Category: Ground Floor

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have completed the task of laying down the three remaining utility supplies; Water, Telephone and Electric.

Today we connected our new water supply pipe to the existing pipeline coming out of the meter. It was a mixture of plastic “new” pipes and iron “old” pipe (running off towards the old little cottage). We didn’t know that the plastic / iron adaptor was specially designed to allow the whole adaptor to slide fully along either pipe, we had to assume that this wasn’t possible and decide how to fit a new length of pipe between the meter and the iron pipe without bending or breaking anything! So we dug an extra couple of metres to uncover more of the iron pipe. We hacksawed at that point and moved the original adaptor along to that point (and this is where we discovered about the special design of sliding along!). we then put in a T junction jut after the meter and then finally connected to our new pipe!

Then it was the nerve racking point of turning back on the water and see what leaks we got!! NONE!! Yippee!

The garage now has water going to it and the outside tap on the front of the garage now gushes lots of water on demand!

The whole trench is now filled right up to ground level.

It is the turn of the Engineers from the telephone and electric companies, who will be called in, to do the final “mile” or rather “yard” to their “live” cables and equipment. This will happen in a few weeks time when we have moved into the temporary quarters!