hole and we didn’t have any fittings that would fit reliably. It looked like a 50mm diameter boss socket but it was a case of a different manufacturer and their idea of what standards to adhere to. We tried all sorts of different solutions, rubber adapters and the like but O Boy we failed to get anything to work. So we had to block off the hole by making a circular disc of plastic and use PU sealant to stick this disc into the boss connector and seal it up. We fortunately had the luck to use another pipework piece, a right angle element that had more of these boss connectors but manufactured by someone else so we moved over to use that one instead. we had a particular adapter that fitted very well so we solvent welded the 40mm water pipe diameter adapter into the boss socket, after we had drilled a 40mm hole and then slide in a two and a half metre length of white pipe, ready for further connections to the basin and shower units later on.

Plugged-up-waste-boss

Watepipe-for-shower-and-basin

After all that palaver, we moved over to the front of the house over the Entertainment room to design and build a air ducting channel that fits in between two joists so it can run underneath the upstairs Study room. This air channel is the waste air being collected by all the ground floor rooms at the front of the house like the Kitchen, Entertainment room and the Great Room and the Conservatory too. Normally, our waste air ducting will run on top of the floorboards on the first floor running around inside the triangular void spaces but we didn’t want to have to introduce four sharp bends in the air flow to just avoid crossing the upstairs Study and also have a permanent square boxing running around this room too. So, we routed the air ducting downwards to squeeze in between two joists for a short distance before rising again and heading off to the Utility Room for processing. We used a mixture of 30mm and 35mm thick PU foam boards that has the shiny aluminium paper coated all over them. It is quite smooth so will provide very low air resistance and it has two gentle slopes to avoid the sudden change of direction. The pieces were hooked and glued into place to create a square channel. The rest of it will be done later on when we build the remaining waste air channels.

Air-duct-over-entertainment-room

Air-duct-inside

The final piece of work that we needed to do before the floorboards were laid, cutting off our access to this joist space (because the Entertainment room has the concrete ceiling, cutting off access from below. This was to install the air extraction pipework for the aforementioned Entertainment room. All the extraction pipework will be 100mm metal ducting with metal sweep corner pieces etc. and we connected together one 90degree bend to a short straight piece, then a 45degree bend to raise the ducting above the floorboard and left a short length sticking out. All this is done inside the space between the joists that lined up with the hole we left behind in the concrete block ceiling but we didn’t leave it at that point. We wanted to make sure that any sound waves being generated inside the Entertainment room were dampened and not leak out through the air ducting pipework and infect the Study sitting over the top. To this goal, we built a box out of left over pieces of chipboard floorboard pieces and glued this box down to the concrete surface and laid the metal pipe along inside and glued this in too.

Sound-resistant-box-for-entertainment-room-duct-installed

Sound-resistant-box-for-entertainment-room-glued-in

We will fill this box up with sand but it needed to be dry first so we filled three trugs full of sand from our sand bank outside our conservatory and spread it all over the kitchen floor to dry off, blowing our giant fan over the top to assist this process.

Drying-sand

One of the last things we were doing towards the end of the week, was putting more noggings across various collections of joists, some over the Entertainment room, some over Bedroom 3, some over hallway outside the Cloakroom, all to anchor the first floor support joists and stiffen them up.
By the end of the week, we had done lots of different “little” tasks, had only put down two more rows of floorboards but that building a house for you. There are certain jobs that depends on the completion of other jobs. it is very important to do each one in order .. or else!
Here is a picture of our first floor with all the piles of chipboard boards waiting, a table of tools and working area.

First-floor-end-of-week-3-1

First-floor-end-of-week-3-2

First-floor-end-of-week-3-3

We resume on Monday with these little jobs!! Phew!

19 June 2021
Sun Shield Patched and Installed over our Corridor plus New Waterproof Cover for Header Tank

It is very very hot outside today, we had to repair the tarpaulin that provides a sun shield over our long corridor in our temporary living quarter and also replace one of the tensioning ropes.

Sun-corridor-cover-Jun-2021

The rope had frayed quite badly in the middle point where the whole cover is hoisted up to provide two sloping surfaces to shed the rain water. So we had to thread a new piece of rope through which was a bit fiddly. For the large tear, we found two thin oak strips and while pulling the tear closed, used the two pieces of timber and clamped across the tear using six screws alternatively driven from each side and holding everything together, hopefully for another year or so.

