Category: Phase 4

We Have Done It! The whole house is now fully clad with our Larch timber!
It took only a day and a half to finish off the last bit, the “L”, “M” and “N” sections, our alcove, around the back of the house. We could cut most of the wood in one go then it was quick too put up.

We used a higher scorch level for these planks to see what it is like and also to capture more heat in the cooler seasons. If we don’t like it, we can scrub the surfaces with a wire brush to tone down the darker colours, and of course, reapply the fire retardant treatment again.

The final job was to unscrew the top 6 rows of timber on the very first section we did a month ago, and we painted the exposed “pink” battens black. We realised that one could see up between the planks and see the lighter colour and hence we had painted all the other battens around the house, except for the “P1” section next to our patio area and Conservatory.
Then, we moved all the excess timber to our long term storage area, the swimming lane, sorted into width. Both sets of treated Larch planks are now all together, ready for the time when we will clad the garage.


The rest of the week was spent tidying up inside the house and upgrading the electric feed from the garage to the house to provide a more heavy duty service (we only had an 13A extension lead before). We will want to use more powerful machines now that we are going to be working inside the building.

By Monday lunch time, we had finished off the last triangular piece of the wall above the Utility’s window and door, the gable wall of the Porch.

We then moved all the platforms and equipment around to the back of the house to start working our way along seven remaining sections to be clad in the fire-treated Larch timber.
By Tuesday, we had finished the “I” wall section but we had to divert our effort to replace the caterpillar tracks on our mini-digger, see Replaced Caterpillar Tracks on mini Digger

We got back to work, Wednesday afternoon without any further interruptions (including missing all the rain on Saturday!) and zoomed along to get the “J”, “K” and “O” walls all finished and everything. We even managed to get the first row on the three walls that makes up our neat little alcove, the “L”, “M” and “N” sections. We also put up the marks on each battens that tells us where to put each larch timber piece going up the wall.


Hopefully, next week on Monday and Wednesday, we will get the Alcove all finished and that will be it!

We started the new week by moving the remaining oiled standard planks to storage in the swimming lane.

Then we started processing our second set of Larch timber that had been dunked in the Fire Resistant treatment a couple of weeks ago. The first job was to remove all the iron stains that we accidentally put on during the dunking process. We had applied the Oxalic acid to each and every stain and then later washed them with fresh clean water to remove as much of the acid solution (which had turned the surface yellow – this fades slowly away).


But also we decided that we would drain and dismantle our dunking tank assembly. We don’t need it anymore, so we recovered about 35litres of the oil, the second bottle is more “coloured” but the first one is looking quite clean.

Then we got on with the task of mounting planks on to the walls, which we started where we left off, on the “H” wall (the right side of the house going alongside the Garage).
But we also suddenly remembered that we needed to paint the top of the battens black so anyone looking up the wall, and up the gap between planks, cannot see the “pink” colour, just darkness.


The “H” section of the house includes the Side Door Porch, which is being held up with reinforcing diagonal arms, attached about six feet up the wall. This means that some of the planks had to have notches cut out to fit around these aluminium arms.
We got the second half of the “H” wall all finished, right up to the rafters, and we got as far as the first couple of rows going up inside the Porch’s gable wall section over the Utility Room window and the Side door. It was quite fiddly working around the projecting wooden beams that holds the Porch roof up, including the more awkward process of moving around on the platform and avoiding the metal arms too. We had to keep coming down to cut our planks and slice the lap joints etc. so it was a bit slower in putting up the pieces.


Next week, we should get the last remaining triangle section finished and then we can move around to work along the back of the house. We might even get that done by the end of the week 😉

Upon the resumption of the new week, we got on with the task of cladding the Front Porch wall, the “C” section that has the main house door and Entertainment Room’s window. It is over 7 metres long and disappears up to the apex of the porch roof, some 5 metres high.
By the end of Monday, we got all the lower section of the wall covered in our Larch cladding timber, with different randomised planks on each side of the door and the window.

Then over the next three days, using our existing high level platforms (we had to raise a shorter one by extending it’s legs by temporarily clamping on a set of the old tall legs), we slowly covered the rest of the wall. It was cramped at times, especially near the top, working around all the piles of timber, ladders and tools, it was a tricky and slow work.

