Category: Phase 5

After having finished the floorboards for Bedroom 3, we can walk around much easier and inspect everything. We decided to swop out the cable conduits around the windows with our recently purchased rigid waste piping and also insert a another new piece of conduit, this time to provide access for power and signalling cables to the windows and their motorised blind mechanisms. We nearly forgot all about those!

Another feature that we have been talking about is putting in a built-in hearing induction loop into and around the walls so we installed another length of conduit, running horizontally above the doors and windows using our stock of 20mm black polyethene pipes. We had to heat and bend much sharper corners because of the tight space requirement when traversing around the corner and having to keep inside the 38mm spacing limits. We made six of these tight bends and then used short 25mm diameter pipe to join them to the straight sections. The Loop started and finished at our Control Box which will house the induction loop amplifier. This is a very rare feature to have such a thing in a domestic situation, all built-in but having two people wearing hearing aids living here, we thought we had better provide the ability to install a loop later on.


Then we used the left-over flexible 32mm conduits to put in the connection for our mass of low-voltage cables to start on each side of the entrance way.

That concludes all the conduits for this room, we didn’t need to install a conduit for compressed air nor any other types like water or things like that. So we moved on to the next task of building the short stub wall and doorway to the en-suite. One of the first steps was to screw up a long piece of CLS 63mm timber at the 500mm height which matches the two windows in the room. We did this by using our green laser to ensure everything matched up. Then we measured to how far the toilet bowl would be sticking out from the wall and made sure that the door would be able to swing clear. It does mean that the doorway is slightly off centre but not by too much, some 410mm on the left side and 610mm on the opposite side. We used more of our “2by6” timber that we originally used to build the framework around the en-suite entrance, to make the stud wall and a flat top. We aligned the height of the little stud wall to the new horizontal rail we just put on so all three window like objects in the room all look very similar, with an oak sill on each one etc. We planed two pieces so it was nice and flat to go across the top of the stud walls and two vertical pieces underneath this flat top and goes all the way down to the footplates on the concrete. These were glued and anchored into place with lots of screws plus several battens too. The last piece of the 2by6 was to create the door sill sandwiched between the two stud walls, exactly 880mm wide which is our standard width for swinging type doors. We introduced a very slight slope to this door sill, dropping down by 5mm as one goes into the en-suite so that if there is a lot of water splashing about in the room, it is not prone to running out and into the bedroom.

The next task is to slice up our heap of 8×4 MDF sheets into eight strips of 149mm wide per board, these strips go at the bottom of the walls to provide the back-panel to our air channel distribution system running around the bottom of the wall, completely all the way around the whole room. We went from post to post along the wall, stopping and starting on them to ensure that the ends didn’t flap in mid-air. We fired in staples on each post but also glued the top edge to the underside of the CLS horizontal rail so it kept the strips straight and sealed to stop air leaks. Talking about air leaks, the bottom edge was sealed using a black MS Polymer glue against the floorboards. Then we went around with a paint roller and painted the bottom section of the strip black to stop any chance of a gleam shining through when the room is finished and carpeted.


The next job was to put up the wall boards, the 18mm OSB sheets. Before we put them up we inserted the final layer of glasswool insulation between the horizontal rails, this is roughly fitted and is really just to provide impact sound dampening for the wall.


Also, we went around measuring the height of the walls, from floorboard to ceiling joists and it came out to be 2415mm on average, fluctuating only a couple of millimetres. This height was designed so after the 15mm thick ceiling fermacell panels is installed, the room will have around 2400mm clear, about 7feet 10½ inches.
We then looked at the various methods of putting up these wall boards and we went for the more rewarding results by putting whole OSB sheets vertically from floor to ceiling in one go (instead of splitting it up into two halves, separated at the Utility Channel) and then cut out the Utility Channel afterwards and also deliberately overlapping the doors and windows so we can trim back the edges right back to the physical limits of these holes in the walls and get a much better finish. The next choice was how we would join the sequence of boards and part boards together along a wall section, we could either use a biscuit jointer or use a continuous tongue and groove method. We couldn’t decide so we went for the biscuit joining method first on the short wall that has the small window in it and proceeded to put in ten biscuits along the entire height with includes the extra ones around the bottom and top pieces that covers the window section. It was a bit fiddly in getting all the loose biscuits in and then slicing the two boards together but it was workable. The big problem we had was with the glue as it was taking us a good 15 to 20 minutes to get all the pieces ready, with their joints and biscuits and we were using the PU spray gun glue foam because it was a very handy tool to just spray the glue into place, but these spray expanding foam don’t have a long “open” working time before skinning over, even this especially designed foam to work more like a glue still has a short time before it skins over and cures. We did manage it by doing it in stages and we got the first wall up and screwed in place. That is another thing, we decided to use screws instead of nails, just like the floorboards because we wanted to know that the boards were being tightly pulled back onto the support horizontal rails and squeezeing on to the glue.

