Category: Walls

Installed Dozens of Conduits and Pipes through the External Wall for Future Expansion
At the beginning of the three weeks waiting for the arrival of our First Floor Joists, we sat down to analyse all requirements of providing connections to the outside world like electricity, data, water and waste services. We looked at the underground situation as well as the Eves too. We wanted to make sure that we had provisions for future ideas and expansions in our garden, swimming lane, patio, lighting and controlling the various gates, lights and other features. All these are the underground connections but for the Eves, we are thinking of more lighting, PIR detectors, temperature probes, sunshine level indicators as well as a watering distribution system for potential hanging baskets etc.

There are four main types of connection as follows:
1. Water : Either clean pressurised water or dirty kitchen waste
2. Low DC voltage : a nominal 48V but perhaps 12V or 24V
3. Data/Logic : Network transport layer, either ethernet or RS484 balanced lines
4. Mains 230V supplies : for occasional high powered devices.
We we have a total of 63 individual connections that is “punching” through the wall somewhere as follows:
For the Eves:
- 19 Low Voltage and Data black 20mm PVC rigid conduits
- 8 waterpipe black 20mm polyethene conduits (flexible)
For mid-wall:
- 3 Mains 230V waterproof sockets
- 4 water hose quick-lock sockets
- 1 letterbox!
For Underground:
- 1 kitchen waste 40mm PVC pipe
- 4 pressurised water in copper / brass 15mm pipe with ½inch female adapter
- 5 low-pressure irrigation water in the copper / brass pipe adapter
- 2 circulating water connections to and from the Swimming Lane also in the copper pipe.
- 10 mains 230V in white PVC conduits
- 10 low voltage and Data black PVC conduits
- 9 temperature probes black polyethene conduits
The first task we tackled was the conduits up to the Eves so we took the polyethene black pipes to act as a conduit for guiding the thin water irrigation tubing and put in a sharp right angle bend at the bottom of the wall, cable tied it to the wooden leg and swept around a more gentle curve to then run along the rafter under the roof boards. After drilling a hole through the cement board, finally poked the other end of the conduit and stopped half way down the Eve, ready for the tubing to go on further to whatever plants are hanging up there.

End-of-a-irrigation-conduit-under-eves

End-of-a-irrigation-conduit-under-the-floor

Next, was the electrical connections and for this type, we used a black rigid PVC pipe that are also 20mm in diameter but much thinner walls. We did not need to bend it as we could provide the access to the cables upstairs in the triangular void, except around the Great Room as the first floor doesn’t extends right across the room. Here we did blast the pipe with our hot air gun and bent it around the jig again to make a doubly bent tubing to make it arrive behind the Utility Channel.

Conduit-box-behinf-eves

Conduit-bending-jig

Data-Conduit-from-eves-to-utility-rail

Data-conduit-inside

On the second week, we got on with the job of installing the three water garden taps located on the A-B corner for the garden along the Loke, the second one over in the Patio area beside the Conservatory and the third one at the P-A corner to serve the top of the garden. We unscrewed the third from bottom Larch plank off the wall to reveal the wooden footplate sitting on the concrete wall and we drilled a 16mm hole through the wooden section and sealed the wide flange using mastic and screwed down with three stainless steel screws. Then we drilled a recess in the larch plank and refitted it.

Tap-pipe-sealed-to-the-wall-1

Tap-pipe-sealed-to-the-wall-2

Recess-in-Larch-to-cover-the-tap-pipe

Next, was to tackle the underground connections. This meant digging a hole a foot deep and one or two “bays” wide, depending on how many connections there were. There were over a dozen of these holes and some had the similar water connection using the same copper / brass fitting, some were electrical boxes and a few were straight conduits going directly into the soil. All of them needed a hole drilling through the concrete blocks to gain access to the inside where we will eventually carry on the plumbing later on when such things will be done. These holes needed the mains powered SDS drill to cut either a 16mm or a 22mm diameter hole, either for the copper pipe or the PVC / polyethene pipe. Again, the water connection and the electrical boxes were sealed with more of the mastic and then screwed down to squeeze the thick liquid flat against the bitumen coated concrete wall.

Connections-on-P-@-Patio-1

Connections-on-P-@-Patio-2

The third type mentioned above is for the temperature probes that are monitoring our buried Energy Modules under the house and we wanted to get some idea of what the sandy soil is doing temperature wise when the Energy Modules get hot during the Summer and how the various weather conditions may affect the surrounding sandy soil around the perimeter of each module. We made a hole 2m deep using our Vacuum drill and shoved a sealed conduit down it and then through the wall.

