Category: Ground Floor

Installing Air Ducts Underneath Utility Room and the Hallways

Today, we started the task of installing the air ducting for our fresh air. We decided to tackle this particular job now as we are waiting for more building supplies to come, plus also, we are waiting for warmer weather to stop the condensation from forming up in the Skylight. We need to dry out the moisture before we continue replacing the lining up in the Skylight.

The Air Ducting is needed to be built, to take our fresh air from the Utility Room, down underneath the floor, across the room, into the hall and down long the hall, going all the way to the Great Room and the Conservatory. This distance is 22metres approximately. We got a pile of left-over chipboard boards, that already had a coat of varnish painted on them, to seal them against moisture. There are twelve sheets, measuring 580mm wide by 2400mm long. We needed to sliced these boards up in such a way that we had the section in Hall Three created with 150mm high sides as the framework for supporting the flooring was done in a different method., compared to the rest of the flooring. And, Hall Three is about 5metres long, which is two sheets. So, we sliced two boards up, making the 150mm wide strips and the left-over piece will then become the base board of the ducting. We needed two more 150mm sides so we passed another one of our twelves boards through the table saw twice more, so we ended up with four equal 150mm strips. Now, we adjusted the saw table to a new width of 178mm because the rest of the framework under the floorboards, has more room but slightly narrower. We can fit in a 400mm wide base board instead of the 430mm that is in along Hall Three and after taking off 400mm the original board width of 580mm, we were left with 180mm. but before we go for that size, we have to take into account the thickness of the saw blade itself, which is just over 2.1mm thick. This is why we have gone for 178mm. So we sliced seven more boards to produce a single strip of 178mm and a left-over piece of 400mm. Now, we are left with two boards and we proceeded to slice these up into six 178mm strips, three off each board. And finally, one of our left-over piece, we also passed through the saw table to produce that seventh strip, to go with the first set of seven, to make the two sides of the Ducting, for each of the seven base boards.

Sliced Up Boards

Sliced Boards 2

So, starting in the Utility Room, we lifted a strip of floorboards, the line next to the Utility Cupboard that will contain the tumble dryer cabinet, the vacuum machine and small cupboards. There is a couple of layers of 50mm thick PU foam boards sitting on top of the concrete so the Ducting can sit on top of them. It just so happens that the gap between the foam boards and the floor joist running around the edge of our Utility Cupboard, is 200mm high. This is ideal because our base boards are 22mm thick and our sides are 178mm high, and fancy that, that makes 200mm in total !! We proceeded to saw out an rectangle hole through the cupboard wall, which is made up of two layers of 18mm OSB and one layer of 10mm Fermacell plasterboard. We sliced a 400mm wide by 200mm high hole, and our base board now can slide all the way along and into the Cupboard.

Across utility

Next, we built a side-shoot off to the side cupboard that houses the tumble dryer cabinet and the vacuum cleaner system so that they can have fresh air, plus also the Study Room upstairs needs a connection to our fresh air supply as well. Oh yes, the Utility Room itself also needs a heated fresh air supply as well, plus also, the vacuum system will need a supply of cooler air, to keep the motor from overheating. We realised that this side branch cannot have any control valves or flaps because it will be underneath the floorboard and they will be glued and screwed down (eventually!), which means, we cannot service the mechanisms etc. Hence why we are having a fairly large opening in the main duct and having it angled into the side branch. We used a larger piece of our coated OSB board to make this junction.

Side branch in utility

We then carried on with the 400mm wide base board, turning the corner at an approximate 45degree angle and headed out underneath the doorway into the Hall, to connect diagonally to the next straight section running down Hall Three.

Now, we took our vertical side pieces, the first ones being 178mm tall, to go from the Utility Cupboard towards the doorway. But, we realised that they were too high to allow us to slide a 6mm lid into place. So, off we go back to the saw table and slice off another 8mm, to give us room to get them in.
For our side branch, we cut the compound angle on both pieces, half 45degrees, so that the joint was nice and neat. When it came to the side pieces for going under the doorway, it is a change of hight again, because the main ducting in the Hall is slightly higher up and slightly wider, being 150mm high and 430mm wide. So, that meant that the sides needed to be trimmed so that it fitted the gentle slope up, including to remember the extra 8mm gap to get our lid in. It was tight, very tight but we managed it.
Now, we had to put in lots of pocket screws into the side walls, to help screw the pieces tight down to the base board, plus a load of glue as well.

Turn into the hall

Once the glue had dried, we went around shaping the corners so that the air can flow more smoothly around the bends, especially the outside corner where we put in a thin sheet of plastic that can gently guide the air around the bend. We then taped up all the joints, corners and so on, with aluminium metal foil tape, to make sure that the joints are air tight and also provide a smoother path for the air too.

Next, the lids were made of just 6mm MDF boards. We Got a full sheet off our rack and coated one side with two layers of varnish, to seal it in against water moisture.
We then sliced three strips off the narrow direction, creating 400mm wide pieces by 1200mm long. We proceeded to to slide each one into place over the air duct, cutting the necessary angles, to make them fit and going around the corner. We used a piece of carboard to “map” out the shape of the lid and then transferred it over to the MDF sheet, to cut the finished article. We did both the side branch going into the side cupboard, and also the bend towards the hallway using this method.

Corner Template

Next, we screwed the lids down and then taped up the joints with more aluminium tape, to seal against any leaks.

Covers on in Utility

Finally, before laying the floorboards back down again, we drilled two 70mm holes into the wall of the side cupboard, and inserted two lines of our 50mm flexible conduit. This is going to be the hot fresh air supply for the coat hanging and footwear rack section, over beside the main exterior door.

50mm Ducts in Utility

Now, we carried on down Hall Three, this time, laying down 430mm wide base boards and 150mm high sides. We made little wooden wedges so that we could jack up the air duct so that it is tight underneath the cross rails that are the framework holding up the floorboards. We then crossed diagonally slightly at the Cross road Centre, which we changed over to 400mm wide and 175mm sides. The base board actually stays the same level, it is the lids that goes upwards because the framework design for the floorboards changes to have 63mm CLS planks going flat across, instead of the more traditionally upright aspect. That gives us more room for the air duct to be taller by another 25mm, and we could reduce the width down a bit as well.

Anyway, we joined the Crossroad ducting in, having to cut the ends at an angle and then resumed the straight run down Hall One towards the Great Room. We again, had to cut a slight angle for joining to the base board in the Great Room. By this time, we were running very low on material as we had originally been using the pile of left-over chipboard floorboard pieces from building the First Floor and all the Ground floor rooms too. But, we just had enough for us to get three quarters the way across the Great Room. This is fine because the final destination for this ducting, is to supply fresh air to the Conservatory and we are planning to have an adaptor converting the output to four or five individual 50mm conduits, or perhaps 68mm rigid plastic pipework that we got loads of as well and taking fresh air to various locations around inside the Conservatory.

Everything was glued into place and one or two occasional pocket screws as well, to help hold things together while the glue dried. The doorway into the Great Room was a little bit more complex because the joists running across the doorway had 63mm CLS in their upright orientation so we had to fill in the gaps upwards and then cover it up with lots of aluminium tapes to provide a smooth transition from one side to the other side.

Hall Ducts built (1)

Hall Ducts built (2)

To add to this scheme of providing a smooth transition from one side, or chamber, to the next chamber, we made lots of small rectangular plastic strips to go underneath the cross rail, inside the ducting. We glued and stapled these clear thin strips and this helps to block off any air gaps that our lids may have generate. So we wanted to reduce any leaks as much as possible.

The next job is to make the lids. We estimated that we needed two-and-a-half sheets of our 12mm thick MDF boards. We proceeded to apply a nice thick coat of varnish on all three of them and allowed that to dry overnight. Next, we sliced 5 pieces of 400mm, well actually, 398mm wide pieces on our table saw!! We did five pieces off each sheet and the sixth left-over one was exactly 430mm, which is exactly what we wanted. We repeated this on the second sheet and then slice two more 430mm wide pieces off our third sheet.

Then, we cut each one to exactly fit each section. We started in the Great Room and worked our way all the way to the Utility Room. We drilled 6mm holes down both long sides of each lids, three of them and then screwed in a captive nut into the side wall of the ducting. Each lid now has six bolts holding it down.

Lids all fixed down

That concludes the main 25metres of air duct, to deliver the fresh air to all our rooms!

29 March 2025
Finishing Entertainment Room with Carpets, Lamps, Sockets, Television and Door!

We have been spending the month of January in getting the Entertainment Room all finished, including putting up our 43inch Television!! But, before that happened, we carried on from where we left things before Christmas, with the task of putting carpet up on the walls etc.One of the first task to do was to slice out the Utility Channel all the way around the room. We had previously marked where the horizontal zone is located in this room, as it is not at the normal height because we had deliberately lowered the flooring to accommodate the lowered ceiling. We used our trusty track saw to guide the circular saw and carefully slice through the 18mm OSB board, to produce a 100mm wide slot. We stopped 60mm short of each corner so that when the carpet gets fixed up onto the walls, the gap between the end of the Oak covers will be a nice distance from the corners.

Utility Chennels cut out

The next job is to trim a little thin recess, only 1mm deep and 12mm wide, on all the top and bottom edges of the Utility Channel and we then glued a thin narrow strip of steel. We had some old computer cases which were made of steel thin plates so we sliced that in our mechanical heavy duty guillotine machine and glued them so that we ended up with a general purpose magnetic surface so that we stick on our Oak covers into place, without having visible screws etc.

Metal strips glued in

Oh yes, we rounded the edges of the window, the two vertical edges, using our largest round cutter so that the carpet can bend smoothly around the corner when it goes into the window hole. The horizontal top edge of the window was turned with a smaller radius cutter, just enough to get the carpet to bend around.

Now we were ready to start the next big task of sticking our carpets to the walls!

We started on the TV end of the room, the narrow wall, opposite the window and we got our 2.4metres by 4metres piece and then painted both the wall surface and the back of the carpet with the latex rubber glue. We had already determined that this glue works very well and it just needed to dry while the surfaces were pressed together. Another advantage of this glue, is that it dries fairly slowly and keeps moist, which gives us time to paint the two surfaces, but also, time to man-handle the carpet up onto the wall and move it around until we got it pressing tightly up to the ceiling. To help with that process, we stapled a couple of pieces of narrow strips of OSB boards on to the front of the carpet so that we had a good grip to help lift the carpet, but also to keep the carpet stretched out in a straight line as well.
We then temporarily stapled five more strips of OSB, to help hold the carpet tight to the wall and the glue. Fortunately, we had loads of these narrow strips that we had accumulated over the years and so we could use them to press the carpet to the glue. The staples were 35mm long and fired using our compressed air gun. Another thing we did at this stage, is that we avoided gluing the last right in the corners because we needed to be able to trim the carpet carefully right into the corners later on, after the glue had dried.

