Category: Tidy Up

Sliced up all the Remaining Foam Boards, Tidy up Generally and Moved the CLS Timber Pile

We spent the day doing a whole heap of slicing up the last remaining heap of foam boards and chunks, chopping them down so that they are all a maximum of 300mm so that they are ready to be placed under the floorboards in the Great Room. Like the old saying, sweep the rubbish under the carpet .. well, we are lifting up the floorboards and throwing the rubbish down underneath!! No really, we need to insulate our room against both the cold outside but also against our hot Energy Modules that we have buried under the house. We don’t want to have our rooms heated up with heat rising from 90degree hot water tanks!!
So, we have been shredding and slicing up all the rubbishy bits of foam boards and they will help protect us from the hot energy modules. We even got in the final chunks of insulation that we had outside and also sliced then up too.

Piles of sliced foam (1)

Piles of sliced foam (2)

We now have a huge pile of “stuff” ready and waiting to be “swept” under the floorboards! The other thing that we have done is have a general tidy up of all our tools that we slowly accumulated upstairs, taking away random pieces of wood, cans of PU foam and gave the whole place a good sweep.

The final thing we did was also to move the entire pile of CLS 63mm timber from the middle, underneath the Skylight and moved them all over to the back half of the building.

CLS Pile before Moving

CLS Pile after Moving

We moved 280 pieces of timber, plus a dozen odd lengths! Phew! We now can reach any parts of the Skylight with our new High Platform!

22 September 2023
Remaining Sheet Materials All Moved Into Bedroom Two

Over the last three days, we have been moving all of our remaining sheet material that is outside in our yard area, at the bottom of the site.

Piles-of-sheet-wood-waiting-to-be-moved

We were quite annoyed to discover that the extra heavy duty so-called high quality tarpaulin was degrading under the exposure to the Sun. We had to put on extra layers to help guide the rainwater away from the splits and holes that were forming in the tarpaulin, but we ended up losing three sheets of OSB 18mm boards in the end. So this is why we decided to move all of it into our newly completed Bedroom Two room, to avoid any further damage to our expensive timber.
So over the three days, using our large flat bed trolley to help move a heap at a time to the front door, and then walk each sheet into Bedroom Two, we first moved the 18mm OSB boards, all 162 sheets. We split the quantity into two separate piles, making sure that we can access at least one of them when we need more sheets as we construct each future room.

Day-1-First-pallet-and-a-bit-moved

Next, we dealt with the 110 sheets of the 22mm groove and tongue chipboard floorboards, moving them also in Bedroom Two, putting third of them up on top of the OSB pile and the rest in a single column in front. We wanted to make sure that our wood rack will also fit in the remaining space in the room.

End-of-Day-2-all-OSB-moved-and-start-of-floorboards

Day-3-All-the-sheets-finally-moved

We have calculated that we have moved about 6 tons of wood and walked over 10,000 steps!!
The next job was to reassemble our old sheet wood rack, with four shelves, and then move all the miscellaneous sheet material that was temporary stored in Bedroom One and get it all back on the rack.

Sheet-wood-rack-reassemeled-and-refilled

This three day effort now means that we can get on with the next room, the forementioned Bedroom One and continue with the construction of the basic internal rooms downstairs., and also laying in the water pipes that are running around the whole house serving the ensuites and bathroom plus kitchen. But we also have cleared the yard of any building material, avoiding any rainwater damage and also we gain some extra space ready for the next load of PU foam insulation boards that we will need soon, to finish off the roof.

Bedroom-1-cleared

10 March 2022
Massive Tidy Up of Mountains of PU Foam left-over Cut-Offs!

In the course of filling our exterior walls with rigid foam boards, which get a huge “mountain” of left-over cut-offs pieces, some fairly regular in shape but many just simply rubbish.

