Author: Shaun

Christmas and New Year Holidays Break plus Recovery from Health Issue

We are having our usual Christmas and New Year holiday break again this year but also taking time off for one of our work crew to recover from an minor health issue, a long-awaited hernia operation that was delayed because of the Covid saga. This means that much of January will be gone before we can resume the heavy work of building the internal framework of the rooms on the Ground Floor.
We will have to order more timber soon as we have already used, probably about 50% of our supply of 63mm CLS planks. But there is a world wide shortage of timber and that is pushing up the prices quite sharply and it is likely that we will see 20% price hikes in the new year. O Boy!
But that’s life!
So wishing everyone a good break yourselves and have a Merry Christmas!

P.S. Stephen thought he had posted this before Christmas!

20 December 2020
Remaining Pillars Installed for Corners and Kitchen Wall Framework Finished

For our last week of work for 2020 (and also before a long break because of Christmas and a minor medical issue), we went around the last twelve Pillars across all the ground floor rooms, creating sturdy accurate corner and T-junction reference pillars, all vertical and straight.

Last-corners-errected

for-bedrooms-and-bathrooms

We made sure that the metal legs (holding up the Skylight) had pieces of CLS timber glued to them that were also vertical and ensuring that the metal legs themselves are hidden inside the wall structure.
Then, for the last day and a half, we concentrated on building the framework that surrounds the Kitchen. We positioned exactly where we wanted the sliding door module to go near the Great Room end of the hallway, plus also a narrow window module (we had one left-over window Oak frame that we didn’t use in the external wall) positioned on the same wall but at the opposite end of the room. Then it was a case of slicing many many vertical posts (two sets measuring 2885mm and 2645mm tall) and went around nailing them into place. This included the first layer of the top plate to secure the posts and form the completed frames of each wall section.

Kitchen-wall-framing-complete-1

Kitchen-wall-framing-complete-2

It is amazing to how quickly a room like this Kitchen can be built, even if it is just an open framework of posts etc., we can already get a feel for the size and shape of each room we have planned for our Ground Floor.
We are cutting up lots of pieces of wood for the job (over 200 so far)

Wood-cut-so-far

This concludes the work for 2020, we can enjoy Christmas and New Year and when we are ready, we can resume work in 2021. It is holiday time now!!

17 December 2020
Second CLS Layer Laid Down, Analysis and Mapping of Wall Structure and Building of Pillars

For the start of the new week, we both tidied up all the “blobs” of mortar sticking around all the footplates and also tightened all the remaining concrete screws down. This was joined with the task of pulling out a whole heap of further CLS planks to form the second layer of timber to build up the Footplate on the floor, so they are ready to secure and fix the wall structures themselves. The second layer was glued and screwed down, making sure the warping and twisting nature of the timber is flattened out.

Then over the next several days, we marked out all the corners and junctions that forms the various rooms and cupboards etc.
We also ordered another twelve two by six planks (45mm by 150mm regularised timber) to go with the other four planks we already had left-over from when we were building the Skylight kerb structure several years ago. These sixteen planks will divide up into groups of four, in order to build two strong solid pillars to support a steel lintel that is needed at the entrances to all the en-suites rooms plus the bathroom too. It turned out that these four rooms have their entrances in a load bearing walls and we want our en-suites and bath rooms to have sliding doors so there is a lot of floor joists to support (Daphne also want’s a ‘Glass Wall’). We are using left-over pieces of steel 100mm by 50mm legs (the legs that are holding up the Skylight and the roof!).
We have done a similar thing to hold up our cold water header tank up on our first floor and it needs extra load bearing elements and the position for these elements are located over and along Bedroom 2 wall and its doorway, thus we need another lintel built into the structure of this wall, this time using our larger steel leg left-over piece (160mm by 80mm), laid flat and supported by a solid block of 4 63mm CLS planks, all glued together into one block, one at each end.
The final couple of days was spent on building the “pillars” for each corner and mid-wall T-junction, using more 63mm CLS pieces and forming fairly complicated shapes to allow each wall to have support for materials at the ends. Each of these pillars were anchored and locked to establish a good vertical straightness by screwing triangular plywood bracing pieces and putting little pieces at the top to join them together into a nice sturdy block.

Corners-sprouting-up

These will help in the long run when we come to put up the top-plate horizontal CLS planks as we can ensure that all our walls are vertical and right angle on the various corners etc.
We did ten of these pillars and we got another eleven to go which we will have done next week. We have sliced over eighty planks already, about twenty percent of our stock of timber pieces so it won’t be long before we will have to order another pallet load!!