A-Temperature-probe-conduit-plunging-underground

Drilling-a-deep-hole-using-a-Vacuum-cleaner

During this week, the second week covered by this report, our electric weather proof sockets came so those were installed in three places at about 3 feet off the ground level and come out flush to the Larch cladding. We put one at the E-F (next to the Utility’s window), one will be in the M Alcove (outside Bedroom 1’s) and the final one for the Patio area next to the Conservatory. This was a straight connection through the wall, again using the rigid PVC plastic conduit, the white one to colour code as being mains voltage, just like the underground ones were too. The conduit was fitted to the back of the socket’s housing and again stuck to the cement board of the wall with more of the sticky yukky black mastic stuff with four hollow wall fixing bolts to clamp the box tight onto the wall.

Mains-Socket-on-E-1

Mains-Socket-on-E-2

The first couple of days of the third week was spent putting in the kitchen waste pipe underground, a 40mm diameter PVC pipework and we had to core drill rather slowly through the concrete wall. we didn’t directly connect it to the large sewage pipework already outside in the soil as there are considerations of whether we put in a garbage collection box to filter out the fibre and solid waste coming from the kitchen sink (and manually deposited on the compost heap) but there is also perhaps a simpler solution of just having a mini compost pot in the kitchen and take that pot to the compost heap now and again.

Then we thought about what sort of letter box we wanted, we want quite large one so small parcels can be posted through it. After some discussion we made a large box which we sealed to the back of the cement board and can be finished later on.

The-back-of-the-Letter-Box

Then, after that, we went back indoors to finished off the several conduits that came through in the middle of the wall and they needed to be diverted downwards to the floor for future onwards connections. These were the water taps and for these 15mm copper pipes, we had to put on 90degrees right angle fittings and solder them together.

Tap-connection-down-under-floor

And finished off bending and connecting all the electrical (of all types) conduits to the Utility Channel for easy maintenance and control of all those outside junction boxes.

Conduits-ready-to-go-into-utility-rails

The rest of the week was spent preparing for the arrival of the special wooden I-Beams on Monday.
19 May 2021
Glass Wool for External Walls Delivered
Our Glass Wool insulation we ordered last week has arrived today. The delivery truck parked in our local Tesco Express (after asking the staff inside the shop for permissions) and came down to confirm that we were expecting this order. There were three pallets plus two loose packets. But fortunately, he had his own diesel powered fork-lift truck onboard so all we needed to do was to bring our medium trolley to collect the two odd packets.

So in our delivery, we received ..
- 24 rolls of 200mm thick
- 12 rolls of 150mm thick
- 8 rolls of 100mm thick
The driver placed the three pallets on our driveway and then we dismantled the pallets to move the packets (they had four rolls in a packet) into our house and parked them in our hall way where our planned stairs will be one day.

Delivery-of-Glasswool-for-the-walls

This material is to be used in finish filling up the external wall cavity to both provide some extra sound absorbing effect and fire protection for our Polyurethane foam boards already in the walls. The different thicknesses were available because the amount of volume varies, with a range of 150mm to 200mm space in the upper section and 100mm gap on the lower half of the walls.
10 May 2021
Ground Floor Walls Structure All Finished

We continued the task of putting up reinforced wall posts for the hanging toilets for the cloakroom and for the en-suite of Bedroom 3 where we had to put down an additional footplate inside the knick-knack cupboard, to allow for a box to be built around the back of the toilet pipework and the sewage pipe going down into the concrete. We put another one of our homemade I-Beam element, but a shortened one.

Then we resumed putting up a forest of posts all around the remaining Ground Floor walls including the cloakroom, linen cupboard (where we put in a double post to support an extra wooden lintel over the doorway), the en-suites and finishing off Bedroom 2 and Bedroom 1.
Another section that had to be done was in the Great Room entrance way. This point is between the steel legs of the Skylight and it has a large C shaped steel beam (designed to hold up the first floor going over this doorway) and we needed to glue a couple of pieces of timber to the top and bottom flanges. The top one is an ordinary CLS timber plank, a 89mm wide piece but planed down from 38mm thick to 33mm thick to match up with the actual joist support level. The bottom flange however wanted to be a much wider piece, about 200mm in actual fact so we used our 18mm OSB boards and cut off two strips. We glued them together to form a 36mm thick planks and then glued this up on the bottom flange of the steel beam, all clamped overnight to dry and cure. After that, we could install the last set of posts for the ground floor, this time, the edges of the sliding door cavity
Then the final job was to lay on the two levels of top-plate CLS timber to tie all the posts together, to tie all the walls together and create a another solid set of rooms.