We needed a glue which stayed usable for longer and after much discussion over different glues, and doing several tests (we put out three blobs of each glue, and then waited 5minutes, 10minutes and 20minutes to see if and when they skinned over and whether the joint was affected by screwing in small pieces of MDF material), we concluded that the solvent-free construction glue was suitable because it is both cheaper and less messy than the other choice of the PU construction type which worked the best (and the third glue, the Skixall performed the worse because it started to skin over by the 20 minute point but still did a good strong joint).
Before we resumed putting up more wall boards, we felt that we should make sure that we could cut out the Utility Channel so we got our track saw out, drilled a series of mounting screw holes and then using our green laser line generator, mapped out on the finish wall the 800mm and 900mm levels, drawing two lines. We also decided that there will be a 38mm uncut area at each end of the channel so that the covers didn’t have to go right into corners or right up to the edge of a window or doorway. We then proceeded to mount up the track guides onto the wall and sliced two horizontal cuts into the OSB board, then finishing off the cuts using our wiggle saw. After tidying up the cut edges with sand paper, we now have our first Utility Channel ready for use, for our sockets and speakers and whatever else we may want in a room.

Another little job we did was to make a magnetic clamping system for our green laser line generator because it would be much easier if we could put up a vertical metal ruler with pre-determined positions of various elements we have in a room and be able to move the laser up and down easily without having to use a clunky screw clamp. So we put on a long metal band on a piece of wood and glued in two strong magnets into the laser’s little shelf. We did have to add a coat of a rubber like spray on paint to increase the friction between the metal and magnet as it had a tendency to slide down under the force of gravity!

Finally, for our next section of wall, along the “H” wall with the large window in it, we decided to try out the tongue and groove method of joining the boards together and see how well (or not) it performed. We got our two router machines out and set up the two cutters, one to make a groove 13mm deep and the second one to cut a tongue 12mm long. These are parallel straight 90degree tongues so it may give us some fitting issues when we get to try it out next week. The machines are now setup and the test pieces look good and form flat and smooth joints so it is promising.

The last thing we did was to bring in a dozen more sheets of our 18mm OSB boards from our storage piles outside under canvas, we will need at least eight more boards to finish off Bedroom 3.
Oh yes, we moved some of our LED flood lamps from upstairs and mounted them into the back bedroom where we have all the sheet materials and several lamps in the room we are doing because the place is getting darker with the rooms being built and blocking off light in all directions!
Next week, among entertaining family members, we will continue putting up wall boards and even maybe a layer of the fermacell (plasterboard like material) on too and get to see an almost completed room, apart from the ceiling and the doors for the en-suites etc.

Continuing with Bedroom 3, this week we installed more various elements into the wall and floor structure to provide additional functionality to the operation within the room like, for example, a control box that will contain the electronic controller, a display module and local circuit breakers for the power lines. This was constructed from sheet of left-over 12mm thick plywood board material and made two open faced boxes, measuring 360mm wide, 75mm deep and 400mm high.