Sun-corridor-Cover-repaired

Then, we replaced the 10 year old waterproof cover, protecting our header tank that sits on top of our garage to provide a temporary water supply to the kitchen, shower and toilet downstairs. We cut another piece of DPM plastic measuring 2.1metres by 2.7metres long and rewrapped the rectangular structure and re-tied the rope back into place.

Water-tank-recovered

Next, we had a quick survey of our roof surfaces to make sure that there were no holes or wearing patches that might look troublesome for us in the future and we can report that it is looking good.
That concludes this year’s annual maintenance for our temporary living quarters.

14 June 2021
All of the Remaining Joists Up and Secured

We carried on with the task of cutting and hauling up a whole series of Joists to form our First Floor structure. We had started at the back of the house over Bedroom 3 and its en-suite and worked across the building towards the middle, stopping at the metal Skylight legs. Here we had our very longest joists to put up next, nearly 11metres long, stretching from over the Cloakroom, a hallway, two cupboards and across Bedroom 3 to arrive at the external wall.
Then, the next task was to replace the C channel metal bar that went between leg 2 and leg 3 of the Skylight, and replaced it with a full sized LVL (it is like plywood but with no twisting of the layers) plank measuring 240mm high and 45mm thick and about 3.7m long. This was bolted back onto the metal legs with 12mm thick high tensile steel bolts and spiked connecting washers to help spread the load bearing forces.

LVL-bolted-to-leg-bracket

This beam forms the top end of the staircase and we wanted to make it much easier to mount the various structural elements that makes up the framework around the staircase itself. It has a matching LVL plank running parallel but at the other end of the stair hole, just short of the main wall running along the front of the building that forms the kitchen and great room external walls.
Then a final piece of LVL plank was fitted between these other LVL pieces and this had eight joist metal brackets nailed at the 400mm spacing as per normal to allow the continuation of the joists going across the Entertainment Room and Utility Room.

Stair-trimmer-joist-brackets

Joist-brackets-nailed-to-LVLs

After that, we carried on with the joists but starting from over the Front door this time and working forward to the metal legs of the skylight which was relatively easy and quick to do.

Stair-trimmer-with-joists-installed

This leaves just four more lines of joists to complete, in two sections, going down the hall way past the Entertainment Room towards the Utility and Bedroom 3 rooms and over to the outer wall. A final piece of LVL plank was cut and positioned stretching from the left side of the Tech cupboard to the Entertainment Room to help support the long unsupported span going along this hallway. This LVL plank had four more pairs of joist brackets put on both sides and we did the shorter pieces first, some 3.2 metres and got them installed with the usual glue and nails. We then cut the final four longer pieces, some 7.53metres long and instead of installing them into place, we hauled them up to the first floor and left them out of the way.

Joists-over-the-hall

This meant that we could finally finish off building the last few walls and doorways near the Utility Room. We had deliberately left this undone in May because we knew the task of bringing in these long Joists, would need the angles while approaching in from the side door and get pieces ranging from six metres up to eleven metres in, up and landed on the First Floor area and moved around the house as appropriate.
It will feel quite strange to having to leave the Utility Room through a proper doorway now.
We didn’t quite have enough time to properly glue and nail down the last four joists but they are in place now so we can safely say “We have Done all the Joists and All Fitted!!”

All-joists-installed-1

All-joists-installed-2

All-joists-installed-3

All-joists-installed-4

All-joists-installed-5

But this is still not the end, we have to put in dozens of noggings in the middle of longer spans on all the I-Beams to help stiffen them against twisting and then put down some 120 sheets of floorboard, Phew!

12 June 2021
The Two Defective Windows Replaced and Third Polished

Today, Tuesday the 8th of June, saw the arrival of two replacement triple glazing units, to swop out the defective windows. They had internal scratches between the layers of glass panes so it must have been caused during manufacturing processes, but a third window had a scratch on the outer surface and the glass people declined to swop that one out but on the other hand, did provide a small pot of glass polishing powder instead for us to polish the scratch away.
But before we could do any of this exchanging lark, we had to, on the previous day, work slowly and carefully to remove the oak beadings, four of them for each window and then unscrew the plastic brackets holding the glass unit in place. Next, we cut the security tape behind the glass and with the help of our neighbour and four large handles with suction cups managed to haul and man handle the very very heavy 117.93kg window (we found the weight on a label stuck on the edge of the unit!) and carefully got it onto our medium sized flat bed trolley we had adapted (again) to help hold and transport the glazing unit.