To conclude this stage of the operation of building the Ground Floor walls structure, we put on the second layer CLS timber pieces all the way around on the external walls and added a third layer across the doorway and window in our Utility Room because these have a major load from the First Floor Joists.

We finished the week by tidying up all the pieces of cut-offs, the tools and preservative liquid, to make the place ready for the next task. That is probably be installing conduits through our external walls so we can easily feed additional cables etc. from inside to outside when we need lighting or speakers etc outside.

1 May 2021
All the CLS Planks Moved Indoors and Ground Floor Walls Is Going Up

We have resumed our task of building up the Ground Floor’s walls, at least, the structural framework structure using our 63mm CLS timber planks and over the last eight days we got quite a long way forward. But one of the first jobs was to redo the vertical timber pieces that were glued to five of our steel legs, we discovered that we didn’t do a very good job in the first place, or rather we hadn’t realised that the primer paint was not very well stuck down as the metal wasn’t very clean when it got painted years ago. So we easily ripped off the timber pieces and then used the angle grinder with a metal scrubbing disc to polish the metal to a nice shiny finish. We also cleaned the timber planks as well using a clean but similar sanding disc and finally applied a fresh coat of PU glue and reattached the timber back to the steel legs.

The next task was to look at the four wet rooms, the bathroom and the three en-suites, because we wanted to put across the entrance ways, a proper and robust lintel to support the first floor joist without having to need any supporting posts underneath. This feature would then allow us to have the option of having complete glass walls and door for our en-suite or indeed other designs we may come across. We had four left-over pieces of rectangular tubing from our steel legs which hold up the Skylight which proved to just be long enough to bridge over the entrances. These steel legs are 100mm by 50mm with 5mm thick walls so they turned out to be very useful to serve as very strong lintels. We only had to slice very small bits off two of them to make them fit for the Bathroom and bedroom 3’s en-suite. Next, to sort out the pile of 145mm by 45mm timber planks and decide on which ones we can used. We decided that we needed one of these wide planks to help with the lintel and combined with the steel element, will help secure the joists in place and properly transfer the load of the first floor sideways to the posts. These posts are made up of another piece of the 145mm wide timber, coupled with narrower 95mm by 45mm plank we had left over and was sitting in our swimming lane storage yard. So each composite lintel was made from gluing together the steel element with the 145mm wide wooden piece.

Sliding-door-lintels-started

And then we glued the two wooden pieces, the 145mm and the 95mm planks together to form the integrated post, including a notch cut out to receive the steel part of the lintel. We left that to dry and cure. So in the meantime, we spent a few hours bringing in the first load of CLS timber planks that we have lying outside that was delivered a few weeks ago. We moved about 150 planks.

The following day saw the new lintels and their posts get fitted and fixed into place, making sure that each one was straight and vertical.

End-of-an-En-Suite-lintel

Steel-lintel-for-Daphnes-En-Suite

After that, we could carry on in building the stud walls from all the footplates we had put down a month or so ago. We started over in Bedroom 3, making sure that the load bearing elements had studs spaced apart by 400mm and the perpendicular walls had 600mm spaced legs. We went around all the smaller rooms, the the Bathroom, en-suite 3, the Tech and Knickknack cupboards plus one wall (the long wall) of Bedroom 2 and then the corridors including doing two doorways. Finally, we put on the two layers of the top plates, overlapping in each direction to help bind all the section of walls together.

First-few-rooms-are-Framed

One of the tasks we wanted to do since we were getting on much quicker than we imagined in building these walls, is to find and buy the I-beam joists we would need for building the first floor so we spent one of the mornings measuring all the lengths of various rooms, to make sure that what is actually the real world measurements, matches the technical drawings, before we send off the final shopping list of these composite wooden I-beams. We need 61 in total, about 460metres in all, ranging from 5metres to double that size of nearly 11metres. It was quite good and matched within 20 to 30mm to the drawing but we had always intended to round up the measurements before sending the list off to four local suppliers and one manufacturer. But only two suppliers have replied with quotes in the ball park figure of £2,800+VAT in total, about £6 per metre. This price includes the wastage from cutting the beams from stock lengths and we realised that we could make use of these waste pieces, by slicing them up into shorter lengths and turn into our noggings to strengthen the sideways anchorage of our very long and tall joist hence utilising all the wastage that we would had paid for anyway.
Then, spread over the afternoon of Friday and the next morning, we finished moving in the rest of the CLS 63mm planks to our indoor storage area. This makes a total of 600 planks we moved this week.
Added with our existing pile, we now have 772 planks to be used for building the ground floor walls including the horizontal structs, the floor support framework, the first floor walls and ceiling. We hope we got enough!