TV Wall carpet

We then carried on with the next wall, the long wall opposite the door, which was a 2.4metres high by 5metres long piece this time. We proceeded like before but we discovered that this type of carpet, which has a woven backing, instead of the felt-like material the first piece had, we hadn’t put on enough glue to ensure a thorough contact area. This meant that we had to reapply extra glue around the edges, going along the top (near the ceiling) and also around the Utility Channel cutout as well, plus the bottom edge near the floor. We stapled on lots of OSB strips to clamp the carpet down so the glue had a chance to dry stuck together.

We then did the smaller portion of the wall to the left of the doorway, and remembered to put on more glue this time. It was easier to handle the carpet because it was in a smaller piece and we managed to get it up with little trouble. We repeated for the other side of the door and then did the section over the top of the doorway. We even put a piece of carpet on the ramp going down into the room! Now, we turned to the last wall to do, the Window wall. This time, it went up in one piece because we wanted the carpet to be continuous underneath the window sill. We carefully cut the carpet along the bottom edge of the window and then bent the carpet around the corner to do each vertical sides of the window. We took off the excess and glued these flapping side bits into place. Finally, we had a piece of left-over to go along the top edge of the window and that got glued down as well.

Carpet for the window wall glued

Windows wall covered

Trim out the window

Next, we installed ten round lighting units up in the ceiling, plus two odd square ones we had lying around, to populate twelve of the holes , four rows of three lamps. A light switch went into the Utility Channel near the door, and then put eight double sockets distributed around the room as well. We used pieces of 11mm OSB boards to make the covers and got them magnetically attached over the Channel. This is a temporary measure but we will replace with proper Oak covers later on.
We used two 3mm thick by 10mm diameter magnets, superglued together to form a 6mm single unit. Then we put four of these magnets in the four corners of a cover where there was only one mains socket in the cover, six of the magnets for a two set of socket, and eight for the last cover that had two double sockets plus the light switch. We discovered that just having four magnets was not quite strong enough to reliably hold the cover in place, especially after the electric cables were threaded and screwed into the back of each socket as well. Magnets are very good, visually speaking because we can avoid unsightly screws etc. but unfortunately, the initial experience is suggesting that we would have to add a dozen more magnets for those covers that have a mains double socket in them, especially if you tried pulling a plug out and accidentally ripping the whole cover off as well. We will have to explore this further, and maybe come up with a different method of attaching these covers without visible screws.

Temporary Lights

We then made a window seat, again a temporary one so that we had a neat cover over the empty void in the bottom of the window. A useful place to sit on now.

Because we had decided that this room, the Entertainment Room, is going to temporarily be the needlework room, to allows us to sort out things like curtains etc. So, towards this aim, we created a large work table, 8foot by 4foot and standard dining table height of 720mm high. We used one of our 12mm thick MDF boards and glued a circumference of 63mm CLS planks around the edge, with an inch gap. Then, put on four legs.

Table

Then, we created two sets of shelves, each one having six shelves, measuring 300mm deep and 1220mm wide. We managed to use two sheets of our 18mm thick OSB boards and sliced it up into twelves pieces and then slice eight 50mm wide longer strips to serve as legs. We ran the router over all the pieces, to chamfer the edges, to remove splinters and make it smoother. Both were assembled so that each shelf had a bit over 300mm gap between each self. Then, both the shelves and the work table, plus also, the window sill seat, got a coat of varnish, to make sure that all the tiny splinters are glued down and after rubbing with some sand paper, it is all nice and smooth.

Shelves

Next, we created our special sound deadening door. A very heavy door, made up with 30mm thick of cement boards as the core, covered up with 9mm hardwood plywood sheets. To maximise the strength of the whole thing, we found a piece of thick Oak plank, with minimal knots in it, measuring 2.7metres long and 150mm wide. It is 65mm thick. We established one straight edge by using our track saw and then planed it flat on both sides, ending up with a 48mm thick plank. We then, sliced it into two narrower pieces, with a 15degree angle down the middle. The last step in working these pieces of wood, is to trim off a recess on both side, to form a 30mm thick “tongue” which matches the thickness of the cement core so that the plywood covers can overlap both the cement core and the two Oak vertical edges. The cement core was built using three layers of small left-over pieces of 10mm thick boards, arranged so that every piece overlapped each other with plenty of surface. We used an epoxy resin glue to ensure a very strong joint between every piece. Because of the random nature of all the smaller pieces, the resultant “core” is rather misshapen but we knew that we wanted to slice the core down to a precise size later on, including putting a 15degree angle on the narrow top and bottom edges as well. Finally, we assembled the two Oak strips and one of the plywood fronts, used PU construction glue and a dozen screws to anchor the Oak and plywood together. At this point, we mounted the hinges and mounted the partial door into the wall for testing purposes and making sure everything is ok. Now, turning it over, we then used plenty of PU glue all over the back of the plywood and very very carefully lowered our concrete core into the middle. Then, the second plywood board came in on top, again, with lots of PU glue spread out evenly across the cement surface and screwed the plywood down tight on the Oak edges too. We loaded seven large concrete blocks on top to pressurised all the layers together and stop the glue pushing the layers apart.

Glueing Cement board core

Holding layers while they set

Door Outer part

You might be wondering to how heavy this door is??
Well, we got our bathroom scales and HAULED it up onto it .. ..
95kg!!
15stones!!
O boy!

This is why we are having four ball bearings hinges!
They are rated at 120kg for three of them so we thought we better put in that extra one, just to be on the safe side, plus also, the hinges comes as a pair so we didn’t want to have one left lying around.
It is recommended that one puts two hinges at the top of the door, one in the middle and one near the bottom. The double set at the top has to take a good portion of the weight as the door swings out. So, we mounted the hinges to the door frame first, cutting little rectangles of carpet away so that the hinge can go flat solid against the oak strips we have previously inserted into the wall structure. Each hinge has four screws in each half so there will be a total of 32 screws holding up this 100kg door!

Now the next trick was to move the door itself and walk it up several layers of pieces of board, and sit it on the top layer which has two air cushions underneath it. We could then squeeze the air bulbs to pump in air, which in turn slowly lifts up the door so that our hinge screw holes can line up with the holes already in the door, from our earlier quick test we did before we put in the heavy cement core. We got it all screwed in and let go! The door is swinging nicely and it goes home very nicely too.

Door installed

Next, is putting in the latch mechanism and the handles. We had to find a longer square metal bar because our door is 50mm thick, especially with the carpet on it as well. Talking about the carpet, we decided to cover the entire door in cloth and carpet materials, to hide the various construction joints and materials, to end up with a smooth single texture on one side, using two fleece blankets, and three left-over pieces of carpet on the room’s side of the door. The fleece material was wrapped right around the whole door and stapled into place on the carpet side, and then we put on the carpet, to cover that up. But, the carpet had a ragged edge as well, so we went off to find some more Oak and create some thin slightly curved strips which we mitred around the edge of the door, to hide all the ragged edges.

Door Wall Finished

That is one half of the doorway done, the main sound proofing door which opens into the room and is flush up again against the rest of the wall. There will be a second door on the Hall side of the doorway, to provide a second sound barrier to reduce audio leaks. We did some tests (once we had installed some speakers etc.) and the loud music could be heard quietly when one stood near the door but a lot quieter around the corner. Which is not surprising because the main room has 100mm thick concrete blocks and the door only has 50mm total thickness, with only a 30mm concrete core!! Hence why we probably will mount the second door on the hall side!

As mentioned just now, we also installed some loud speakers we had in our old living room, plus also taking the 43inch Television and mounting that up on a wall bracket. It looks rather small in the grand scene of things so hopefully, we will upgrade to an larger model when we can, along with much better quality surround sound speakers too. We installed a Raspberry PI to act as a media streaming device for the television, which will allow us to enjoy music and videos we have got stored in our library.

TV & Speakers

The last thing we did, was to find some old underlay, and some old carpet we inherited from the previous place we were living in. It only covered the first 1.9metres of our 5metres room and that will do for now. It makes that end of the room quite cosy and the sound quality is very pleasant indeed, very soft and warm!

Oh yes, nearly forgot about the little control screen and its buttons that sits just left of the door and about shoulder height. We 3D printed a black plastic surround, with four buttons vertically on the left and right side and a row of five buttons underneath, surrounding the touch sensitive 7inch screen in the middle. This will provide access to various information that is happening in that room, and beyond, but, it will have menus to allow you to configure how you want the temperature to be set at, how the lighting units should be set in various patterns, to suit your moods, and so on. It is the link to the rest of the house, including communication, security and other helpful services like shopping lists etc.

Door Wall Finished

That pretty much concludes the work on our Entertainment Room for the time being. We even put in a fan heater so it can be kept warm so we can go in and sit down at the table to do some needlework, or watch the TV!

1 February 2025
Entertainment room – Ceiling Completed and Wooden Walls Constructed

We decided to have a go at finishing the Entertainment Room after we had finished the ventilation system. So these last few weeks, saw us sort out the ceiling. We wanted to build the complete ceiling, which means putting in the conduits and channels to allow us to thread wiring and cables from each of the light placement to next light placement. The ceiling is a solid concrete blocks affair on concrete beams so there is very limited space up there. We had already mounted beams of 63mm CLS timber up underneath the concrete blocks (we screwed 6inch long screws down through the entire concrete block and glued the wooden beams up as well) and these beams are just large enough to clear the concrete beams too. We decided that we can have seven lighting units per controller, and that we will have four lamps in one row, with its three siblings in the next row over, staggered. But, in order to feed the power cable from the controller board, we needed to mount aluminium channels up across the wooden and concrete beams. We tried to cut away a bit of the wooden beam, a diagonal slot but we discovered that quite a bit of the concrete beam needed to be grinded away to make room for the aluminium channel as well. That was far too much effort, and also running a risk of disturbing, and weakening, the strength of the concrete beams. So, the solution was to cut up a load of old left-over pieces of our 11mm OSB boards, into narrow 40mm wide strips and staple and glue them up on the underside of the CLS beams, deliberately leaving a gap for the aluminium channels to be glued up, going diagonally from the first three lamps, to their siblings.