We designed it this way to allow the shell to be fitted into the wall structure but not too deep to intrude into another mechanism like the sliding door modules. These boxes will be covered up by the wall boards, the 18mm OSB sheets later on but will have internal brackets and fuse holders plus a display unit with built-in audio amplifiers to help drive the four speakers that will be the standard provision in this size of rooms.
The next task was to drill 20mm wide holes for more conduits to connect to this buried box and through the utility channel too and plus another one going up to the ceiling to serve the lighting circuits. Talking about conduits, we installed a couple of extra ones either side of the entrance to the room, these being 20mm diameter pipes, to help thread the mains AC power lines in and around the utility channel. At this point, we have still the problem of having a flexible conduit that also needs to go either side of the entrance, this time to supply bunches of network cables, speaker wires and other low voltage signalling cables. Our supplier of the 40mm wide twin-walled conduits still have not arrived so we have been looking around for alternatives. It looks like that we will have to use rigid plastic plumbing pipework, the 32mm diameter size that is usually used for waste water plumbing but we could use that, coupled with sweep bends and achieve the method of channelling the cabling around our windows but we would still need a flexible solution and the nearest type we can find is a corrugated water hose being sold in 10metres length and 32mm internal diameter and this would be used at the entrances and going around en-suites etc. We will place an order for those solutions soon.

In the meantime, we started looking at our air distribution system, the four separate orange 63mm ducting that will take the air to all edges of the room. We mounted our air splitter chamber in the entrance way so it is ready to be connected to the main air duct when that is constructed, and the four outputs were then connected to lengths of the orange 63mm twin-walled conduit. These conduits travelled across the room, cutting paths through the rigid foam board that covers the hot water pipes and anchored to various floorboard support legs and arrived in approximately the middle of each wall.

Next was to design an sweeping adaptor that will take the output of this orange ducting and split the air into two sideway facing wings to send the fresh air along just behind the wall boards. We had thought that we could design a model on the computer and generate the object using our 3D printer but it turned out to be quite a complex shape sweeping up, backwards and then forward and sideways, all because the air duct is underneath the floorboard, has to go around the back of the support framework and arrive above the floorboard level but hidden behind the wall board. There were seven individual parts to make it possible to generate each 3D part on the printer (because of the limitations of building up the plastic object layer by layer so it is very very difficult to create hollows or bridges without it collapsing or having internal support structs etc.) and it would take well over 24 hours to just print one of these winged adaptors.

We needed lots of them all over the house, at least fifty of them! So an alternative solution was needed and it found it by using the waste water rigid plumbing pipes, the solvent weld types, not the push fit ones. We took a series of 90degree bends with short straight pieces and created a fair substitute design that does the same job of channelling the air out and sideways behind the walls and into the room. We sliced little bits off various parts to reduce the size, trying to make it as compact as possible and eventually we applied the solvent and glued it together. It is a twin pipes going up and then turned to form the two outward facing wings. Finally, we took short lengths of the rigid 68mm brown pipework and experimented in heating it up with the hot-air gun and using various shaped wooden moulds, we could stretch the plastic out and then squeeze it down to wrap around the two 40mm pipes of our adaptor.

We then did a test run by fitting it into the wall, underneath the large window in the room, placed two strips of the MDF strips (with little cut away sections) and screwed it up to the wall legs. We found two narrow pieces of our 18mm OSB left-over pieces and also screwed them on the horizontal rails so we created our air channel hidden behind the wall board. We connected the orange ducting up to the new adaptor and connected our old 150mm centrifugal fan to the main air splitter chamber to give it a blast of air through the system. We could feel the air gently sweeping along behind the OSB strips and gently entering into the room itself. We wanted to make sure that the air would gently distribute fairly evenly along the whole wall and had thought that we may had to cover the air channel with a cloth barrier to help guide the air to spread out but it turned out to work just fine without any additional cloth barrier after all.


We then found some old pieces of underlay and carpet to place on the floor (just a sheet of 18mm OSB board that we are using to help us safely negotiate the floorboard support framework) and had a look at the finish results. The first implementation of the wall boards is positioned to allow a 50mm (a 2inch) air gap between the floorboards and the bottom of the wall board, to provide room for the air to escape and have our carpet fixed down in the gap. But we decided that 50mm was too big so we reduced the gap down by 12mm to just 38mm and looks much better. the air was still escaping out quite easily even with the carpet in place too.