CLS-All-moved-in

More-than-750-pieces-of-CLS

For the rest of Saturday, we marked out roughly where all the wall stud posts will go, including making provision for the three hanging toilets, the various doorways like the sliding doors for the cloakroom. There is a total of 86 of these posts to do, to finish off the ground floor walls, of which 25 have their ends dipped into timber preservative to ensure long term survival in these various wet rooms.
For the hanging toilets, we designed our own I-beams structure, a pair of CLS timber with four pieces of plywood glued and screwed across to make a ladder like combined element. This will help stiffen up the point where the toilets will be mounted and keep everything nice and stable. So between Bedroom 2 and 3 pair of en-suites, we positioned the three of these I-beam elements so each en-suite can have their toilet and connect into the same pipework.

First-toilet-wall-framed

They are positioned so that we meet the minimal legal requirement of at least 500mm spacing on each side of the toilet including the bowl itself.
Next week, we can do the cloakroom in a similar manner and also do the same thing for Bedroom 3?s en-suite too. Then we will carry on putting up the rest of the stud posts.

24 April 2021
Exterior Walls All Fully Insulated with PU Foam Boards

By Thursday, after a couple of delayed days due to icy cold weather that would have stopped the gun foam from working properly, we finally finished installing the 200mm (on average) thick layer of polyurethane (PU) “seconds” foam boards. The last section was around the Great Room, in the west end, finishing off the Patio section, then the O section and finally the N little section around the corner.
We had to first dismantle the upper section of our indoor timber storage area, see Spare timber Store Moved Outside to Swimming Lane and move the timber outside, to gain access to this segment of the exterior walls. It is our very last section to get done and now we can say, for real, without this task hanging over our heads, that we really truly finished this job. Although we have not finished putting insulation in the walls because we will be adding further layers of Mineral wool insulation to finish filling the rest of the wall up to the 380mm depth for the complete wall.

Foam-Insulation-in-the-last-Wall

The other job that took several hours was to glue a piece of 11mm OSB board to go over the “O” window to improve the structural integrity of this section that is supporting the extension and its roof.
We filled in the space with foam, gluing each piece to the wall and each other and then screwed the OSB to the timber framing, using plenty of PU glue to ensure the whole thing is solid.

Reinforced-Header-over-O-window

So that is it .. except, we now have to tidy up the mountains of rubbish generated!!

Insulation-rubbish-Pile-1

Insulation-rubbish-Pile-2

8 April 2021
Ground Floor Walls Being Filled with Recycled Polyurethane Foam Boards

During the last two weeks, starting last Thursday 4th March and on several days, interspersed with other tasks, we have been filling up the ground floor outer walls with approximately 200mm thick of polyurethane foam “seconds”. We hauled out our slicing bench table from its storage corner and connected up the dust extractor vacuum machine and proceeded to slice up all the various pieces of the PU foam boards, all random in thicknesses and sizes as well as having different coverings (most were foiled coated paper but some were glass-fibre impregnated ones). We resumed clockwise around the building, starting at the Front Door and sliced the foam to fit precisely between the wall legs. We also used spray PU foam to help stick everything together and fill in the vertical gaps, to ensure that we had a air-tight block of insulation.
One of those other tasks, was to build a Homemade Foam Board Shredder so we can tidy up the rubbish we have generated and will continue to do so.
We have finished the “C”, “B”, the long “A” section and turned onto the “P” wall and now have reach all the way to the far corner of the Great Room and its Patio Window. We cannot go any further because we got our CLS timber storage located here with the high shelf with other lengths of timber planks resting on it. We will skip that bit and move around to continue on the “N” and “M” walls (part of Bedroom 1) and then around into the “L” and “J” and so on.