Insulation-rubbish-Pile-1

Insulation-rubbish-Pile-2

We had to strip off the paper foil off both sides of the board (sometimes, it is a glass-fibre impregnated paper and others are shiny aluminium foil coated paper) so it could go into our shredder machine.
Here are some examples of the wide range of variability of these “seconds” that had been thrown out by the manufacturers and amazingly, some of the boards had dates on them and these dates indicated that some were only a week old when we got the delivery!!

Foam-shredder-Mk1-2

The shredder dealt with the pieces that are not long and regular in shape and size, the cuboid and badly formed rubbish bits were crunched and shredded. One might had expected that by shredding these solid blocks of foam into a random chunky pieces would have generated extra volume but it turned out that it is not so bad after all. We did a couple of ton bags of cut-offs we had already collected a few weeks ago and when these were shredded, they virtually occupied about the same volume as you can see ..

Two-bags-of-insulation-shreddings

Shreded-Insulation

But we still had to make room to store this mountain of rubbish while we build the interior framework of our rooms so we elected to use the alcove outside, formed by the L,M & N walls and built a very large tarpaulin “bag” to hold this fluffy material.

Large-foam-storage-bag-1

Four corner stakes were bashed into the sandy soil and, using dismantled left-over pallet materials, to reinforce and build a box like structure. One of our 10metre on a side tarpaulin that have several holes in it (due to the covering up of the stack of OSB sheets), was used to create a bag, laid inside our new frame and weighed down with concrete blocks in the corners and stretched out upwards and clamped down around the top edge of the framing.

Large-foam-storage-bag-2

Now we got this outside storage, we proceeded to shred up the remaining irregular pieces and transferred the fluffy lumpy bits to the new super bag outside.
We then bundled up the more manageable pieces of rubbish with duct tape and move this outside too, to join their cousins, the fluffy bits.

Larger-pieces-stored-behind-the-bag

The only upheaval to this process was the demise of our shredding machine. We had overworked the motor and it got too hot and burnt out several windings inside the electric motor itself (we believe!) so the last couple of days was spent breaking up the greatly reduced pile chunks using our hands and fingers instead. It was very tiring and long winded! We probably will buy an replacement machine, later on to be ready when we tackle the insertion of more insulation board bits up into the roof rafters, but it was quicker (just!) to get it done now, rather than waiting for a delivery!
Anyway, all this material will be used in the long run, to act as more insulation under our suspended flooring on the ground floor. Nothing goes to waste!
Finally ..

The-bag-is-full-of-bits

Bag-all-covered-up-waiting-for-later

We now have our house looking much tidier and ready for the next task of building more walls for our internal rooms on the ground floor.

15 April 2021
Spare timber Store Moved Outside to Swimming Lane

Today, we decided to move the heap of timber planks we had stored inside our Great Room, on a raised shelving rack system.

Timber-storage-rack

The main reason for tackling this job now, to move the timber outside, was because we needed access to our external walls to insert the insulation foam boards. We knew that we had to move this pile of various sized planks anyway, sometime in the future so we felt that if we did it now, then we would finish off the insulation task completely and not have it hanging over us.
So the first job was to have a look at our swimming lane outside, to rearrange some of the items so we had enough room for the 4.8metres long planks.

We pushed this and that bits and pieces around and was able to transport a collection of planks, ranging from 89mm by 38mm planks, some 100mm by 50mm ones and three big 100mm by 75mm planks to their new storage location, under cover in our Swimming Lane.

Moved-to-swimming-lane-storage

The shelving system in the Great Room was dismantled and we now got a cleared area to allow us to gain access to the walls for the installation of the insulation chunks.
The rest of the timber, the 63mm by 38mm type, is staying indoors because they will get used up to build all the internal rooms for both the ground and upper floors.