These cladding planks are the original finish (no burnt surfaces, apart from the gentle band of colour at the bottom and tops of the windows and doors), we had to go all over the surface, wiping the dust and finger prints off. Sometimes, a bit more effort and the use of some sand paper was require, to bring back the clean look again.


After that, we tidied away the three platforms and then continued on the next and last two wall sections, “D” and “E” to finish off all the walls that make up the “front” of the building that don’t need the fire-treated timber. We were looking at the finished C porch wall and decided that the darker band running underneath and over the windows should be toned down. We therefore proceeded to unscrew the high scorched planks off the “A” wall to scrub them more vigorously and put them back.


Following this new thinking, we also decided to only use scorch level “2” and level “3” to form a narrower band on the “D” and “E” walls, to make the darker bands less of a statement.


This concludes the work on the first half of putting up the Larch timber on our walls. The next job is to sort out our second set of timber, remove the rusty iron marks, scrub the darker scorched planks to tone those down and then dunk all of them into the oil bath. That would be next week’s list of jobs to do.

We resumed work on putting up more Larch cladding planks on to the wall sections “P2” and “A”, coming around the Great Room and along the front of the house.

It is just a repeat of the standard placement of each Larch piece, according to the scorch burn level and the randomised widths, and getting them cut and sometimes connected together with a lap joint.
The middle of the “A” section has a fence support post so it was a case of making sure the randomised planks came to the same pattern at the top for the final two rows. We only had to manually swop over two planks in the spreadsheet and we were also lucky that the combined height arrived almost exactly to the height of the fence break, thus avoiding having to reorder the list!

On Thursday, we did discover something that was concerning us and it happened during a heavy rain fall (we had 6mm of rain in 10 minutes flat!!) and we watched the rainwater fly off the roof and missing our gutters. This was in the valleys of the roof and the sheer amount of water that had collected was enough to make it shoot down the valley and the angle meant that it shot over the edge of our gutters. We had noticed to how wet these corners were after a rain shower and we thought that we might have had a leak or something. But now we know what has happened and we can now build a solution which is to construct a barrier of some form, to catch the flying stream of water and deflect it downwards into the gutters instead. That is good!
By the end of the week, we have completed the “A” and the “B” sections and have moved onto the more complicated “C” Front Door Porch section that goes up four and half metres, up in the apex of the roof that hangs over the Front Door and Entertainment room.


We needed to make sure that the first row of the Larch timber, a large width with a scorch level of 1, was positioned at the exact level so when we have reached the top of the doorway and the window, they all aligned up together and smoothly allows the next full row to blend in seamlessly. We used our laser level gadget that produces a sweeping red line, right on the horizontal level, to provide the necessary synchronising factor to achieve this goal.

We will continue next week, while dodging the short sharp showers and hopefully we will get the rest of the front of the house clad. Then we can turn to our Fire Proofed Treated timber, clean the iron marks off and dip them into the weather protection oil and then proceed installing the other half onto the walls along the side and back.

At last, we can actually see the Larch cladding timber going up on our walls this week! But first, we made a couple of templates; a lap joint cutting guide to produce a 50mm wide half lap joint for two pieces running on the same row, so we could screw both “ends” of the two planks into the single upright batten.

It uses our two battery powered circular saws; one to rip across the end at 50mm deep cut and just shy of half way through the thickness (10mm out of the overall 20mm thickness) and the other saw to cut across the face at 10mm deep to complete the removal of the piece. Then we flip around the second plank (end over end; rather than edge over edge) and repeat the process using the same template. This produced two mirror image cut away ends that merges together almost seamlessly.


The second template tool were three metal plates with guidance holes drilled into them. There are three versions; one for each plank width. These helpful guides will keep our placements for the mushroom headed stainless steel screws at a regular and consistent location when fixing all the cladding planks up on the walls and their battens.

Skipping pass some external interruptions we had this week, we went to the far back left corner of the house, to the Great Room wall section, P1, to start there. The wall is 4800mm long with a large window in it so we can learn how to proceed, setup working platforms (two trestle tables joined together using two CLS 63mm planks and covered in plywood left-over pieces) and carefully see how we put up each plank in turn. The spacing between each row of cladding is achieved using a 9mm thick plywood for the bottom row against the slate ribbon and a 6mm piece of MDF to separate each row going up the wall.