Putting-foam-into-the-walls-1

Putting-foam-into-the-walls-2

Putting-foam-into-the-walls-3

Putting-foam-into-the-walls-4

13 March 2021
Remaining Pillars Installed for Corners and Kitchen Wall Framework Finished

For our last week of work for 2020 (and also before a long break because of Christmas and a minor medical issue), we went around the last twelve Pillars across all the ground floor rooms, creating sturdy accurate corner and T-junction reference pillars, all vertical and straight.

Last-corners-errected

for-bedrooms-and-bathrooms

We made sure that the metal legs (holding up the Skylight) had pieces of CLS timber glued to them that were also vertical and ensuring that the metal legs themselves are hidden inside the wall structure.
Then, for the last day and a half, we concentrated on building the framework that surrounds the Kitchen. We positioned exactly where we wanted the sliding door module to go near the Great Room end of the hallway, plus also a narrow window module (we had one left-over window Oak frame that we didn’t use in the external wall) positioned on the same wall but at the opposite end of the room. Then it was a case of slicing many many vertical posts (two sets measuring 2885mm and 2645mm tall) and went around nailing them into place. This included the first layer of the top plate to secure the posts and form the completed frames of each wall section.

Kitchen-wall-framing-complete-1

Kitchen-wall-framing-complete-2

It is amazing to how quickly a room like this Kitchen can be built, even if it is just an open framework of posts etc., we can already get a feel for the size and shape of each room we have planned for our Ground Floor.
We are cutting up lots of pieces of wood for the job (over 200 so far)

Wood-cut-so-far

This concludes the work for 2020, we can enjoy Christmas and New Year and when we are ready, we can resume work in 2021. It is holiday time now!!

17 December 2020
Second CLS Layer Laid Down, Analysis and Mapping of Wall Structure and Building of Pillars

For the start of the new week, we both tidied up all the “blobs” of mortar sticking around all the footplates and also tightened all the remaining concrete screws down. This was joined with the task of pulling out a whole heap of further CLS planks to form the second layer of timber to build up the Footplate on the floor, so they are ready to secure and fix the wall structures themselves. The second layer was glued and screwed down, making sure the warping and twisting nature of the timber is flattened out.

Then over the next several days, we marked out all the corners and junctions that forms the various rooms and cupboards etc.
We also ordered another twelve two by six planks (45mm by 150mm regularised timber) to go with the other four planks we already had left-over from when we were building the Skylight kerb structure several years ago. These sixteen planks will divide up into groups of four, in order to build two strong solid pillars to support a steel lintel that is needed at the entrances to all the en-suites rooms plus the bathroom too. It turned out that these four rooms have their entrances in a load bearing walls and we want our en-suites and bath rooms to have sliding doors so there is a lot of floor joists to support (Daphne also want’s a ‘Glass Wall’). We are using left-over pieces of steel 100mm by 50mm legs (the legs that are holding up the Skylight and the roof!).
We have done a similar thing to hold up our cold water header tank up on our first floor and it needs extra load bearing elements and the position for these elements are located over and along Bedroom 2 wall and its doorway, thus we need another lintel built into the structure of this wall, this time using our larger steel leg left-over piece (160mm by 80mm), laid flat and supported by a solid block of 4 63mm CLS planks, all glued together into one block, one at each end.
The final couple of days was spent on building the “pillars” for each corner and mid-wall T-junction, using more 63mm CLS pieces and forming fairly complicated shapes to allow each wall to have support for materials at the ends. Each of these pillars were anchored and locked to establish a good vertical straightness by screwing triangular plywood bracing pieces and putting little pieces at the top to join them together into a nice sturdy block.

Corners-sprouting-up

These will help in the long run when we come to put up the top-plate horizontal CLS planks as we can ensure that all our walls are vertical and right angle on the various corners etc.
We did ten of these pillars and we got another eleven to go which we will have done next week. We have sliced over eighty planks already, about twenty percent of our stock of timber pieces so it won’t be long before we will have to order another pallet load!!

12 December 2020
Twelve Triple Glazing Units Arrives and All Are Installed
Very very early Friday, with all the alarms waking everyone, we staggered up to get ready for the arrival of the glass which could arrive as early as 8am!
What we are expecting is as follows:
- Nine large units, each weighing 118kg
- Two medium units weighing 75kg
- One slightly smaller one weighing 65kg.
We had our troupe here by 8am or soon after, under a very heavy cloudy sky and swirling winds. We passed the time having a much needed hot drink and fortunately, it wasn’t too long to wait. The van arrived at 8:47am.