12 December 2020
Entire Ground Floor’s Rooms are Mapped Out and Footplates Installed

We resumed the task of laying out the footplates for the entire Ground Floor rooms. We had to tidy up all the excess jumble of bits and pieces that used to live in our outside Store room and we moved all of it into our new Entertainment Room, sorting them into related piles. We will also build some metal shelving and place them in the Entertainment room too to aid in more items to store while we develop the internal rooms and installation of all the utilities.
The second half the building (the Cloakroom, en-suites, Bedroom 2 and 3, various cupboards and the Bathroom) was mapped out, drawing our coloured lines straight on to the concrete floor. We then surveyed the height of the concrete slab and discovered that one section had a very high level. The relative height difference was 23mm from lowest to highest spots but there was one even higher local spot of another 10mm! We definitely over-did the amount of concrete when making the floor slab several years ago! So we ground down that spot down somewhat but we will treat this particular slab as a special case and have a different finishing level (which means that we just reduce the length of all the stud posts).
Over the next 2 days We pulled out a heap of 63mm CLS timber planks and laid them out over the entire floor, cutting to fit etc. Next, we did drilled anchorage holes and putting in concrete screws to secure all the timber pieces. We used over 150 screws, each being 100mm long by 7.5mm thick.

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-1

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-2

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-3

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-4

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-5

The final two days was spent packing mortar underneath all the timber pieces everywhere, we needed four separate mixer loads, each having half bag of cement, three builder’s buckets of soft sand (40kg), a handful of fibre strands and a splash of emulsifier, along with the usual water. The laser was kept in one spot at our four way intersection point of our hallways and we used the detector to set all the footplates at the same height in absolute terms. The only exception to this rule was the extra thick concrete slab as mentioned already, and we lifted the detector up by an extra 10mm and set a higher level for the remaining pieces.
And on Saturday afternoon, the final task was to tighten the concrete screws for the footplates that we had put mortar under on the day before (it had set enough) to lock down the footplates and then tidy up the cement mixer machine, hose and other bits and pieces, now that we have finished needing mortar for at least several years, the mixer can go back into storage again, around the back of the building.

Next week will see us doing the job of pulling out another set of CLS timber to put on the second layer to reinforce the footplates, glued and screwed down, and then start marking out exactly where every single stud post will go, taking into account doorways, cleared sections for utility conduits and pipes to go upstairs and other design requirements too.

5 December 2020
Laying Out Footplates for Kitchen, Bedroom 1 and Great Room

After doing other tasks and chores for most of this week, we started on Friday afternoon, the task of mapping out the shapes of the Kitchen and Bedroom 1, with the Great Room alongside them and the laying out of the double layer wooden footplates that will anchor the walls. These footplates will be bolted and mortared down to the concrete floor slab, but first, we printed out from the computer, a set of plans with dimensions and proceeded to literally draw coloured lines on the said concrete slab. We used a string pulled very tight to generate a straight line and mark the floor with spirit pens. We positioned each wall according to the plans and made adjustments to take into account the metal support legs for the Skylight and Roof. The metal legs were not quite in the positions that the plans dictated, but only a few centimetres out. Also, we decided that we would move the Kitchen and Bedroom 1 walls nearest to the Great Room further inwards, so we could avoid having the metal legs intruding inside our Utility Channel that runs around the whole room, with electrical cables etc.

The next job was to do a survey and measure the height of the concrete floor at regular points along each of these walls marked out on the floor and find the highest and lowest points. We used our laser level machine and found out that our recorded numbers ranged from 143mm (the highest point) to 163mm (lowest point) which meant that our concrete slab rises and falls by 20mm across the floor. This would have meant that our mortar line would have to be 25mm thick to accommodate these variations, but we realised that only one wall had the “worse” highest points so we hit on the idea to plane down the thickness of the CLS plank by 8mm for just that wall section alone. This meant that we reduced the amount of mortar to a maximum of 17mm thick in some locations and the thinnest places would be just 5mm. This was much more reasonable. We proceeded to plane down two CLS planks, 3.6metres long from 38mm thick to 30mm thick and placed by the Bedroom 1 and Great Room wall section.
For the rest of the walls, we pulled out a further ten planks of treated timber, the 63mm by 38mm CLS pieces and sliced them to fit to the drawn lines. They all had 6mm pilot holes drilled, ready for the concrete bolts but first, to help drill the holes into the concrete slab.
The final task of the day, and week, was to trim and slice the wood to fit around the bottoms of the metal legs, taking into account the metal pads and bolt heads etc.

First-set-of-footplates-ready

Upon the new week, we will drill and mortar these planks into place, put on the second layer of wood and then start mapping out the next room, Bedroom 2, Bathroom etc.