We did four sets of seven lighting units, plus half a set of just four units in the last odd row, finishing off the ceiling. There are a total of thirty-two concealed lighting units, each one with a fully controllable white brightness level plus some splash of colour too.The next job was to install our fire suppression system up into the ceiling space as well. We already had a 15mm plastic pipe threaded up through the wall into the ceiling space so we simply just took some 10mm plastic water pipe and threaded that down inside the 15mm pipe (the other end appears under the floorboards out in the hallway) and then put on a couple of T-junctions to split the water supply off into three different directions. One hovering near the window, two feet in. One in the middle and the third one nearer the back of the room. They all have 90degrees bends on them, going into a short piece of copper pipe, this goes through a small chunk of CLS timber and connects to the end cap which will have the spray nozzle fitted later on. We got these wooden blocks done now so we can reach up later on to screw them into place when we are lifting up the ceiling boards up into place. We tested all the joints by pressurising this section with compressed air and squirted washing up liquid around each joint to make sure that there weren’t any bubbles coming out.

Entertainment room fire supression pipe work

Talking about ceiling boards, that is our next step. We took six sheets of our 18mm OSB boards and laid them out in our Great Room, lifted up off the floor with several full lengths of CLS timber. But, before we did that, we had all six of them stacked them up in a pile, on our work table. We proceeded to cut tongues and grooves in the appropriate edges so that the six sheets will fit together into a single combined ceiling, three boards wide and two boards long in the 8feet direction. The room is basically 12feet wide and just under 16feet long. We assembled them into that pattern on the floor and then tied them together using ratchets and straps to draw the tongue and groove together nice and tight, as if they were fully engaged up on the ceiling.

Now we can mark out where we want all the lighting units, plus also the air ventilation port as well onto the boards. We knew that the distance between each of the concrete plus wooden beams is 520mm, and each one occupies approximately 200mm, which means that there is a space of about 300mm that we can lay out and position our lamps. We decided that we would randomly shift each lamp position around a bit so that we do not create a ?boring? grid like pattern. We used our Tungsten carbide tipped core cutter measuring 95mm in diameter, and we made short work on drilling out 33 holes, especially using our mains powered Black & Decker electric drill!!

Entertainment room ceiling have light holes cut

We are nearly to mount these six boards up to the wooden beams, but first, we had to unscrew the top horizontal rail off the concrete walls because it is in the way of the OSB boards going up, plus also the carpet we are going to stick up later on. But, we realised that the top rail that is going across the window is completely glued in, and the wooden ceiling beam is hidden behind it, where we needed to screw up the ceiling boards. This meant that we had to chisel away a fair chunk of this top rail, to increase the gap above so that we can slide in our 18mm thick OSB boards plus the 11mm padding layer we have put up on all our wooden beams. What a fuss!! This is what you get when an original idea didn?t quite work out completely correctly. But, We made it.

Oh yes, one of the last thing to do while the ceiling is open, is to glue up some pieces of concrete blocks up around the metal air vent pipe that is sticking downwards, ready to be attached to the pretty vent cover. There is a gap between two neighbouring concrete blocks so we needed to fill in that gap with more heavy mass material, to reduce the amount of audio sound waves escaping out of this room. We found some left-over pieces outside in our swimming lane, sliced down to the required dimensions and then glued it up into place using PU Construction glue, and a tall prop to hold the block up while the glue set.

The next job, the big one, of putting up each OSB board up to the wooden beams, screw and glue them into place. We got out our massive board lifter mechanism we bought ten years ago and it effortlessly lifted these 27kg heavy boards up with ease. We carefully aligned the long edge against a set of marks that represented the wall surface and shoved the short end into the gap above the window. It got all glued and screwed in at that point.

Entertainment room ceiling showing conduits and first board test fitting

We then put up the second board along that line, after slicing off about 120mm off the end. We engaged the tongue and groove joint, made sure that it was very straight and then also glued and screwed that one up too. We repeated this twice more to put up the remaining four sheets. It was jolly hard work but we made it !!

We remembered to drill a small hole to let the fire suppression spray nozzle through and glued liberally the nozzle into place with PU construction so that we could undo the nozzle cap later on. We screwed the wooden blocks to help lock them in tight.

Then other thing we did up on the new ceiling, was to enlarges the ventilation hole. We did only a 95mm hole because we knew that we could be slightly off position and we wanted to see where we managed to get the original position. We were pretty close actually! It just needed a slight shift by 5mm away from the window and we cut out a new 220mm hole, ready to take the ventilation cover.

Entertainment room ceiling boarded

Now the next job is to put up the carpet!!

We ordered five pieces of carpets, the cheapest ones we could find and ended up paying well over £350!! We were going for a darker shade of colouring, but our head of the household put her foot down and selected a paler set of colours!! We ordered a 4.8metre by 4metre width for our ceiling, in a steel blue speckled colouring. It has a felt backing. We knew that it will glue just fine because we had previously got free samples and we tried various types of glues, to see which one is practical to use, to see how each one dried and see how strong the bond was afterwards. We tried wallpaper paste, a latex rubber glue and a contact glue. The wallpaper paste completely failed to stick at all, the latex rubber glue took absolutely ages to dry and wasn’t sticky enough to do the job of holding up the carpet while it finished drying. In another test, we did successfully use this latex rubber glue to stick a piece of carpet to the wooden board very well indeed which will be good for the walls. Anyway, we settled on the third type of glue, the contact glue (Evostick), because it dried very quickly within 10 to 15 minutes and we could press the two halves together and proved very strong. We tried ripping the sample carpet off and it started tearing the carpet itself instead of the glue. So we knew what type of glue to use.

Just a quick note about the cost of the carpet mentioned above. Yes, it is an extra cost to our overall build, but actually, it is not that high an extra, because we saved money by not having to put up our high precision plasterboards, which would have cost about £250 (13 sheets worth) so the extra on top is only £100 .. We Can Live With That!

The next trick we had to perform, is to get this twenty square metre carpet up onto the ceiling, upside down! We built a tall mobile wall with a shelf to hold the excess carpet in a fanfold arrangement. We needed a flat vertical surface so that the carpet’s backside is laid out flat, ready for the contact glue to be painted on. This flat surface is almost the entire width of the room (3.6metres – 12feet) and we decided not to paint to the very edge because the carpet is still at its original 4metres width and it needed extra room to ‘flop’ down.

Ready to hang ceiling carpet folded up waiting

In order to make sure that the very first attempt of pushing up the first edge of carpet goes on flat and without any wrinkles or ruts, we stapled on a 3.6metre length of 63mm CLS timber to the very edge of it, with equal amount of excess carpet left and right. We pulled the carpet up and draped it over our mobile wall so we had about 1metre dangling down. The mobile wall was then shifted so that it was about a 1metre from the end wall (furthest from the window). Once we have painted a strip about 900mm wide on the back side of the carpet, and a similar width up on the wooden ceiling with the contact glue, allowing it to become tact-free, we could lift up the CLS timber above our head while we stood on a ladder and a foot stool. We deliberately positioned the CLS plank against the surface of the concrete wall, sliding it up against it. We had previously marked the concrete wall near the ceiling so we knew where to position the plank so we arrived at the ceiling with the carpet and press hard upwards to get the two glue surfaces to bond together. Now, using a second similar plank but a bit shorter so we didn’t jam up too badly on the side walls, we used this piece of timber to press the carpet upwards continuously, bit by bit, moving further and further away from the completed section.

Ready to hang ceiling carpet first strip

One aspect of this task of putting up all this contact glue, is the very strong chemical solvent smell coming off all the painted surfaces. So, we had to bring in a giant fan to stuck out as much of the fumes as possible. Also, we connected up our 6inch fan to the purple 100mm pipe out in the hallway, underneath the floorboards, and blow in fresh air via the ventilation outlets (four of them) we got in the room. Plus also, we opened the front door and the side door to allow clean fresh air into the house too. We even turned on our main ventilation fan we had previously installed and got it to stir the air around the entire house.

Now, we could duck under our mobile wall, and paint the next section, another 900mm strip, on the carpet and again the ceiling as well, wait for it to tack-free and then move our mobile wall along that 900mm. It was a wiggle, keeping the carpet straight and flat but we got there. then, we then ducked back under to the other side and picked up our rolling CLS timber, to continue pressing the carpet along bit by bit until all the glued strip is done.

We repeated this process another three times and arrived at the window. We discovered that the supplier had given us another 500mm of carpet because it turned out to be the end of their roll so they just gave us the excess for free? very nice of them!!
We had to prop up the last bit of carpet with three extending legs because the weight of that excess carpet was heavy enough to make it not stick up on the glue properly.

We then dismantled our mobile wall, and then went around trimming all the excess carpet off the edges. After that, it was the case of finding all the round holes, all 33 of them, and cut out the carpets, one by one. Oh yes, we also located the three water spray nozzle points and carefully cut around the little metal plate.
And then, finally, we went around the edges of the ceiling, to apply glue to the dangling bit of the carpets and stick that up to get it all finished.

Ceiling carpet glued up

We then remounted the top horizontal rail back up on the wall, making sure that the rail was levelled with the lower rails, by using our six foot long spirit level. We had to drill new holes into the concrete and adjusting the piles of wooden shims, to secure the rail dead flat.

The next job, before we put up the wall boards, is to insert the little plastic hanging hooks up inside the Utility Channel, every 12inches or so, right around the whole room. These hooks will hold up the high voltage mains cabling so that we can supply the old AC electricity to a socket if we need some equipment to be powered by AC power instead of our 50V electricity from our solar or batteries. Plus also, we inserted a length of 20mm white plastic conduit pipe going from the Utility Channel in the far corner furthest away from the window, and threaded the pipe up behind the other horizontal rails, and with a 90degree bend, poked the top end up inside the ceiling space towards the first lighting unit hole. We now can reach in with a hand and grab the cables that will come up from the Utility Channel, to supply power and network connections to our lamps.

Now it is time to insert the sound deadening material in between the wooden rails, plus also to spray PU foam behind each rail plus also the Utility Channel too. We pulled out rolls of our 100mm thick glass wool and cut lengths off, folded them over and stapled them in each gap, hanging down. The space we needed to fill is about 50mm thick, sometimes as much as 100mm in some areas so we realised that putting up double layered of the wool, will bulge out a great deal. This is what we were looking for, in order to increase the density of the glass wool, to help absorb the sound vibrations.