Tidied-the-CLS-stacks

4 April 2021
House Banner Design Progresses and Dismantling of Platform Modules

We are working on a design for a house banner, located over our front door porch facing our Loke. We want to cut the design into our slates and then fill it with various coloured epoxy resin to form a picture of a rose or two and our house name. The tricky bit is generating the necessary instructions to send to the milling machine that will slice into the surface of each slate by about 2mm. We have already bought the epoxy resin plus a series of tough UV stable colours (like Iron Oxide for the rusty red colour, aluminium powder for the silver grey, chromium oxide for the green and titanium dioxide for the white etc. )
The whole design won’t be to big or too bold, just enough so our house will have something to identify itself to visitors!
The work on this has been patchy when the weather was yukky and we couldn’t work on the roof, but since we have finished the main part of the roof on Thursday and the tidy up job is interrupted by more rainy weather, we have been working much more on this task like all day Saturday.

The other task that was done this week, from Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, is to start dismantling the dozen platform modules we have been using for the last 18 months. We will not get rid of all of them, partly because we still got the “C” porch roof to complete, but also we realised that some of the better looking modules could be used for internal functions like reaching the ceilings in various rooms when we are decorating etc. But for now, we have dismantled four modules completely and making a stack of “legs” in our swimming lane.

Pile-of-platform-legs

And we adapted three other modules by slicing off 900mm off the legs to form set of working platforms to enable us to prepare the Eves (ready for painting) and finish off rubbing the gutters and seal the metal mesh coverings.

Truncated-platforms

We will also dismantled the lift shaft as we don’t need that any more and we have an odd sixteen foot long platform module that was our mobile platform we had last year and that will dismantled that too.
With winter coming, we will work more and more in the workshop on our windows and assemble them together and get them all ready for installation etc.

23 November 2019
Rain, Rain, Rain forms Rivers, Lakes plus Seas and Lots of Pumping!

Last Sunday (the 6^th), supposed to be a day of rest, saw but we saw the worst day in our time here at Roselea with 8 hour period of rain, rain and more rain falling upon us, starting from about 8am and finishing about 4pm!

59.1mm

Yes, that is the amount of water that indeed landed on us! Which produced a catalogue of “hair pulling” moments!
It all started fairly mundane which the rain falling steadily, not so heavily at a rate of about 8mm per hour, until lunch time. We had about 18mm of rain by then. the first blast that hit us dumped rain on us at a rate of 36mm per hour but only for about 10 minutes, adding another 6mm in that short time. We were surviving up to that point, our defences were holding and there were no signs of rainwater from our surrounding neighbours who had improved their drainage in the last few years. We just had a little pond forming on our driveway with much of the water out on the Loke.

The-first-defence-falls

Only-a-small-amount-of-water-so-far

But ..
Only an hour later during our lunch break (we had to abandon our preparations!!) the real downpour arrived! Just before this point, the rain gauge was reporting 30mm and in the next 45 minutes, it jumped up to 50mm!
This is when all defences were breached and water then turned into rivers and gushed from all directions and our small ponds became lakes and seas ..

Driveway-Flooded-to-150mm-deep

Water-surrounding-the-garage

Our swimming lane which was empty is suddenly full, a metre deep, 1.2 metres wide and 20 metres long, completely full of water! This was because the neighbouring workshop and garage saw their own rain soak-away module be swamped and all the surface water rushed towards and into our garden! We estimated about 20,000 litres arrived that way plus also a fair amount came from the grassy slopes of the neighbouring properties, so much so that our sandy soil became boggy!!

Swimming-lane-filling-with-flood-waters-from-the-neighbors

Swimming-lane-full

We had so much on our driveway where our Loke collected tons of water and dumped it on us too. We calculated another 20,000 litres came in that way too, it flooded our garden shed, it just missed flowing into our main house (just a tiny trickle) and got to within an inch of our garage floor level.
We also had rising water back filling one of our large diameter conduit in the back of the garage and got about 2 inches of water under our raised flooring but we think it didn’t go any higher because the water started pouring down the earth tubes which were buried in the concrete floor and the lips of the tubes were about an inch above this level.

Water-coming-up-through-large-duct-on-the-front-right

Garage-all-wet

But the driveway got so deep that it managed to get into our front door, up the hallway and got into our store room.

