Category: Walls

By Tuesday lunch time, we had finished gluing up all the Slates that forms the Skirt on the wall running right around the house. Some 300 slates were stuck onto the polystyrene padding layer so two thirds are above ground and the remainder is in the dirt.

Over the remaining days of the week, we were grouting the slates in sections using a anthracite coloured (dark grey) cement based grout, which we used up 17.5kg of grout. We had to order another 10 kg because we had not realised to how much more grout these slates took to fill the joints (the bevelled edges were facing backwards so had a hollow to fill up). The new supply arrived very quickly on Thursday morning. After each section was grouted we went along and removed any excess grout with a wet sponge, then as each section matured and hardened overnight, that section was scrubbed with a rough ‘scotchbrite’ pad and washed using our garden hose connected to a brush to provide a constantly running clean water.


We had a side issue to deal with on Thursday with the repair of the garden shed’s roof, see Garden Shed Repair
But in the afternoon, we managed to fill in all the way along the front of the building, pushing the sandy soil back into the trench and level off the area in front of the slates
So by Saturday mid-afternoon, the whole Slate Skirt was all grouted, all washed and the soil pushed in and levelled. Also half of it had the non-drying black mastic applied to the top of the skirt to seal it off against any chance of rain water getting inside behind and perhaps freezing during a bad winter and causing damage.


The last few hours of work for this week was to install one of our window frames with our newly arrived grey PU sealant. We made wedges to help jam the frame into the house holes when they are in the correct position and a couple of spacers to make sure the top edge, the header, is held at the right distance away from the wall.
We first charged all the surfaces (after brushing off all the dust first) with a thin layer of the sealant and then slid the framework into the hole. Then all the outside exposed joints were thoroughly filled in with more sealant and scraped smooth at a slight angle to improve the bulk strength and make it long-lasting. We had allocated three tubes (standard 300ml size) to each of our twelve windows. We had about a quarter of a tube left so instead of using more of the grey stuff, we decided to use some older white PU sealant to put a thin bead around the inside joint.


That concludes our work for this week! The last of the mastic application will be put on the next week (we couldn’t do it immediately because the washing operation left the slates and walls still wet) and we will carry on installing more oak windows frames as well.

We started the week reviewing our complete set of task lists, removing those ones that we have done, and adding new ones plus doing some other chores like shopping. So after lunch, we resumed work on creating the Skirt to run around at ground level. The first job was to mark the wall at each corner (both inside and outside ones) and then snap a chalk line between all these marks so we had a consistent line to follow. Then we installed the eight cement corners, or rather the remaining seven of them that go in the inside facing corners that covers up the downpipe coming from the gutters.

The next two following days were spent installing the polystyrene corners and strips. The nine outer corners went on first, removing any bottoms of the cladding battens where they were too long (and we resprayed the fresh cut ends with more wood preservative treatment) and in a couple of places, we had to stick on some extra thin padding layers onto the wall surface because the concrete blocks didn’t quite align up to the wooden wall above. Each corner was held on using two plastic nails and mastic along the top to help seal and stick it down. Then the rest of the day and half of the following day was spent putting up the 400mm high strips fitting in between each corner piece. We are drilling a 8mm diameter hole through the polystyrene material and into the concrete block behind and then a plastic nail was hammered in. We are spacing them out at about 200mm apart and our 400 nails we bought was enough at the end of the day, we had about 60 of them left!


The remaining of the day, the Wednesday afternoon, and a couple of hours on the following Thursday morning, was spent slicing up a load of slates into narrow strips, 55mm high by 200mm wide. These will serve the job of covering up the little slopes along the top on the new polystyrene skirt.

Then we made a smaller pile of vertical 95mm wide by 300mm tall pieces which will cover the octagon corners, the face of them, and then even smaller pieces to do the slopes on top too.
Carrying on with this making slates pieces, the next shape was the narrow vertical strips for the outer corners and their associated little rhomboid piece on top again.
By the end of the day, we made also the left and right handed narrow strips that has a 20degree angle sliced into them, a whole heap of them.


After a morning spent on other chores, we resumed Friday afternoon on finishing off slicing the last dozen or so special shaped slate pieces.

Then we got on with the task of gluing all these slates pieces onto the Skirt! We started along the front of the house at the Conservatory plus around the corner along the “A” wall and in the few hours, we managed to get 30 slates up on the polystyrene strips, plus three corners done too.