Overfilled with insulation (1)

Overfilled with insulation (2)

Overfilled with insulation (3)

Now it is the turn of the 18mm OSB boards, to be glued and screwed up onto the rails. We decided that we would not employ our normal step of cutting tongue and groove in the vertical edges, to lock the boards together, to make a smooth surface. This made it very much easier to put up each board, especially considering the swollen glass wool all over the wall! We did glue each joint with our PU construction glue so it was locked together after all. But, we did notice that the joint isn’t as smooth as we normally get. We will solve that problem by sanding the joints with our belt sander and then the carpet will go over it, which will hide all these tiny bits of imperfections!! We went around our walls, putting up three sheets on the side wall, then almost four sheets along the long wall, went around the window and finally, two whole sheets on either sides of the doorway, plus a couple of shorter ones to go up and over the door hole. We wanted extra bits around the door because we needed to sliced into the edge with a 15degree angle, in order to remove a chunk of the OSB edges, to replace it with a strip of solid Oak timber instead. We knew that we are going to be hanging a very heavy dense door and we needed to make sure that the hinges will stay put when screwed into the wooden material. We found a plank of Oak in our garden shed (measuring 95mm wide by 30mm thick and a good 2.4metres long), sliced it in half and sanded all the old weathered surfaces. We glued two strips on both vertical edges of the doorway because we haven’t quite decided on which way around the door will be hung. These Oak strips were glued and screwed into place, including lots of large clamps to ensure the glue joint is squashed as tight as possible.

Oak strip clamped on

Entertainment wall OSB installed (1)

Entertainment wall OSB installed (2)

Entertainment wall OSB installed (3)

We finished off the week of work, well actually, finished off a whole year of work, by enclosing the window’s alcove with 11mm OSB boards, to hide the last parts of the concrete blocks. The two vertical sides got covered up from front to back, touching the window frame itself. And we put half a piece up on the top surface including several pieces of 1mm thick steel plates, glued to the backside of the 11mm OSB material. These will serve as magnetic attachment points, to hold up the ?lid? that is covering up the mechanisms for the automated blinds.
And finally, we glued on a narrow strip of 18mm thick OSB board, 45mm wide, to go over the top of the window hole, to bring it up to the same level as the rest of the wall surface.

This concludes the work for this year. But, we haven’t finish by a long shot !

21 December 2024
Created Oak Utility Panels

Today, we decided to complete one of the last things to do inside our Cloakroom, namely making two Oak panels for covering up two Utility Channel “holes”. We found a planed plank of Oak timber on our rack in our garden shed. We must have had some left-over pieces from a previous job couple of years ago. It was a large enough piece to fit the requirements of making a 125mm tall panel cover and long enough to cover up two holes measuring 365mm (one near the toilet) and 400mm long (near the basin). These Oak covers will overlap the holes by 12mm on the top and bottom edges and at least 25mm at the beginning and end of the covers. This will protect the edges of wallpaper all around, but the larger overlaps will allow for magnets to be stuck into the wall and the Oak, to help hold the panel in place. Our piece of Oak we pulled out of the shed was 1200mm long by 160mm wide. We first trimmed it down to 125mm using our bench circular saw and then got out our router. We used a large 19mm straight cutter to cut away the back to form the lip on the top and bottom edges first. We noticed on our test piece revealed that the cutter would “chip” off huge splinters as the cutter was travelling along the Oak and hit certain grain in the wood which ripped large chunks off. So, we changed our approached and very delicately cut a very slim 1mm groove instead of trying to do 5mm in one go. This worked much better and this allowed us to carry on cutting the rest of the wood away without causing these splinters. We then changed over to the chamfer cutter to cut a 45degrees slope on the front, to make it a softer profile. Now, we can chop this long piece into two smaller lengths, measuring 425mm and 460mm each. Next, we trimmed all four corners off and applied the chamfer again on each end. Finally, we switched back to the straight cutter to remove the back material to make the larger lip at the ends.

The last job was to fit some small magnets to both the Oak panel and into the wall surface as well. We found twenty little round ones measuring 6mm in diameter and 3mm long. We drilled a flat bottomed 6mm holes in four locations, two at each end of each panel and glued them in with superglue. Now, we put magnets on top of the ones buried in the wood so that we could mark on the wall where we would need to drill those holes. We put a blob of gel paint on the magnets and that successfully marked the wall when we carefully placed the panels back in position. We drilled the holes and at this point, we thought that the 3mm length would not be long enough to be successfully glued into the wall, so we changed over to 6mm length ones instead. We put on parcel tape on the back of the Oak panels and then put the magnets back on, put construction glue into the holes in the walls, making sure that all the dust have been removed, and finally, very carefully put back the panel on the wall, with the sticking out magnets squidging into the glue. We put a spreader clamp across to the opposite wall to help hold the panels in place while the glue sets.

Oh yes, We gave the Oak three coats of Acrylic transparent varnish to protect the surface from dirty fingers and grease.

We now have two Oak covers, ready for switches, displays, speakers, microphones, buttons and all sorts to be installed later on!

19 November 2024
Cloakroom Decoration Phase Two, Final Top Coat For Floor And Sliding Door Installed

We proceeded to paint the ceiling in the Cloakroom a nice sky blue colour (to match the colours in our wallpaper), but we also wanted to create some fluffy clouds so we cut some paper and stuck them to the ceiling, to cover the air vent and the three lighting units. They are of variable size and shape.
We then decided that the clouds are not working so we painted the air vent the sky blue colour, to make it blend in more, and dab various colours of grey and white and blue to make the clouds more fluffy.

Then, we painted the alcove where the vanity unit is going, including either side of the door entrance. This is a blue grey colour that approximately matches the colours in our wallpaper.

Now we are ready to apply the final finishing top coat of resin to the floor. It is a pale grey colour. But, first, we sanded the rough surface, to reduce the obvious join lines and other bumps and rubbed around the edges. We noticed that there were holes so we filled them up with more filler.

Cloakroom floor filled and sanded

After, we were satisfied with the condition of the floor, we proceeded to paint the final resin top coat all over.
While the resin was still wet, we sprinkled icing sugar all over the surface, to help roughen up the surface, to make it a better non-slip surface.

Topcoat applied and sugared

After a day of waiting for the resin to fully cure, we then got a bucket of hot water and poured it all over the floor. Because we deliberately had a small slope rising towards the doorway, none of the water escaped the room at all. We used a sponge to stir the water, to dissolve the sugar and then picked up the dirty water with a couple of sponges. We repeated again with more hot fresh water and sponged it dry. We now have one finished flooring, fully waterproof and easy to clean right around the whole room, including underneath the toilet.

Washing the Sugar off

The next job is to lay on the wallpaper we have bought for our cloakroom. It is special wallpaper and we carefully lined each strip starting with the one immediately behind the toilet and then working one way, leftwards towards the door, and then doing the final two strips to the right of the toilet, coming around on to the linen cupboard and turning a few inches on the side wall. We then carefully trimmed the bottom edge so it neatly terminated to the skirting and then did the same at the top. We had to dab a few edges and joints with more paste to help stick it down.

The next step in decorating the walls, is to put on several coats of varnish all over the wallpaper, to provide a protective and water resistant surface. We put on a third coat immediately behind the toilet itself because it will get even more scrubbed as you would expect.

We then sliced a thin piece of oak off one of our planks and then run it through our router to give it a gentle moon crescent shape. We rubbed it smooth and then gave it a coat of PU varnish with a mid-brown dye. We stuck it on the edge of the wallpaper that just came around the linen cupboard corner. This will protect the edge of the paper from being damaged.

Then we noticed that some of the blue grey walls were showing signs of wear and tear, probably caused by when we were doing the vanity unit and the lower shelf underneath. So, we gave the grey walls a touch up coat of paint.

The next step is a very important one, is the mounting of the toilet!! We carefully cut through the wallpaper to where the two pipes needed to come through the wall, then the two bolts sticking out, ready for the toilet and finally, the square push button module for flushing the toilet. We followed the instructions for measuring the length of the two plastic pipes, one for supplying the flushing water and the bigger pipe to take away the water. We then push the toilet on to the two bolts and made sure that it was level. We tightened the nuts until the toilet was nearly back against the wall, at which point, we ran a line of clear PU sealant between the edge of the toilet and the wall and finish doing up the nuts tight. We carefully scraped any excess away.
And finally, we installed the flush buttons module. We connected the tiny air pipe from the cistern and then clicked the module into place. It has magnets to hold it tight. Very clever.

We then press the button .. and it flushes !!
And no leaks !!

The other thing we did was to connect up a temporary tap to our cold water supply. It is an ordinary tap, with a multi turn knob. Nothing fancy. We now have the ability to have running water. We got soap in a bottle, plus also a bar of soap. We did buy a plug for the sink but it wasn’t a very good quality as it doesn’t hold the water for hours and hours. We will have to find another one.

We then ordered a large mirror measuring 600mm wide by 1200mm tall. It is a frameless and also has hidden hooks so it hangs slightly proud of the wall. We also bought a toilet roll holder and a hand towel holder, plus also a toilet brush and finally, a small swing lid rubbish bin.

Cloakroom Finished 1

Cloakroom Finished 2

The last thing we did for the Cloakroom, was to install the sliding door module. We didn’t get as far as implementing the compress air system because we decided that the sliding mechanism we spent a few weeks designing isn’t working as well as we hoped. We will mount what we got and make use of it for now, but, we will use a different sliding mechanism in the future and replace this one with a new one. We probably will move it to the Kitchen because it is likely that the sliding doors will be rarely used.
So we managed to get the module up inside the wall and screwed it into position. We then got a sheet of OSB board and sliced it up into two 450mm wide by 2100mm tall pieces. We then cut a narrow piece of MDF board and glue that to the edge. Next, we bent a couple pieces of aluminium 40mm wide flat bar to make a couple of L shaped brackets, with a slot cut in the top to allow the hanging of the two halves of the door to hook onto the carriage. We then cut a couple of finger grooves on the edge of both doors, on both sides so that one could open and close them. The last thing we did, was to use short length of draught excluder brushes and mount them near the bottom of the door, one on each side of the door so that the brushes are very slightly pressing into the surface and this holds the door nice and steady.

Temporary Cloackroom sliding doors

This is just a temporary doors, as it is only 11mm thick. We will replace them with proper 45mm thick ones with frosted patterned glass later on.

28 October 2024
Vanity Unit Designed and Created

We started another job recently, this time to design and create our Vanity Unit for our Cloakroom. We wanted a simple design, in a natural darker colour, to match the décor and not to be too big, or too small, but just right! We always liked the design of the basin bowl to be “cut” into the vanity work surface itself so that everything is flush and smoothly flowing from one surface into another.