While we were doing our experiments, we ordered all the parts to make plenty more of these air divertors, some 450 pieces, a mixture of sweep 90degree bends and 90degree elbow bends plus also a pack of grey pipes too, all for overnight delivery. We made a jig to hold the parts whilst they were glued, This meant that we did proceed to make a further three adaptors and proceeded to install them into Bedroom 3, one under the smaller window, one along the section of wall just beyond the en-suite and the third one in the middle of the wall that is shared with the Utility room. We trimmed the orange ducting, applied sealant glue and therefore formed the ventilation system for the whole room.

We also ordered 20 sheet of 6mm MDF board, paying a ridiculously high price for them (the world has gone mad for timber products!) and these will serve to provide the smooth backboard to the air channel. We will have to paint it black to reduce the gleam peeping out from under the wall edges.
Another change of an implementation design and strategy was the cold water pipe. We had used the 28mm white plastic pipework that is designed for domestic water, especially hot water because it has a metallic barrier moulded into its wall thickness to prevent dissolved gases from “upsetting” the plastic material and forming weakness after a decade or so. But this kind of pipe is rather expensive and we need lots of it to provide our hot water circulation system. So we decided to swop out the 28mm cold water feed and replace it with 32mm polyethene water pipe instead. The pipe is much cheaper and even the T-junction adaptors are half price too so now we have a blue coloured pipe running from the Utility room and reaches the access chamber where we will have all our connections done to serve the en-suite basin, cistern and shower.

Once we have doubled checked that everything is laid out, all the conduits, pipework and air ducts are in place under the floor, then we brought in loads of the shredded chopped up pieces of our left-over PU foam board and filled up the void and empty space in among the legs and pipework. We moved about two thirds of the content of our giant bag we got outside and filled the space to the level of the floor joist.

The last day, the Friday, we tackled the task of laying down the proper set of the 22mm thick tongue and groove floorboards. This chipboard material was laid in the long direction, starting at the en-suite side of the room, slicing off the tongue so that the full thickness is fully on the framework around the edge of the room. We also sliced off the tongue at the beginning at where the entrance is so that would be ready to butt up when the hallway own floor is constructed. We put down three rows to see how it came together and everything looks good so we lifted those pieces up (they weren’t screwed down) and put in the finishing layer of glass wool to fill the final void directly under the floorboards to help deaden the sounds as much as we can do. The chipboard pieces were then placed back into place and this time, screws, three of them in each joist and also more around the edge of the room too. We put down 6 rows plus a little narrow strip to finish over by the large window. It was tricky to get the ends of each row in as the tongue needed to be inserted into the previous board’s groove but also to move pass the lowest horizontal rail on the wall too. This was especially true for the last narrow strip and we had to rasp a clearance slot where the wall posts were, just in order to get the tongue to engage fully into the groove. But we got there!


That sees the flooring all completed now so we can now look forward to be doing the walls next. It is nice to see a room taking shape.

We continued with the work on Bedroom 3 and getting the floor, walls and windows ready. Whilst we are waiting for the deliveries, we got on with finishing the windows by putting the plastic vapour barrier around the bottoms and tops of the two windows. The first task we did was to insert small pieces of 25mm thick foam boards to encapsulate the last exposed bit of the concrete wall under the window and this will reduce heat losses and avoid condensation inside our window module. It was then a case of bending and folding the plastic up and over down into the chamber and back up again towards the oak frame under the glass. A slab of OSB 18mm thick board was then fixed into the bottom of the chamber to provide a mounting surface for the mechanical elements for our automatic blinds that will go up between the two pane of glass. The other piece of the black plastic was then inserted at the top end of the window to basically do the same job of sealing the wall structure from condensation derived from wet air generated by us human beings. The second smaller window was also done in a similar manner.