We decided to start at the bottom of each wall, with the widest Larch timber (burnt to a level 3) and then followed by the 2nd row of a medium plank (with a burn level of 4 – darker) and then finally the darkest (burn level 5) plank using a narrowest plank to meet up with the window sill. We arranged it so that the joint between this row and the fourth row is just hidden by the Oak sill itself so we had to remove s small area (the upward slope) of the Larch timber and it all fitted very well.

Then we got our spreadsheet and randomised the order of the 12 planks that go between the bottom and top of the windows, to mix up the three different widths, to make it more interesting and more variations around the house. We decided that we would mark on the batten on either side of the window, the exact placement of each row so we can be reasonably assured that our last plank will align to the top of the window in a consistent manner. This in fact exactly what happened and we now have both sides of the window populated with planks spaced apart by an average of 11.5mm over 15 planks.
As we got higher and higher, we realised that we needed a better means of working and reaching up that high so we took one of our three large platforms and chopped the legs down so it provided enough height to enable us to reach up inside the eves.

We finished off the main area above the window and stopped just short of the rafters. We left the gap between each rafter exposed to see if it really needed filling or not.
Also we noticed that we could see the “pink” battens plus also the gap between the Larch planks were much more obvious higher up because we are looking upwards and able to “see” up the slope between the rows of Larch.


So we spend a couple of hours painting the top 500mm of the pink batten along the front of the house, including all under the front door porch area with black paint we had left-over and we will also close up the gap of the upper rows to reduce the impact of the joints.
The final day Saturday, was a rain washed out day so we got on with another job, fitting the filter modules and sterilising unit together, along with a submerged pump to our rain water underground tank. See Rain Water Underground Tank Brought Into Operation.
Next week, weather permitting, we will resume putting up more cladding on the walls but if disrupted by bad weather, then we will do some preparation work to produce more Oak decorative coverings for the corners of the building.

This week, we finished waterproofing our dunking trough, with two layers of thin plastic sheeting we found in the shed and then covered over with a left-over length of our roofing membrane material to provide a scratch resistant surface as we dip each plank in and out.
Then we made five spikey drain support strips, spaced apart 1.2metres so we could do every length we had from 3mtres to 5.7metres. Each strip was 1.2metres long and we used forty 100mm standard nails, hammered through the batten via pre-drilled clearance holes, spaced apart by 25mm and this would allow us to handle 39 planks at a time.

The first job was to pour in our Flame Retardant treatment .. no actually, it was to pour in a large trug of water first, about 30 litres and leave it for an hour to make sure we don’t have a leak. We can afford to lose some tap water but not our Flame Retardant Liquid which costs £1000 for three 25litre bottles!! Link to the product
But we needn’t had feared .. we had No Leaks! Phew!
So we poured in two bottles of the fire stuff and started dipping. We measured the level in the trough at the beginning and it was 42mm high for 50 litres.
We began with the widest planks first, the 150mm width and all 4 metres long.
It was not too bad a process, dip one in, rotate in the liquid to ensure a full coating and then lift out to drain and repeat.

We had started in the afternoon as the morning was spent making the spikey draining prongs. But we wanted to get all 300 planks dipped so that they could and should dry overnight before they get their second and third dunk. It was a very, very long afternoon and we finished just gone 7pm ? Phew!

But shock! Horror! We suddenly realised that our nails were corroding and leaving black lines on our nice Larch planks! Oh **** and double damn! The Fire Treatment liquid was water based and we found that the fire proofing chemical was speeding up the whole rusting process! So we needed to clean the nails, dry them off and spray them with black metal paint to protect them. That was done at 9pm! Oh Boy!
In the morning, Stephen found on the web a solution to remove rust marks from timber by using a solution of Oxalic acid to dissolve the iron oxide and he was all ready to order the necessary chemicals when mum said “look under on the shelf in the kitchen and you will find a fifty year old bottle” and apparently, it was a common laundry solution in getting rid of rust marks on clothing! So making up the required solution, we rubbed the rust marks on the timber .. and they disappeared .. to only leave a bright yellow smear over the spot!! Big Sigh!! What Now??! Roll eyes upwards!!