The-Glass-arrives

12-Triple-glazing-units-waiting-to-be-unloaded

The-edge-of-a-Triple-glazing-unit

We carefully unloaded each unit, using four suction pad handles and transported each one on the adapted trolley to near each window position around the house. We put the glass on a narrow piece of polystyrene sheet to both protect the edge of the glass and keep it clean from the damp sandy soil.

Preparing-to-lift-a-unit-off-the-van

Moving-the-heavy-glass

Unit-ready-to-install

It took us 50 minutes to complete this task of moving well over 1.2 tons of glass. We had a much needed cup of tea and a slice of cake before resuming work!!

Then this is the big moment, will the glass fit?
And yes of course it did!
All of them!
We proceeded around the house, with one person inside taking off the wax protection paper off the sticky tape and four lifting up the glazing unit up and slotting it into the framework and then screwing several plastic beading clips against the glass to secure it into place.

Holding-unit-whilst-tape-is-uncovered

Glazing-clip-being-installed

Glazing-clip-installed

We started this process at 10:30am and got the last one done at 12:30pm.

We all had another much needed break to recover and enjoy lunch!!
So that concludes the installation of the Triple Glazing units, all Twelve of them! This makes us pretty much weather proof! Yahoo!
The final step to do next week, is to fix well over 300 of these plastic beading clips, cut the oak beading strips to length, mitre the corners, add the rubber seals and slide them onto the plastic clips. After that, we need to finish off doing the oak “wings” that covers up the ends of the larch cladding on either sides of each window. At this point we will be finished Phase 4 (The exterior of the house)!

Windows

Reflections
2 October 2020
Preparation of our Windows is all Done

Over the last ten days or so, we have been preparing for the arrival of our triple glazing units for our twelve windows in our main house. This was a mixture of taking down the temporary plastic polythene sheeting off the windows, removing the wooden strips that were holding them up. Then scrubbing and removing the old glue we had on the aluminium framework (from a failed attempt to attach polythene to the windows). Next was to paint the inside of the same aluminium surface black to stop it glittering in the middle of the window through the glass.

Another task was to construct a vehicle to help transport each glazing unit around the house to various locations. It took our small four wheel flatbed trolley and mounted a vertical padded framework to hold the glass while it was moved. This was sorely needed as the nine biggest glazing units weighed in at 120kg (265lbs or 19 stones ) each!

Glass-moving-rig

We also made a rain shield “tent” like structure just in case we were hit by the predicted Storm Alex that would be running across northern France and along the English Channel.

Rain-Protection

By Tuesday, we had some indication that our glass would be delivered Friday (2nd October) sometime, so we continued with the preparation task and went around the windows to stick on the double sided high strength security tape onto the aluminium strips, all ready for the glass. We left extra tails of covering paper which we folding to the inside of the window to allow easy removal after the windows was in-place. We decided that it was worth the risk of this getting wet in the frequent showers of rain we have been having all the while but it turned out ok because all the rain just came down straight and wasn’t blown into the windows etc. But we did discover that we were missing a roll of this sticky tape, we had originally ordered four 20metre rolls but couldn’t find the fourth one anywhere! We can’t prove that we were short-changed in the original order (because we ordered 6 months ago), so we had to dash to the computer and order an extra roll with an overnight morning delivery option. This was Tuesday lunch time!

Tape-Covering-Tails-

In the meantime, we took our homemade plastic glazing pads (see Manufacture of Glazing Support Pads), and went around sticking them on to the sill of each window, four of them for a large window and two for the smaller ones.

Frame-ready-for-glass

The drama with the double sided sticky tape was not over, because the courier had some issue and failed to deliver our roll before noon Wednesday as ordered. We phoned the supplier and they chased down the courier. We could see that our package was sitting in Norwich and had been since 6am Wednesday morning but it wasn’t until 1pm on Thursday before it finally arrived. Just typical that when we wanted a real speedy delivery, something goes wrong and when we don’t care, it always turns up promptly! Phew!
Anyway, we finished off the final three windows that afternoon and then went around with a straight metal “ruler” to test the level of the pads to makes sure that they were all flat and synchronised and did some swopping out of one or two pads for thicker ones and in one case a couple of thinner ones.
All is now ready for the glass!
The final concluding piece of information is that we learnt that the glass will be delivered first thing Friday morning, between 8am and 10am. We informed our cohort of helpers of this shocking news and set our alarms for 6am – Eek!!

1 October 2020