The-flooded-loke-and-driveway-from-above

So on our day of rest, we bent down to the task of mopping up the wet stuff, sweeping the water out of the garage, pumping the lake over to the school field and the ditch on their side, and pumping out the flood in our hall way and store room.
What a day we had!
Nearly 60mm of rain in 8 hours which is only 7.5mm per hour but then when one gets hit with a 48mm per hour rain rate, for only 15 minutes, nothing can cope with that!!
We have switched on our heating systems to give us some warmth and start the drying out process. Tomorrow, we will continue inspecting our home and see what state our store room is in etc.
Oh boy!
The one good spark in all this gloom was that our new main house didn’t suffer anything, no floods, no leaks and once we have our proper doorways fitted then nothing will get in! Hurray!

All this flooding meant that the following week was spent recovering from this flood. We half emptied the store room of all the boxes and furniture to assess damage, dry things out and repack several dozen boxes. Everything is almost back in the store room now. The garage is tidied up and dried out too and the space under the back room floor had dried as best as it can do on its own but we will have to do a proper review of our garage when we have moved in properly into our new home. We even managed to do a day of slating!

12 October 2019
CLS Timber Stack All Moved Inside House

This afternoon, we moved all the remaining 63mm CLS Timber from its original pallet stack situated near our Loke and put the lot inside the house under a tarpaulin tent cover.

Indoor-wood-store-loaded-up-1

Indoor-wood-store-loaded-up-2

We also moved all the untreated 100mm by 50mm regularised timber lengths from the swimming lane and put them together with the rest of the timber, in order for them to keep dry and fresh but also to be accessible when we start building the Skylight structure.

1 May 2018
New Timber Storage Created and Tidied Up Old Pile of Timber

Today, we finished off creating the new Covered Storage Area while it was raining gentle showers all day. A chest high line of “arms”, six of them, are now mounted and braced so we can load it up with miscellaneous lengths of timber. The three sleepers on concrete blocks underneath will take all the remaining 63mm CLS timber lengths we have got.

Internal-Timber-rack-finished

The old storage tent that was situated out near our Loke, has been taken down and tidied up.

Old-Timber-storage-dismantled

The tarpaulin will have to be sorted out and where it has ripped, we will throw those bits away but any decent pieces we will keep. In fact, we will use several pieces to cover up the windows in our new Storage area to keep off driving rain blowing in a window!!
Tomorrow, we will dismantle and move the pallet of the 63mm CLS timber from outside the house, to inside the house and that will clear up access for our scaffolding tower when we are working on the roof, plus also make more room for more deliveries like the slate tiles and timber cladding when we get them.

24 April 2018
Odd Jobs and New Timber Protected Storage Area

Today, in the morning, we did some odd jobs that were left over from the weekend, tidied up the workshop, repaired a puncture in one of our tyres for our medium flatbed trolley and service our air pump that provides oxygen to our septic processing unit.
In the afternoon, we decided that we would make a new protected storage area for our CLS timber which is now badly located outside our house and is in the way of us working on our Fascia and the roof. So using the left over piece of our white tarpaulin sheet, we fixed it to the corner of our Great Room, using the internal legs and horizontal strut and rope to secure it.

Start-of-Internal-wood-store

Tomorrow, we will build two layers of shelving, the lower one sitting on the concrete floor that will take the large number of the 63mm CLS timber lengths and a second cantilever shelf about shoulder height which will take the odd dozen or so remaining timber pieces we have left over and will be needed to for future jobs.

23 April 2018
A Spring Clean inside Building

This afternoon, we decided that it was finally time to do a good sweep of the concrete surface inside our building. There is quite a lot of saw dust, wood shavings and other rubbish lying around and this is the first time this year that it is all dry and easy to sweep with the lovely hot weather we have been having.

Rubbish-cleared-from-House-Apr-18

We filled up two large trugs of sand, saw dust, pieces of cement boards and loads of empty glue tubes! It all was put into two large rubble sacks and dumped with the rest of our building waste, all waiting for a skip when we have enough to justify having one.

20 April 2018