It must be the fire treatment chemicals doing it! Oh Boy! We took some scraps of Larch timber and dipped them into the treatment, wiped them with the rust remover to get the yellow smear and then left them outside in the sun to see if they will bleach away. We were also thinking about sanding the surface or wire brushing it or something to get rid of the rust marks etc. That would have to be done later on.

In the meantime, we resumed the dipping process, but in reverse, taking the planks from the drying pile (yes the planks were all dry!) and gave them their second dunk. By lunch time, we had done all the long narrow planks and to our frustrations, we saw that we were leaving black marks on the planks in addition to the rust marks and realised that the black paint we put on the previous night had not survived for some reason. We threw Our Hands Up In The Air!!! Arrgh! So after lunch, We replaced all the draining prongs with 90mm galvanised air-gun nails and made five replacement draining supports, but spaced apart by 30mm this time, affording us to handle 33 planks instead of the 39 before.
So, mid-afternoon, we resumed again, dipping all the remaining planks and finished nearly 7pm again!! Were We Whacked!!! Gee Wizz!

The third day of dipping, we had some good news to start off with, we saw that the yellow smear had disappeared completely! Hurray!! It seems that the yellow chemical was not very stable, at least, the test pieces we left outside in the sun had lost their yellow!! Yippee!
With a lighter heart, we got on with the final third dip, putting our third bottle of the treatment in the trough and got on with the dunking process.

We had been measuring the liquid level each day and we could see that we were using about 20mm of liquid for each dipping session and that was good. by the end of the third day, we had just a few millimetres of liquid left in the bottom of the trough, we had to wiggle the planks and flip them over several times to make sure they were fully coated.

We then vacuumed out the remaining liquid, using a fine cloth filter to remove as much of the brown particles that had come off the darker burnt timbers and we manage to rescue about 6 litres, still slightly brown colour but at least, we have some ready to coat on any timber piece we want to make sure it is fire treated.
That was the end of the third day on Thursday!

So on Friday, it was the turn of the second pile of Larch timber that is earmarked for the front of the building and didn’t require the fire treatment process and just the oil solution. We poured in two of our four bottles of decking oil into the trough and got on dipping another 300 planks (just shy of 300 actually). It was a bit more slippery! But all were dunked in oil and stacked up over near the front of the building, ready to go outside to be mounted up on the walls.

That was easy! Sigh!
The last day was spent doing a major tidy up job in the workshop, taking out the ill-fated nails, putting tools away and sweeping the whole place. We then install the Sun Shield on the corridor and lastly inspected our water tank we got on top of our garage roof. It hadn’t been inspected for several years so while we were up there, we took a look and it was all fine.
So that concludes our rather adventurous week!! Phew!

The last two weeks saw the completion of scorching all the Larch cladding timber. A total of 596 planks of varying lengths from 3metres, right up to 5.7metres and different widths of 75mm, 100mm and 125mm. They all had a position in a list that describes how much scorching each had, from level zero (not touched by any flames) to a deep burn at level 5. We eventually, after having to do running repairs and improvements to the Scorching Machine (a new Motor driver heatsink amd replacement snadpaper on the drive rollers), processed all 441 Planks that needed scorching. Our canister of Butane gas, had 19kg of gas at the start. This went down to just 2kg at the end so how about that then?!

The next task was to do a grand tidy up of the whole area, moving the scorching machine over to be stored away in a corner for emergencies, sweep up the brown “charcoal” dust that was produced by the scrubbing process, probably about good bucket load and a general sweep right across the middle of the building, another 2 buckets of mostly sand.

Then, we sorted out all the scorched planks into two main piles, one for fire treatment; these planks are destined for the back of the building nearest to the boundary and the side next to the garage too. The other main pile is earmarked for the front of the building and only going to have the single treatment of being oiled. The two piles are quite similar in size.

The last day on Saturday was spent building the basic structure of our dunking trough to apply the necessary treatments. It is a long trough nearly 6metres, 160mm wide at the bottom and the two sides gently fans outwards to a height of 100mm. Then a 4foot wide draining board was constructed all the way along one side so we can position the freshly dunked planks up on the slope and reclaim the dripping liquid and recycle it for the next planks.

Next week, we will seal the trough with plastic layers to retain the liquid and then start treating the Larch timber.