The next job was to attach a line of left-over CLS pieces to run all the way around the room at the ceiling level. This line of CLS timber will support the top of the OSB wall boards, with a short section having had the timber planed down to remove 11mm to cater for the extra strong lintel we built over the large window that is needed to support the first floor joists etc. Then we did the middle support rail as well so that concludes the majority of the support CLS timber all around the room. The next short pieces are going above and below each window and above the main door and the en-suite too. The height of the upper rail will define the internal framework for the structure of the doorway and this distance is 2206mm from the floorboard surface. This will give us room to insert the Oak frames and provide clearance for the flooring covering (like carpets etc) and have a 7foot I.e. 2134mm tall doors.
The windows also are set at this height so that both the windows and doors will match up with their openings, with the seats for the windows themselves will be set at 500mm off the floorboards. The seat will probably be 20 to 24mm thick Oak planks glued together and in the order of 365mm deep with a bull nose front edge sticking out into the room by 25mm or so.

Then, still waiting for the delivery of our conduit tubing (we enquired and the supplier is having trouble in sourcing the 40mm twin wall conduits), we got on with doing the side walls for each window. A piece of CLS timber is needed at the back to extend the original framework around the window so that there will be sufficient support to hold the second oak frame that will hold the inner pane of glass . We had do some major planing of these timber pieces to make them line up with the original CLS so that the new oak frame will match up together. Long screws were drilled and driven through the full depth of the 63mm direction, to secure each piece into place. then yet another piece of CLS timber was placed, but this time at the front of the window section, just behind the horizontal rails, to form the vertical corners of the walls where the windows are inset and the fermacell “plaster boards” will provide the finishing surface coming along the wall and turning in towards the windows.


One of the other tasks we did this week for this Bedroom, was to drill clearance holes through the horizontal timber pieces that forms the space for the Utility Channel and these holes had short length of various sizes of conduits and pipes inserted. These conduits helps to transfer the cabling from one side to the other of an opening like a window or door, to the other side so that the cables can carry on around the Utility Channel. There were 20mm diameter polyethene black pipes to carry the mains AC 230V supply and a second larger diameter plastic conduits measuring 37mm overall but 32mm internal, to carry all other types of cabling like network cat5, speaker wires, DC voltage power and other low-voltage types. We did the doorway around the en-suite plus also the two windows too.


At last, our Flexible Twin Walled Plastic Conduits Arrives, but only our 63mm and 100mm types. We are missing the 40mm diameter one as it is in very short supply across the country and beyond. We are looking for alternatives to help us guide our low-voltage cabling around windows and doorways, we had some old wide bore water pipe so we used that one instead (it is the green ones).

Now we could and did design and construct an air conduit splitter module (a plenum), which takes the 100mm feed coming from the main air duct, and splits the air flow into four separate 50mm streams to go off across the room to the four walls. We used left-over chipboard floorboards to build a triangular shaped chamber which squeezes from a 100mm gap, down to a 50mm spacing to spread the air out sideways, into four holes. The five holes all had short lengths of plastic pipes inserted and glued into place so we can just slide the conduits straight in and out to provide a good strong and tight seal. There were four 68mm wide pieces of pipe plus one 110mm wide sewage pipe, all ready for installation later on. We also did a small test of different glues and sealants to make sure that the plastic pipes we have used will stick to the twin-wall conduits and we can happily report that all four types we tried all worked just fine (PU sealant, PU construction glue, general purpose construction adhesive called Grip Bond and a modified polymer one called Stixall).

The other task, the final one for the week is to slice up a sheet of our fermacell material, a gypsum mixed with recycled shredded newspaper board material, into 175mm wide strips so we can insert a backing panel in our Utility Channel, to both provide a surface to mount hooks and other lightweight items but also the fermacell layer will provide a fire resistant barrier to stop the spread of flames. So we took a sheet and sliced it up on our workbench table saw, set the fence to 175mm and cut six strips off one sheet. We went around the entire Utility Channel fitting each section with our new strips, occasionally having to trim the edges to make it fit and also in one section, we had two 20mm conduits sticking out the wall and had to drill a hole in the correct spot. We used the general purpose construction glue along the bottom and top edges, plus a line on each vertical leg and did the occasional vertical joint between fermacell pieces too.


Another little job we did was to try out a test fit of some 6mm thick MDF board material to see how it looks and how it comes together, all to form the air dispersal channel running around the bottom of the wall, all the way around the whole room. We concluded that it will do a very good job so next week, we can look into doing that job.