So, the first job is to design and make a mould for the bowl itself. We glued together five layers of 25mm thick insulation boards, the largest one measuring 270mm wide by 450mm wide, shaped like a letter D. Then, the next layers were consecutively shrinking smaller around the curvy parts, but aligned up on the flat edge. It is now looking like a domed shaped pyramid, with the steps to get to the next level. We then, used a surfform shaper to remove the excess material from these steps, to smooth out the whole thing into a gentle curving bowl.

Starting the bowl blank

We then scraped around the flat back edge, to give it a pleasing softness to the two outside wings and scraped all over the bowl to improve the shape.

We then covered this foam layered object with two-part wood filler material, to fill in all the holes that accidentally get created and then sand it more thoroughly all over again. We repeated this process several times, patching small areas with more filler, until it was looking good.

The last piece to add to the mould, was the reinforcing drain hole layer. We will need to drill a hole in the bottom of the bowl eventually, therefore, it would be good if that area of the bowl should be reinforced with extra layers of glass fibre when we come to make the actual bowl itself. So, we found an old 100mm diameter disc and chamfered one edge with a flat 45degree slope, to make the glass fibre strands to bend and lie into the mould without sticking up. We stuck this wooden disc, which was only 11mm thick with more of the wood filler and then filled in around the edges, to make sure that it doesn’t have any “concave” hollows or pits, for the finished product to accidentally get stuck to the mould when we try taking them apart!

We noticed that the edge around the top of the bowl mould was rather jagged and we couldn’t get the wood filler to stick strongly enough so we went on to Plan B.
We laid the mould flat on a large smooth board with had parcel brown tape stuck to it and then covered the whole thing with Gel Coat resin and leave it to set.

Blank filled and sanded

While that was setting, we got some 10mm thick cement board and sliced it up into two 300mm wide pieces. We then glued them together using PU gun foam glue and flattened them together with six 25kg concrete blocks. Next, we very carefully measured the gap in the Cloakroom where the Vanity Unit is going, into the alcove that is formed by the Linen cupboard. We needed to measure both the widths at the back and front, plus also measure the angle of the wall surfaces which turned out to be 89.6° for the left back corner, and 91.6° for the right back corner. The back width was 755mm and the front edge measured 760mm wide. So we transferred these measurements to our double thick cement board and sliced the left and right edge very carefully.
In order to help us fit this cement board “worktop” into this alcove, we got two pieces of battens and screwed them onto the wall at a point so the top surface will be at 800mm off the floor. Even though we were very careful in slicing the cement board, it still needed rasping on some parts of the left edge, to make it slide in and fit right back against the wall. We also had to rasp the two corners because they are gently curving as well.

When we carefully cut around the edge of the mould, to release it from the flat base, we noticed that there were still missing chunks around the edge, the resin is transparent so we couldn’t see how much resin there was and also we were running out of that particular batch.

We took this opportunity to install a releasing mechanism to our mould, by drilling a 6mm hole right through the middle so that we could glue in an air pipe. We also widen out the entrance to the hole, the one at the bottom of the bowl, so that when we come to glue the flexible pipe in, we will seal up the joint between the resin skin and the pipe itself.

so we stuck the mould back down again on the base (after putting more parcel tape over it) and mixed up a little bit more resin, this time adding a bit of colour, green. We blobbed a line of it all the way around the edge of the mould and also we dribbled some into our new hole to doubly make sure that the compressed air won’t “peal” off the wrong layer !!

While that coat of filler was setting, we went off to cut two more pieces of cement boards, but this time only 200mm deep, and glued them together with the same PU foam glue as before, weighted down with four concrete blocks.
Then, while we waited for that glue to set, we sliced 50mm wide strips off a 12mm thick cement board, to start making the upstand strip that will go around the edge of the vanity unit. We carefully drilled screw holes through the base board and up into the upstand pieces. We had to replace one piece because we didn’t drill out the pilot hole wide enough to allow the screw to go in without breaking the hard cement strip apart. We were successful the second time around after testing various sizes. It needed a 3mm pilot hole and a 3.5mm clearance hole, to allow the 40mm long 3.5mm wide screw to go in fully.

By this time, the glue had set so we got our 200mm wide strip and place on top the other base board, because the same shape and size also fitted very well at the lower shelf position. So, we placed the larger piece on top of the 200mm piece and sliced off the excess ends. We rounded the back two corners, just like the base board and both of them slid into place very neatly.
We positioned the batten for the lower shelf so it just sat slightly higher than the waste drain hole going through the side wall. We drilled a clearance large hole through the batten and then screwed the two pieces on to the wall. We decided that we only needed two of them, a left one and a right one only.

We then painted them the same grey colour as the rest of the wall. We did the other battens for the main vanity unit as well.

One of the last things we did at the end of one of our days doing this job, was to finish filling in the mould around the edge with the wood filler. We now can get that nice and smooth and we had enough time at the end of the day, to coat a final top-coat resin all over and let it set overnight.

Upon the following day, we trimmed off the various drip marks hanging off the bottom of the mould and then proceeded to polish the mould with layers and layers of wax. We had a special tin of wax release substance that is especially designed for glass fibre resin production where the wax is put on to the mould so that the resin cannot stick to it and should pop off fairly easily .. we hope !!
We put on six layers in total, each layer needing 15minutes for the wax to dry before applying the next layer.

While we waited, we got on with another task of shaping the 50mm wide upstand pieces that we previously have cut and screwed. We put on a 50mm radius curves on the beginning of the two side upstands, and then, routed a quarter round on the front edge of all four upstand pieces. We continued to use this quarter round cutter to trim the front edge of the flat top of the vanity unit, on both top edge and bottom edge, to form a bull nose profile. We also did the same to the lower shelf as well.

Now, we dived into the deep end and went ahead to cover our basin mould with three layers of glass fibre, with regular resin on each layer, and allowed it to cure and harden.
We then trimmed the dangling “curtain” of glass fibre off the bottom of the mould, tidied up the edge

Bowl with initial fibreglass layers

Then we attempted to “blow-off” the finished basin off the mould by squirting in compressed air down the air pipe we had installed .. but .. alas .. it didn’t work!! OOOO Boy!
We tried to jam two crowbars deep into the foam base of the mould, tied some string between them and tried yanking the mould off .. but .. alas .. NO Joy! It broke the foam material.
This meant that we had to destroy our lovely mould! We hacked out all the foam and started nibbling the inner mould layer. It seems that the glass fibre basin part had stuck to our mould in several places, hence why we couldn’t release the mould. It seems that the waxing process didn’t do a complete coverage all over the mould. We are not sure to why. Phew!!
It took us several hours to rip the foam stuff out and then carefully, chip away the thin layer of resin from the basin bowl. We ended up with a couple of spots that needed grinding to remove the excess material. We eventually got our basin bowl out of it .. But, we will have to make another mould for the other wet rooms that contains a vanity unit with a basin. Phew!

Struggling to remove the foam plug

Cleaned up!

Now, we can mark out the cut out shape for the bowl, on the cement base board of our Vanity Unit, and proceeded to cut the piece so we ended up with the bowl fitting snuggly into place. We blunted the blade on the jigsaw as it is very hard cement material.

Now that we have a boundary between the flat surface of the vanity unit and the bowl, we now can position the locations for the soap depression, plus also for the nail brush and the plug itself. We set up the router to use a hemisphere cutter bit and using a pre-made template (a piece of 6mm MDF board with a 100mm circle for the soap dish, an oval elongated shape for the nail brush and a smaller round one for the plug) and carefully cut away the cement material until we had three depressions, neatly arranged around the edge of the basin bowl, starting on the left hand side and finishing with the plug depression centred, above the overflow outlet and the drain hole. There would be room for a bottle of liquid soap and then finally, the spout itself to give a gentle fountain of water etc.

We then glued the basin bowl into the cut out zone of the cement base board, using lots of PU construction glue which is very sticky and very tough once it is set. We left it 24 hours to cure and harden. We stuck a couple of bricks on top to hold down the bowl (which is upside down) sitting on our work table.

Glued in the top

Then, we proceeded to put a little vertical piece of the same cement sandwich board we had left-over, to form a little barrier just under the front edge of the vanity unit and connects to the curve of the bowl. We did this on both left- and right- and sides. We use a small piece of 20mm wooden batten to help secure these pieces into place and then we put a gentle quarter round on the lower edge to remove any sharp edges, before we continued to glue these two pieces into place using 5minutes PU glue, we also stuck down the four pieces of our upstand that goes around the edge of the work top.

It is getting there .. !

The next task is to fill in all the corners with two-part resin base filler, to smooth the transition on all the joints, to provide a curve so that the glass fibre can be encouraged to bend around the corners without breaking, or popping clear of the resin before it had set.

While we remembered, one of the final use of the router, was to cut another quarter round on the edge of the basin bowl that is touching the cement work top, again to allow the glass fibre to bend down into the bowl itself.

We put in more filler around the upstand and use a 22mm tube to form a curved profile on all the 90degree corners and that was rubbed down smooth.

We built a little “stand” to hold the vanity unit up and clear off the table so we can apply the fibre glass and resin all over, without sticking to the table etc.

So, after rubbing down all the fillings, we blasted the whole thing with compressed air and move this and the stand to the Garage and stuck on two layers of glass fibre with resin all over the top surface and bowl.

Fibreglassed all over

While that was curing, we got the second shelf and drilled a large clearance hole at the back of the shelf, centred. It is a 50mm wide hole to allow the push fit plumbing right angle connector up underneath so it can receive the waste pipe coming down from the trap and the bottom of the bowl itself. We then made a quick and easy legs to hold up the shelf, using two small pieces of OSB and carefully screwed two long screws on each narrow ends of the shelf, through a small piece of plastic pipe to act as a spacer. The whole thing held the shelf well clear of the table.

Upon the following day, We then trimmed off all the sticking out straggling strands of glass fibre and turned over the whole thing so we could resin and apply more fibre glass underneath the vanity unit and especially doing the front half of the bowl, to strengthen it so it will be much stronger and resistance to being bumped into in the Cloakroom.

While that was setting, we also did the second shelf and we covered it in glass fibre in one go, doing both sides at the same time, including going over the drain hole as well.