Old-windows-removed

We got the two units collected together near the driveway, ready for the van’s arrival.
Finally, we spent several more hours cleaning the glue and the remains of the tape off the metal frame and got it all clean. We stuck on a fresh line of double sided sticky security tape ready to pull off the wax protective strip when we are about to put in the new Glass on the morrow.

So this brings us to today, when the van arrived just after 9am (scheduled for after 10am) and we hastily got our worksuits on, grabbed our neighbour again and got the two new glazing units off the van, parked on up against the wall on a pallet and then loaded the old ones back into the van for them to take away and one assume that they will analyse the glass panes for their mistakes back at the factory.
Finally, we moved each of the new units to their window holes, reversing the process, with lots of grunts and managed to slip them home and stick them back onto the uncovered security tape. We secured all the plastic brackets back into place again and reattached the Oak beadings back on.

H-window-Replaced

Great-room-window-replaced

The third window with the scratch on the outside (we don’t thick we scratched it) we did after lunch.

Window-C-Scratch-From-inside

We made a thick creamy paste of the cerium oxide polishing powder and dabbed the mixture onto a pre-soaked cloth wheel, fitted it to our electric drill and carefully buffed the scratch for about 30 minutes in total, stopping many times to spray the glass with water to cool the temperature down as much as possible, to avoid creating heat stresses and shattering the glass. We can’t show you the result because it’s not visible (grin)…

So this draws to the conclusion of our windows story, stretching back to last October, just over seven months ago when it all first started!! It got dragged out because of the Covid Saga! Phew!

8 June 2021
Third of First Floor Joists and Floorboards Built

We carried on from last week in installing the joists for the First Floor. We glued and nailed the section over Bedroom 1 and then moved on to tackle the section over the Kitchen and the Hall in between these two rooms. Before we did the Hallway, we cut a chunk off the LVL solid timber piece, some 1770mm long that bridged over the Hallway to support the wide flange I-Beams coming from the Gallery. These were held up using rated joists hangers, fixed into place using hardened thick nails.

Then the last bit of work to do in this section, was to install extra noggins half way down the joists to help stabilise and stiffen up the wiggly I-Beams.

1st-Third-of-joists-installed

All this just took only another two and a half days and we decided to have a change of order. Instead of carrying on installing more joists, we opened up our pack of 18mm thick chipboard floorboards that have tongue and grooves machined on all four edges to make joining together the floorboards very easy and form very strong overlapping floor. We loaded up on our trolley 40 sheets, each measuring 240mm long by 600mm wide and weighing about 12kg each. We estimated that we would need forty sheets to build the flooring for this first section and the Gallery and we trundled the lots around to the Conservatory entrance in our Great Room and moved the pile into the house. The first job was to snap a chalk line 500mm from the edge of the First Floor looking over the Great Room so our first line of the chipboard sheets would overhang and we can slice off the tongue at the later date to have a clean cut edge. This first line also included the two metal posts that supports the Skylight so we had to cut a small piece out of the board, the cut being centred on two neighbouring joists and then cut out the shape and size of the metal leg itself (160mm by 80mm). Then we doubled checked the alignment of the completed line before we glued and screwed down these four and a bit sheets. Then over the next day and a half, we got all the rest of the boards glued and nailed down, remembering to keep any cut-offs piece bigger than two joists to ensure that any floorboard is fully supported on at least two joists.

We stopped half a row short of the staircase so we could carry on installing more joists and have the floorboards coverage continue with all the tongue and grooves still locking the boards together when we resume that task.

1st-Third-of-the-floor-laid-1

1st-Third-of-the-floor-laid-2

1st-Third-of-the-floor-laid-3

1st-Third-of-the-floor-laid-4

To finish off the week’s work, we put up six more joists (almost 7metres long) going over Bedroom 2 and its en-suite which were also glued and nailed into place. We got as far as slicing five out of a further nine more joists measuring 9metres long and they are laying up on the first floor waiting for next week.

5 June 2021