28 November 2020
Second Delivery of CLS Timber Arrives

Our remaining timber arrived Thursday yesterday late afternoon. There were 348 planks in this second delivery, adding with our previous one of 99, we now have 447 planks of 63mm by 38mm CLS untreated soft wood, each measuring 4.8metres long.
We spent the last hour of Thursday and several hours on Friday morning, moving the entire load into the house and storing them all down in our Great Room.

Lots-of-wood-ready-to-use

We are missing one plank plus also one of the pieces was seriously damaged so we have requested replacements

27 November 2020
Tidy Up and Replace Lighting Units Plus Installed New Camera System

After skipping the first day of the new week because of some appointments, the next three days we went around tidying up the house after we had finished the Entertainment Room, dismantling the wooden platforms that were still inside the room. We also cleaned up all the mortar spillage that had dropped down to the floor and swept all the rubbish out.

EntRoom-Shell-Finished-1

EntRoom-Shell-Finished-2

EntRoom-Shell-Finished-3

EntRoom-Shell-Finished-4

Next was to replace the burnt out floodlight we had up on the Skylight and put up eight new smaller 100W LED lighting units. We put two in the Utility Room which is becoming our new Tools area. Then mounted the remaining six units around the Skylight area, near each metal support leg, and rotated the existing 300W LED floodlight more horizontally to illuminate our workshop area down in the Great Room.

New-work-lights-1

New-work-lights-2

The third thing that happened this week, was the installation of our new camera system. A dedicated recorder box and a couple of 4K cameras. We put the recorder in the Utility Room and then ran a cable all the way down to the other end and up into the rafters to mount the camera as high as we could reach, to look down length of the house. We now can view and record all our work on building the internal rooms and also the first floor rooms too. The second camera is being held as a spare for the time being but it is likely to be employed later on when we start doing individual rooms and will mount it on a upright stand and capture what we are doing.

New-camera-Daylight

New-camera-Nightlight

The last thing that happened on Thursday late afternoon, was the arrival of the remaining CLS timber we wanted, see Second Delivery of CLS Timber Arrives it took us until Friday lunch time to move all of it into the house.

26 November 2020
Concrete Beams and Blocks Forms the Lid for the Entertainment Room

This week it is the turn of the Concrete Beams and hundreds more of the concrete blocks to be hoisted up and laid out to form the roof of the Entertainment Room’s internal sound proofing shell.
The first job was to construct a lifting hoist location where each individual 120kg beam is lifted up and swung around, to get pass the skylight metal leg and lowered down to the top of the concrete wall.

We got three of our shorter metal scaffolding modules, plugged them together and then clamped the whole thing to the wooden wall. Then we got our metal hoisting arm up (only just fitted, avoiding the skylight) and then attached the electric winch.

EntRoom-Setting-up-hoist

EntRoom-Hoisting-a-beam-up

We first lifted two beams up and got them positioned over the far end of the room, near the window. This allowed us to then set and position the second of our heavy duty angle iron piece, with clearance holes drilled into it and then glued and screwed on to the wooden legs of the external wall.
Then we sliced up one of our paving slabs down the middle to give us two similar pieces, 900mm long by 300mm wide, plus a small bit left-over from the previous time of using the paving slabs at the bottom of the window, to make a filling in piece measuring 240mm wide by 300mm deep. Then, we glued on half bricks on the edge of all three pieces so that they can sit on the concrete beam and form the lid over the window, sitting on the metal angle iron and the beam. We wanted to raise this “lid” higher to maximise the space above the window to ensure that we had enough room for our mechanism for controlling the automatic window blinds. We glued these composite pieces using regular PU glue to stick them into place.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we proceeded to lift up the remaining eight beams and 162 blocks, plus 5 further blocks sliced down the middle to form the finishing piece in each row.
We used spray PU foam to act as a glue and space filling at the same time on each block as we inserted a block along the beam. Not forgetting the two driveway 50mm thick concrete bricks were placed at the start and end of each beam to fill in the gap between them sitting on the wall.

EntRoom-Gluing-blocks-in-with-foam

The last day, Thursday, we had to fill in the tenth row which was half the width so we sliced nine blocks in half to produce a filling in piece, measuring in a set between 190mm to 200mm wide and also cutting down two more bricks to fill in the final space on the wall.

EntRoom-All-blocks-installed

We had a half bag of cement powder left over so adding two buckets of soft sand, we mixed them together in a dry form, ready to vibrate in all the joints on the roof. But first, we nicked a quarter of it to make the normal mortar “muck” to stick down the last row of half blocks to the top of the wall and finishing off the whole roof.
Then we proceeded to pour the dry mix all over the roof, brushing it over all the joints, banging and vibrating the roof using a piece of wood and club hammer and filled up the cracks between the blocks and beams. Finally, we went over the roof surface and sprayed a small quantity of water to help activate the cement and harden it up.