Lower shelf resin coated

After lunch, We proceeded to trimmed all the loose strands off both the vanity unit and the second shelf. Then rub all over everywhere and we put in extra filler here and there, to touch up areas that became a bit too thin after sanding the lumps away. We also thickened up the edge around the bowl and filling in air gaps that accidentally formed during the second stage of putting glass fibre on. We also decided to put the white filler on all the flat surface, to help remove much of the gently wavy surface.

All filled and sanded

At this point, we are reaching the moment where we need to apply the final colouring layers, but, we do need various plumbing bits and pieces, like the over-flow and the drain hole, to come from our suppliers.

So, in the meantime, while we waited for our plumbing order to arrive, we got on with colouring up the second shelf, with the final dark grey with a hint of blue in it. We also collected up a collection of tiny pieces of glitter of various colours, sieving out all the larger lumps. We put the shelf back on the support stand so that we could coat both sides in one go. We mixed 200g of the grey / blue mixture we previously settled on. We experimented with lots of different shades of greys and different levels of blues as well

And we settled on this darker shade of grey and were happy with the blue content as well.
So we coated the second shelf with the grey colour and while it is still tacky, carefully sprinkled on our tiny pieces of glitter all over, on both sides of the shelf. Then, later on, several hours later, we applied a protective clear coat of resin which is designed to help seal everything in and provide a very smooth finish.

By now, our plumbing items arrives, a over-flow plastic pipe so we drilled a new hole into our basin bowl, just below the rim, using a core drill of 27mm diameter and then digging out a little bit of the cement board underneath and behind the bowl. We then glued this plastic right angle pipe in with lots of the plastic filler, covering up the threaded part and over the flange at the back, and squashing it all together by using the nut to push the filler tight into the thread and the surrounding area. After it had set, we sliced off the plastic nut and the remaining pipe that was sticking out into the bowl area. We sanded it smooth and then touched up some small hollow bits until we got it lovely and smooth.

The next job was to install the drain hole and plug. It measures 41mm across on the threaded section and the flange is 61mm across. So, we used a 44mm core drill but we added an extra piece of wood, cut into a circle, a piece of 3mm thick plywood, also cut to a 61mm circle and positioned it behind the core drill bit. We stuck on a small piece of 60grit sandpaper on the wooden disc and then locked the core drill on to its holder. We then got a middle position in the bottom of the basin bowl and drilled through the thick layers of glass fibre and resin material from underneath first, then turning over the whole thing, continued to cut the remainder of the hole from the bowl side downwards. Then, we did continue grinding the surface away using the little sanding disc we had attached so it created a little hollow for the flange of the drain hole to sit neatly into place and just be below the surface. We chamfered the hole a little bit to allow the plastic moulded drain hole unit to fit in better etc.

We then trimmed down the long threaded part so there was just enough thread left to attach a solvent weld adapter to let us fit a right angle 32mm waste pipe piece, to bring the waste pipe back towards the wall and then turn to go down towards the second shelf and the large clearance hole we have already made.

The last thing we did for this particular day, is to coat the grey / blue gel coat on to the under side of the vanity unit all over and then sprinkle our glitter everywhere. We used a small fan to provide a gentle wind to blow the glitter up onto the vertical surfaces. We have just been holding up a pinch of the sparkles about 2 feet above the target area and sprinkle it that way. but, that doesn’t work so well for vertical surfaces so we used a little fan instead.

Upon the next day, an interrupted day with a external meeting to attend, we put on the final glossy top-coat resin on to the back half of the vanity unit (it is still upside-down) because the grey resin is very slightly tacky and we felt that turning it over wouldn’t be a good idea without causing problems like getting stuck etc. So, the top-coat went on to cover up the grey and provides a very hard finish.

We had a little bit of time before lunch so we took our finished second shelf, cleaned off all the dribbles around the back edges and fitted it in our Cloakroom. Well, not actually fitted exactly, I mean, with glue and everything! Just resting there on the support battens so we can sort out the waste plumbing pipes that will be coming down from the bowl. We are using push-fit plumbing parts, to take the waste water through the trap (which is above the shelf) and then turns a right angle immediately underneath the shelf. Then, a short distance at an angle to a second bend but this time only a 45degrees bend before a longer straight run all the way to the final socket that is buried in the linen cupboard wall.

Waste Plumbing connections

Just before lunch, the glossy top-coat has harden completely so we turned the whole Vanity unit over and then applied the grey / blue gel-coat mixture all over the top surfaces and inside the bowl, to complete the coverage.

Then, after the aforementioned meeting, we use the last hour of the day to apply the glossy top-coat resin all over the grey surfaces, all in one go so that we do not get a join line or something.

The last job to do was to clean all the back edges, similar to what we did to the second shelf and tidied up the drain hole so it will provide a flat surface for the attachment to fit snuggly down tight, which we sealed in with black sealant. We then finished off the last bit of the waste pipe from underneath the bowl, including connecting the overflow output and join into the vertical trap. We cut down the long excess lengths of the drain hole attachment so it fitted closer to the bowl and reduce the unsightly views of waste pipes etc.

Vanity unit complete

That pretty much finishes the construction of the Vanity Unit for our Cloakroom. The next job is to make our waterfall tap and we have some ideas which we would like to try out first. We may have to buy a waterfall tap but they are difficult to find without any mixer handle built-in.

3 August 2024
Construction and Decoration of Cloakroom

Now that we have finished installing the air ducting and water pipework that are travelling underneath the Cloakroom, we are now tackling the task of building up the inner surfaces of the walls inside the Cloakroom. One of the first jobs, is to put on horizontal utility rails on the door wall, so that we can have a small “control” panel beside the Vanity Unit and the entrance of the door, to provide knobs and buttons, to control the water coming out of the spout in terms of temperature and flow rate. Also, we would have a display to show the temperature when the water is flowing, and default back to showing the time otherwise. There would be a loudspeaker built in so we could have gentle music, or play gentle tones like the hourly chimes etc. finally, there would be a button to make the doors open!! We set this Utility Channel a little bit higher than our normal height, adding another 100mm. We wanted to keep clear of the Vanity Unit so that it is easier to keep the area clean and dry, and keep any water from splashing up to the Oak “control” panel.
We also put another “control” panel over near where the toilet is situated. We created a niche in between two vertical legs, measuring 350mm wide. The niche is based on the same size and position as the Utility Channel, lifted up that extra 100mm higher. This niche will provide a place where we can put in controls for flushing the toilet, controlling the lighting levels etc. We drilled a hole in the bottom rail for a 20mm pipe, to go down inside the wall, underneath the floor and then back up inside the wall beside the doorway, to the other control box. Then we put in a short pipe connecting this control box to the Hall’s Utility Channel, so we can bring in data and power cables from the outside.
The second control box also have a 20mm pipe put in the side and that travels down the wall and this time, goes across to the toilet and terminates inside the toilet internal framework. This will provide the means of adding extra features to the toilet, like having a heated seat, or perhaps have sensors to detect when the seat has been lifted up. A third hole was also drilled in the side of that control box, a smaller hole, to take a small 6mm plastic pipe, which also goes down the wall and across to the toilet as well, which will join with the existing bellows that causes the flush action to occur.

We have measured exactly where these control boxes are, so when the wall boards have been installed, we can cut out the small segment of the wall, to to replace it with a piece of oak which will have the buttons and bits and pieces on them.

We then turned to the task of installing the toilet framework and cistern into the body of the wall. We have gone for wall mounted toilets so it makes it much easier to keep the floor nice and clean, but also, hides away the cistern itself too. There will be just a small square access removable panel, so one could service the cistern, or even replace the filling mechanism etc. Everything is hidden inside the wall itself and will only show a small push button to flush the loo. We decided to take the opportunity to raise the toilet up higher than typical toilet bowls are, because it is sensible as we are all getting older. This metal framework provides a method of sliding up and down, to control the overall height of the ceramic bowl and we went for an additional 100mm higher, to make it come up to around 500mm off the floor, instead of the usual 400mm. Having done that, we then could measured the position of the large waste soil pipe and cut a piece to go horizontally from the stack, which then turns 90degrees upwards to join onto the elbow connecting pipe that comes from the ceramic bowl itself. Now, that we got this major pipework in place, we then could secure the framework into place using four coach hex-headed screws, two at the top and a further two at the bottom. That is it!

Cloakroom WC Frame

We then connected the cold water 15mm pipe to the back of the unit, using a tank connector fitting to a copper pipe, which we soldered on a short piece of copper pipe and then bolted on a right angle bend which then had the plastic 15mm pipe inserted in and tightened down.

Back of Cloakroom WC Frame 2

We put in a couple of 20mm pipes, one of them coming from Bedroom One’s Utility Channel, to provide mains electricity if we ever needed that and the second pipe, coming across from the small control box already mentioned above.

That concludes all the conduits and pipes going from here to there, including going under the floor as well, so we could get on with the next task. This is where we put in lots of glass wool pieces in that large space under the flooring, like we have been doing in all the other rooms, to insulate against the cold (or perhaps hot!) concrete slab.

Cloakroom floor insulated

Then we glued and screwed the floorboard pieces that were already done (years ago!).

Cloakroom floor down

This meant that we can now, and did, install the first layers of wall boards. The first layer is the usual 18mm OSB sheets and we worked our way around the room, doing each wall segment. Some of the pieces had pipes sticking through, like the 32mm waste pipe socket, waiting for the pipe to come from the basin, the bigger 68mm air ducting and the 15mm hot water pipe, to connect to the spout sitting on the Vanity unit. The tricky bit was the toilet wall, because it had two round holes to put in, plus also the “access” panel to the cistern, but also, a future rectangle access panel just above the ceramic bowl itself.

At this point, we decided that we would install some additional lighting into the Cloakroom so we could see what we are doing better! We had various samples of LED lamps so we gathered three of them together and placed them on short pieces of 12mm thick plywood and hang them up inside the ceiling space so that they don’t intrude into the room itself as we will be moving around and fitting large pieces of our plasterboard sheets. We wired the lamps back out to the Hall and put on a pull-cord switch for a local control when we have turned on the Hall lighting.

The next job was to trim the excess OSB material away from the door edges and also to cut out the Utility Channel that is beside the Vanity unit as well. At this point, we had a sudden thought that we had forgotten to make some provision for a future installation of more sensors and controls in and around the Vanity Unit itself, like detecting when the water is overflowing, or controlling the water by tapping the spout. So we needed an additional 20mm conduit installed, coming from inside the proposed Vanity Unit cabinet and going up to the Utility Channel we had just cut out. But, in order to do this, we had to sliced away a small portion of our new wall, to expose the hollow wall and the lower part of the utility channel framework itself. There, we drilled a 22mm down through the CLS timber for a conduit to fit through. We then took two pieces of our 20mm wide rigid plastic tubing and heated them to bend them 90degree right angles in them. Them using a small piece of 25mm wide water pipe, we could join the two halves together to form a single continuous conduit, going through the aforementioned hole. We finally, drilled a 20mm hole through the OSB cut-away piece, and then glued this piece back into the wall again. We will sand it all down once the glue has set rock hard and it will all disappear when we cover the walls with our plasterboard material anyway!

Next, we sanded all the wall surfaces, to remove any splinters and roughen up the surface, ready for the glue. We also gently washed the walls down with a damp cloth as well, to remove the dust.
Now, we can proceed to put on the Fermacell boards (our high performance plasterboards), and started on the back wall where the toilet will be hanging. We measured the locations of the various holes, including the “letter-box” future expansion, we drew a thick black line around the edge of the rectangular hole, wrote the exact measurements on the wall itself and then took several photos for future records ..

Cloakroom WC Slot dimensions

.. and we continued to measure the other holes etc. The width of the wall in total was 1100mm so we collected up a sheet off our pile and took it to the Great Room where we had our working table set up. We marked out the newly measured locations of the four round holes (one large one, one medium one and two much smaller ones for the bolts) and the large rectangular hole for the “pretty” plate that has the flush buttons on it. These got drilled and sawn, as well as the whole sheet was sliced narrower to that 1100mm width. We test fitted the board back in the Cloakroom and we only needed to rasp some of the edges a little bit, to make them fit smoothly. Once we were happy, We dampened down the back side of the fermacell sheet, and sprayed PU foam glue all over the wall, put extra construction PU glue around the toilet holes and pressed the sheet into place. We then stapled it all over and screwed a half dozen of short screws in and around the various holes, to make sure that the fermacell is well and truly squashed flat against the OSB board, so that when the ceramic toilet bowl itself is bolted into place, it won’t crush, wobble or damage the fermacell material.

We proceeded to cover up the other five surfaces in the room, including doing the surrounds around the door entrance way itself.

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (1)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (2)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (3)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (4)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (5)

Before we could get on with doing the next step with the skirting boards, we needed to trim all the corners, plus also slice a small radius on the outside corners (the two vertical edges and one horizontal edges of the doorway, and also the corner of the linen cupboard). We had to open both of our doors to let out the cloud of fine gypsum plaster dust to slowly drift out of the house!!

The next job was to put on the skirting board, but not a traditional wooden kind, but, made up using more fermacell material, cut to produce a heap of 100mm wide strips. We recycled many of old left-over pieces we had lying around on our sheet rack and from doing the current covering of the Cloakroom’s walls. But before gluing and stapling them on to the bottom of the walls, we passed them through our table router which had the giant quarter turn of a circle router bit and adjusted so that it sliced off a glancing chunk of the fermacell, to make a smooth and slightly elongated curve at the top of the skirting board pieces.
We went around the whole room, which adds up to about 6metres in total, gluing and stapling each piece in place. The only section that needed special treatment was the section underneath the Vanity Unit, because it is where the fresh air comes out into the room. So we make a special piece where we curved up and over the “hole” and then filled in on either side with smaller lengths of the skirting boards.

We then sanded the three outside corners, to make a gentle bend around from one line of skirting to the next line. All these skirting boards will be ultimately covered up with the glass fibre resin combination, going right across the floor and making a waterproof sealed surface.

Next, we filled in all the staple holes, rubbed down the occasional joins, and filled in the five inside corners and smoothed down by using a 32mm diameter pipe, to produce a gentle rounded contour. We did the same with the floor to skirting board edges but this time used a 50mm diameter pipe so the fibre glass and resin covering will smoothly curved around up the edges, to make it nice and easy to wash the floor. We went around putting a little bit more on the vertical contoured corners, to help fill in small gaps etc. and then rubbed down using a piece of sandpaper stuck to a short length of the 32mm wide pipe so that we could end up all nice and smooth.

We also have been testing various combinations of fibre glass and resin on test samples of the chipboard flooring material, to see how well it sticks down etc. We also painted fermacell pieces too. Then, we coated some of them with the finishing “top-coat” to see how slippery it could be to walk on. The test revealed that it is very well stuck down and the white top-coat is not that slippery when it is dry.

So with that in mind, we proceeded to prepare the fibre glass matting for the floor, tearing pieces off the roll, to put down three layers in total all over, with one layer going up the skirting boards around the edges. We needed to achieve this task of painting the resin into the glass fibre, in such a way, that we can reach over to apply the resin without stepping on to any “wet” parts. This meant that the pieces of matting had to be arranged so that each portion of the Cloakroom was completed fully, before moving along to the next section. We decided to do the area under the toilet first, then do the vanity basin section next, and then the middle section and finally the doorway area to finish off. These jigsaw pieces were bundled up and put into a line, ready for the actual application of the polyester resin. The doorway had an strip of 12mm plywood covered up in parcel tape, to make it non-stick and screwed down so the edge of the fibre glass can be terminated neatly to approximately where the sliding door will hang. This 12mm thick plywood strip is a guide to control how much glass fibre we should put down and we are aiming for a gentle slope going up when exiting the room. This will provide a double useful feature; one for keeping in any water spills and secondly, to make the transition from the hard, and much thinner floor covering, to the much thicker carpet and underlay that will be put down in the Hall. So, we had a pile of torn off pieces of the fibre glass matting, getting narrower and narrower, as we get closer and closer to the “barrier” defined by the 12mm plywood strip. This task took several hours to get right!
So after lunch, we got on with the job of mixing up the resin, we put in red colouring dye, to give it some interesting shade of colour and mixing batches, one for each section. We had five mixing pots so we started with 1.2kg of resin, put in 12ml of hardener and got on with the three matting pieces next to the toilet wall. We discovered that we needed to mix a further 500grams to finish off this section. Them, we proceeded with a 1.6kg of resin, to do the section under the Vanity unit and then moving across to the middle section with another 1.6kg of mixture. The last section of the floor had a 1.5kg of resin and then finally, an additional 600grams to build up the slope in the doorway. This took about three hours to complete this task, making sure that all the layers were pressed down, using the metal ribbed roller, to get rid of air bubbles and make sure the resin is well mixed with the glass fibre. All the skirting boards had plenty of resin brushed on them as well, as we were doing each area.

Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (1)

Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (2)

We did come along and lay down another heap of glass fibre strips across the doorway, to build up the gentle slope, to raise up the surface so that it meets the carpet and underlay out in the Hall.

Cloakroom Raising the threshold

This is the basic floor covering, which we will double check for bumps, sand the surface to make it smooth and then apply a finishing coats, perhaps two coats, to provide the waterproofing seal to the whole room and 100mm up the walls. This final “top-coat” will be done later on when we have finished routing various conduits going over the Cloakroom before we install the ceiling fermacell boards and complete the whole room, including painting it and the walls with our colour scheme. Once that is all done, we then will do the final coat of resin on our floor!!

So talking about conduits, we did that task of putting any conduits up inside the ceiling space, see Installation of a Variety of Conduits from Tech Cupboard for details.

Next, we installed some lighting conduits up inside the ceiling, short 40mm flexible conduits that goes from one lamp position to the next one, and then another short length to connect to the outside world in the Hall, to join up with the controller board out there.

The final job to do up there, is to build an air ventilation module that will allow a circular “pretty” vent to be installed in the middle of the ceiling and then a 100mm diameter flexible pipe to come out the side of this module and goes through several joists, heading towards the main ventilation ducting that runs right around the whole house, up on the First Floor, inside the triangular void space. We constructed the module using pieces of left-over floorboards and glued and screwed it together to form a box. We then slid inside a piece of flexible plastic sheet, it is only 2mm thick and we cut it down so it fitted inside the box, but push it into a curve to help guide the air flow more gently around the bends. We also put in two little side wings as well, to guide the air towards the output pipe connector, which is actually a sweep right angle bend, with a socket sticking in the correct direction, to take our purple flexible pipe that will go through the joist as mentioned above.

Cloakroom Air collector

The last piece to put in is a small bracing wooden bar across the box so that the “pretty” air vent cover can be fixed up against the ceiling surface later on after everything have been painted.

Now that we got our air vent module built, we push it up into the correct location, approximately centred in the middle of the room and marked off where the air socket is facing the webbing of the joist. After taking it out again, we proceeded to saw a series of 114mm diameter holes through five consecutive joist. We wanted the flexible purple conduit to poke up just before our main Air Duct which runs around inside our triangular void space upstairs. We drilled two overlapping large holes through the floorboard so it produces an elongated “oval” hole for the purple pipe to slide through at an angle and reasonably pointing towards the future Air Duct.

Cloakroom Air collection in place

Cloakroom air goes through joist and upstairs

We slid back the air vent module and screwed it in so it is all flushed with the bottoms of the joist and then pushed the purple pipe into the side socket and sealed it up with aluminium tape.

That concludes all the conduits and pipes that lives up in the ceiling space, so we could start the process of installing the fermacell sheets up there to cover up the joists .. at last! But, one of the first tasks to do, is to glue a strip of “2 by 1” batten around the edge of the walls so that we had a something to enable us to screw up the ceiling boards. Sometimes, the walls are positioned in between joists and there is nothing up there to secure the edge of the fermacell.
Next, is cutting smaller pieces of the fermacell material to build up the jigsaw pieces to slide horizontally into each section. It was quite an effort to work out the precise order. We took advantage of the joists running across the room, to act as a wide battens to allow us to butt together the two edges of the fermacell and have it nice and tight and flat, without having to do any major sanding. We got it organised so that we had only one tongue and groove joint to do, connecting the piece above the Vanity Unit and the two pieces over the door entrance. We ended up with four pieces.

The next task is to drill various holes for the three lamps and a giant hole for the air vent. We didn’t want to have to cut these holes upside-down so we did it while we had the pieces loose.

Now, it is time to glue and screw them up! We used our construction PU glue because it has a much longer working time, to allow us to slide the pieces around, to get them joined together and hooked into place, before we screwed any of the four pieces. We even pre-started the screws while each piece was lying on the floor so we didn’t have to used two hands to hold up a screw and drive it in. It helped enormously, so much so, that we are considering buying another piece of equipment to automatically drive screws in, by just using one hand – the screws are held in a long strip which automatically feeds into the screw driver!!