EntRoom-Grouting-the-blocks

EntRoom-Blocks-grouted

The rest of Thursday and much of Friday was spent tidying up all the equipment, taking down the winch motor and its metal lifting arm, sweeping the floor and creating a “rubbish” bag down the bottom of the garden (using one of those large ton bags and four old metal re-bars to act as legs) and moved all the broken and sliced concrete block remainders, dismantle the various wooden templates and finally moved the cement mixer away from the Front door area.
One thought that came up, was to get the ceiling battens installed now, rather than later on because we might forget to do it before we put up the First Floor Joists, which may impede our attempts in screwing up the CLS 63mm battens up inside the Entertainment Room. So Saturday was spent in doing that to get it all done and dusted before we forget and before we dismantled the wooden platforms too. We drilled six holes through each row of the concrete blocks (they are 6mm holes), just alongside each concrete beams, a total of 60 holes for the 150mm long screws to go through and grip the CLS plank of timber.

EntRoom-Roof-sprouts-screws

We used 3.6 meter long 63mm sized pieces because they very nicely brought the surface of the ceiling just clear of the concrete beams, which makes it very easy to then screw and glue up the ceiling boards later on. We then screwed the wood up leaving a gap which we sprayed PU foam glue into, after which we tightened the wood up squashing the foam tight.

EntRoom-Ceiling-support-battens-

EntRoom-Ceiling-support-battens-glued

So in just over three weeks, we constructed a complete concrete shell from start to finish! Not Bad! And it took only a little bit longer to build the wooden framework that surrounds the whole room. Very nice to see that all complete.
The next job is to start bedding down the footplate (double layer of treated CLS planks) that makes up rest of the rooms onto the concrete floor.

21 November 2020
Untreated 63mm by 38mm CLS timber Arrives

We had our delivery of fresh timber arrive today, this morning, but it turned out to be only fraction of what we ordered.

CLS-Delivery-20201120-1

CLS-Delivery-20201120-2

There was some confusion back in the builders merchant yard and we only got 99 planks. We were expecting 448 planks, which supposed to be a complete pallet load. We are chasing them up!!

20 November 2020
Concrete Shell Almost Finished

Monday, we did two and half layers in building up our wall inside the Entertainment Room, that is over seventy blocks! We completed layer 4, then number 5 and number 6 and a little bit of layer 7.

Entertainment-room-Blocks-Row-6-Finished

Entertainment-room-Blocks-Row-7-Started

Tuesday, it was a half day because we are reaching the limit of lifting up the 20kg concrete blocks high enough to get on to the progressing walls whilst being able to see if they were in the right place. We finished layer 7 and a section of layer 8, for which we had to use one of our mobile platforms so we could use up most of the mortar mix we had. The remaining of Tuesday and Wednesday was spent building a safe, spacious working platform for us to stand on and continue building up the wall and finally put on the roof without compromising our effort and muscles. The platforms were made from the same basic frame work as the external one used for the roof, we just adjusted the length of the legs to suit.
The last part of Wednesday was spent moving 121 concrete blocks and making four piles in the middle of the room, ready to be lifted up onto the platform. We couldn’t immediately start a new mortar mix because it was far too late in the afternoon as it generally takes three hours to apply that amount of mortar to the 50 blocks or so. So instead, we moved enough blocks to finish off the final three and half layers (number 8, 9, 10 and 11) before we reach the critical twelfth layer.

Thursday saw us put up over eighty blocks to finish off layer 8, get layer 9 and 10 done completely and on Friday morning, to did layer 11. We also put on the lintel over the doorway.
For the rest of Friday, we laser surveyed the height of the wall to find minimum and maximum variations so we can adjust the height of the final twelfth layer. As the result of this survey, we sliced up 27 blocks of 135mm high, 9 blocks of 185mm high and a couple of 70mm thin ones over the doorway (sitting on the lintel).

We test fitted all these blocks in “dry” mode, including cutting down those blocks in corners and around the windows so everything was ready for the final stage in completing this twelfth layer.
So finally on Saturday afternoon, we mixed our usual load of mortar and proceeded to stick down all these shortened blocks and again, using the laser level , we made sure that they all finished up nice and flat.

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-1

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-2

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-3

So this concludes the building of the concrete walls and on Monday, we can start the massive job of lifting the ten 120kg concrete beams up and plonk them on our new wall!! No Sweat!

14 November 2020