We put up the piece over the Vanity Unit first, then the Toilet piece next, then the middle piece and finally the fourth piece over the door entrance way. We put plenty of glue on all the joists and battens, plus also the fermacell joints as well.

Next, we went around filling in the edges at the top of the walls, to form a gentle contour between the wall and the ceiling, at the same time, filling in the little gap that we had at the top as well. We used a 32mm diameter plastic pipe to shape the tile adhesive mixture, because we got loads of it, but also, it is very easy to rub it smooth afterwards.

We also put up our white concentric ventilation cover, in the new large hole, screwing it into place, plus also, we put in three flush fitting LED lamps too.

The next job is to rub down all these fillings and apply additional treatment to areas that didn’t quite “do the job” first time around. While these are drying, we carried on making the heat exchanger module for our Hot Tank.

Now reaching this point in our Cloakroom, we proceeded to spray the walls and ceiling, with the first coat of white emulsion paint. Our very useful sprayer machine is a powerful machine and did a quick work of covering all the walls and ceiling. We took down the air ventilation grill and put little plastic bags over the three LED lamps and sealed them up. They still glow brightly so they are still helping us!
After the first coat, we went around and gently rubbed all the surfaces and discovered several missing holes which didn’t get filled in. We also spotted some of the joints between fermacell pieces that also needed more attentive work done to them too.

Cloakroom first coat of paint (1)

Cloakroom first coat of paint (2)

Cloakroom first coat of paint (3)

The second coat is now on and we are nearly there. The surfaces is much smoother now, but, we still spotted unfilled holes !! So, we carried on and filled in those little holes and rubbed the surfaces down again smooth.

It is now ready for the final coat of paint and doing the wallpapering. Our next job is to clean and oil the exterior cladding and oak frames.

22 June 2024
Floor Framework for Ensuite One and Two Constructed

While working on the Cloakroom and installing various utilities under the floor, we realised that the two Ensuites behind the Cloakroom needed to have their wooden floor framework built so that we could route the various pipes and air ducts across and use legs to tie them down.
So, starting with Ensuite One, we got out our laser level line generator and got the laser line aligned to the doorway plank of CLS timber that is already there with then allowed us to see the projected line on the back wall. We marked the wall posts 20mm further down and this will introduce a very slight slope downhill from the entrance way, ensuring any water to flow away from the bedroom and towards the drain. We then cut a piece of treated timber to do the two side rails, measuring 1724mm and 1690mm (one of them had a gap to fit in). They were glued and nailed with 90mm nails on all the wall posts they covered. And then the back wall got it horizontal rail, measuring 2070mm and that got also glued and nailed too. We decided to divide the room up so that there are three further horizontal pieces to complete the floor framework. They measured 1650mm each (plus or minus a few millimetres!) and we then put three legs underneath each one. We rotated the joist so it flat and taking up less room, to maximise our plumbing pipes, especially the waste pipe coming from the shower area, so that we can have a slight drop in the pipe to encourage the waste water to flow away but still have plenty of height to allow us to connect this waste water to our heat recovery module.
So, each of these horizontal rails had three legs so we needed to cut nine pieces of the green treated timber and dipped the ends in more preservative solution and then trimmed them just so that they fitted underneath the rails and give a solid support for the framework.

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (1)

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (2)

Then, we tackled Ensuite Two and did the same there too. There was a couple of differences, one being that because this room is right in the corner of the building, it had two outside walls, with the vapour barrier membrane plastic sheeting covering up the walls. This meant that there wasn’t any room for having niches and a control box for the shower itself. Therefore, we went out to buy five planks of 89mm wide by 38mm and 2.4metres long pieces, and drilled five clearance holes using our drill press, to make sure that the holes are going in nice and straight and not veer off at an angle. We are screwing these planks through their wide direction so we needed 150mm long screws, hence why we wanted to make sure that we were straight. We screwed these planks 250mm above the concrete floor slab, to allow the horizontal floor joist to be safely glued and screwed without being too near the ends of the timber. The other difference, is that the middle cross rail had to be set at an angle. We did this so we could avoid putting a leg almost in the middle of the accessible region underneath the doorway in Bedroom Two. We needed to maximise this gap so we could fit our heat recovery module in, which could be quite large. So we shifted the end towards the hot water pipe that are encapsulated in PU foam and get the leg quite close. We ended up cutting the end with a 5degree angle and then putting the usual three legs underneath.

Ensuite 2 Wall depth exspansion

Ensuite 2 floor framing (1)

Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

That concludes this little job on the side, to enable us to get the Cloakroom finished.

27 May 2024
Installing Utilities underneath the Cloakroom and Beyond

We started putting in the Utility pipes and ducting underneath our downstairs toilet, which we are calling by its traditional name of a “Cloakroom”, which is a very odd name as there is no evidence of cloaks or hats or sticks at all!
We wanted to make progress on implementing an actual toilet, fully flushing and everything, including having a working hand basin as well. So to achieve this goal, we needed to make sure that we have installed all the necessary pipework, and air ducting, that goes under the floor, to the other Ensuites behind, including going upstairs too.
Our downstairs Hallway have various Utilities travelling down its length, the major Air Duct travelling down the middle of the house and both hot and cold water in the side branch. So this is where we need to “tap-off” several feeds to each of our surrounding smaller wet rooms, like the Ensuites, toilets and shower room upstairs.
So, we started by putting in two manifold “distributors” in a line, and connected to our pressurised cold water. Each of these manifold units comes with three 15mm side branches so we have six in all. Four of them will be heated up by the hot water and fed to the following destinations; the Shower Room upstairs, the Toilet’s basin upstairs, Work Room Three’s Sink upstairs and the Cloakroom’s basin.

We installed a length of 15mm plastic water pipe, insulated in 75mm thick tubular foam for our cloakroom downstairs and left it sticking out of the wall, ready to be fed through holes in the wall boards when we get that far. The other end will be connected to our hot water mixer / heat exchanger unit which is located in the hall, along with a motorised valve so the computer can control the flow of water going into the basin. Then we did a second hot water 15mm pipe wrapped in more of that 75mm foam insulation material, went up inside the wall space to the First Floor joist and then sideways to head to the back of the upstairs toilet and then turned upwards and be ready for plumbing into that basin. There are two more hot water connections, the shower and workroom sink, to be done later on as these don’t cross our Cloakroom.
The other two 15mm connections are straight direct cold water feeds to the cistern for the upstairs toilet and the cloakroom downstairs. They were threaded through the walls from under the floor and is now waiting for the equipment to be installed.
Then we put in a 32mm wide waste pipe that connects to our main waste stack, drilling out a side connector and inserting a rubber bung that has a 32mm hole to take the waste pipe coming from the basin. We terminated this pipe 6inches off the floor, sticking out of the wall that separate the cloakroom from the Linen cupboard. Again, we will have to drill a clearance hole through the wall boards when we come to fit them up.

Cloakroom Water supply

Now it is the turn of the air ducting.
The air ducts needs to travel all the way to the far Ensuite (number Two) and we decided that we needed to build the framework for both Ensuites flooring so we had legs to attach these tubes to. See
Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

The following air tubes to install, were the orange flexible 50mm diameter conduits. Another long one to take fresh warm air to Ensuite Two, to approximately half way on the back wall, ready to plug into a left, and right, distributor, one for the Vanity Unit, and the second one in the Shower area. These are much slower and are used to provide a constant room temperature gentle air flow to keep the room fresh and dry. Of course, this utility will slow right down, or even stop, when one is having a shower. Anyone would feel a draught when one’s body is wet all over, one would feel the chilly breeze!!
A similar air conduit is installed for Ensuite One, to swing around and terminate about half way in the middle of the back wall, opposite the entrance way.

The next orange conduit is for the Cloakroom and then the Linen Cupboard, needing only short lengths but this time, we connected a right angle bend on the ends and carefully positioned it so it points into the room. The Cloakroom will have this fresh air come underneath the Vanity unit, again slowing right down when the room is occupied. The Linen Cupboard had the 90degree bend pointing upwards near the back of the floor and this will provide lovely fresh warm air constantly inside the cupboard and keep our linen dry and fresh.

Air supply for linen cupboard

The final orange one is being another 50mm flexible conduit to supply fresh air to the upstairs toilet, so it has to travel across the Cloakroom and then bend up inside the wall body (the wall that separate the Cloakroom from the Ensuite One) and then travel sideways inside the First Floor Joist space, to reach beyond the boundary of the Toilet, at which point, it will turn upwards and plug into another right angle bend, to poke out just underneath the Vanity unit like this cloakroom.

Air supply for upstairs WC

The final piece of air ducting to do, is another rigid 68mm brown pipe, for another high-speed hot blast, going to Ensuite One, just the other side of the dividing wall from the Cloakroom. This will also turn up inside the wall space and pop out around chest height too.

Air ducts under cloakroom

All these air ducts will be connected to our main Air Duct, using specially design “collectors” that draws a controlled amount of fresh air out of the air stream, concentrates it down to a smaller diameter, passes through either a water based radiator, or an electrical heater, plus also an air flow rate sensor and a temperature sensor too and then further reduce in diameter to fit either these 68mm pipes, or the 50mm diameter conduits.

This concludes this piece of work, putting everything we need underneath the flooring, in the Cloakroom, and we can now glue and screw down the floorboards at long last. We then can start building up the walls!

27 May 2024

Finished Lining Tech Cupboard with Fermacell

We started the new week with a job of finishing lining the Tech Cupboard with our Fermacell boards. We wanted to get this little room all done so that we could start installing the batteries and the heavy-duty electric bus bars that will route the power from our batteries that will be located in this Tech Cupboard and get this 50Volts DC power running up and down our hallways, but most especially, to our Utility Room and over to the Plant Cupboard where we got our Solar Inverter box so we can charge our batteries using the power of the Sun.

The metal leg (one of seven that holds up the Skylight and roof!) was completely encapsulated with a layer of 18mm OSB board and then covered in the 10mm thick fermacell material. The walls are also covered in 18mm OSB boards plus the fermacell, so we can now screw shelving brackets anywhere in our Tech Cupboard

Finished Lining Tech Cupboard with Fermacell

Tech-cupboard-lined-and-filled

We then filled in all the little staple holes and also rounded all the corners with Polyfilla, rubbed it all down and then gave the whole room a good thick coat of white paint.

Tech-cupboard-Painted-1

Tech-cupboard-Painted-2

That is that done and we can now start creating battery storage cabinets, equipment shelves and installing high powered electricity bus bars and network patch panels etc.

9 September 2022