For the last day of the week, we managed to do a further 150 slates, completing the “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “E” and “H” wall sections. Each length of wall was measured and then divided up into slate width plus a gap and then adjusted so that the beginnings and ends had larger even off-cuts pieces and avoid having very small narrow strips. We are mixing about 10kg of the cement based tiling adhesive for approximately every 35 slates, this means we now have used 54kg or just under three bags so far. We have five more bags to go, 100kg in total, so we should have enough!
The final job was to clean the surfaces and the gaps between the slates, ready for the grouting.


We will finish off Roselea’s Skirt next week so she can feel good that any dirty rainwater won’t splash up on to her cladding and cause some upsets, disease and rot!

On Monday we went off to the local DIY store to buy a sheet of 75mm thick polystyrene foam board and we made a little portable “hot wire” cutter! We had to slice up the 8foot by 4foot sheet so it would fit inside our car! We cut 400mm wide strips, three of them and only just got that in!

After another interruption, we resumed work on doing our Slate Ribbon today with the task of grouting the gaps between the slates.


First thing this Tuesday morning, we went to apply the black mastic sealant along the top edge of the slates, so any rain water that manages to get pass the cladding, will get diverted away from the wall and not dribble behind our slates. Then after lunch, we scrubbed the slates to get rid of the grouting smears and then put back most of the sandy soil and levelled out the ground. We have left just the two ends to finish off when we have made the special corner pieces.

Talking about the special corners, that is what we have been making for the rest of the week. All day Tuesday was slicing up our 75mm (3inch) polystyrene foam board into various shapes, all featuring the octagon angle of 22.5 degrees. It was a case of passing through the hot wire which was set at the required angle (either 22.5 or 30 degrees, depending on the outcome required) and producing 27 octagon parts, 18 parallelograms pieces and 9 pairs of left and right hand strips.


After retiring back to the workshop, we proceeded to glue (using PU slow reacting type) to stick together 9 sets of the octagon pieces, three of them, to form a combined 90 degree corner object.

The next day, Wednesday, we salvaged a set of 12mm cement board pieces and one whole new sheet, to make a set of double layer sets. We wanted seven sets of 400mm high by 600mm wide and one odd set, also 400mm high but wider. The last one was using the salvaged pieces. We used our battery circular saw out in the house, on two trestle tables and among a cloud of cement dust, we sliced, sliced and sliced away to produce a heap of rectangular pieces. All of them were glued using our old PU slow glue and then clamped together to flatten everything together.

we then went back to the workshop to glued another 9 sets of left and right hand combined parts using the 50mm thick strips and the special parallelograms using the slow old PU glue (which we finally finished off!). We used 4inch nails, three in each, to secure the two pieces together while the glue cured.

For the rest of the afternoon, while the glue needed its full 24 hours before ready to be handled, we went outside to dig and remove away a spade worth width of soil, and down to the rainwater pipes, from the wall of the house, so we are ready to install the polystyrene strips and the new special corners. We got almost all the way around the whole house, working from the back, up the side and half way along the front.


Thursday saw the completion of the special corners where we glued the two “wings” to the central module bit, using our usual old slow PU glue.

While that was curing, we finished off the digging outside, going along the front and around the corner to the stud wall for the conservatory.

We had some interruptions in the day but we finished off by surveying all our inside corners and making sure that we had the correct dimensions, but only to discover that our attempt of putting on sticking out plywood strips didn’t quite turn out to be so accurately positioned as we were expecting. It will need a solution so we are back to the drawing board to discuss and analyse the problem. In conclusion, we decided that some will have to be adjusted (which is difficult because they are glued into place, so we will have to saw off the plywood pieces and put on new ones.

On Friday, we had a good tidy up of the workshop so we could use our circular bench saw for the next job, which is to slice the cement boards that we made the other day, with a 30degree angle along the top and bottom edges.
Then we created a wooden jig to provide a right angle framework to support the track saw so we can achieve good accuracy and consistent perpendicular (right angle) cuts, with various tilt angles.

We needed a mixture of 22.5degrees and 45degrees edges, depending on where the piece fits into the overall object when completed.
There are 10 regular octagon parts, with a face width of 92mm, and then 16 pieces of side wings plus a heap of narrow 50mm wide strips.


The last day, Saturday, saw the completion of slicing operation of the double layered cement boards, into all the jigsaw pieces and then we glued together all the parts to make seven inside corner pieces and one special one for the “G” downpipe.


We had enough time left in the day for us to go and take our test piece that we made before lunch with fast acting glue, and get it installed into the “Q1” corner (the Conservatory stub wall and the first part of the Great Room wall that looks out over the patio .. or it will do when we have built it!). We actually went around all the inside corners around the house and test fitted our piece and it was not so bad as we first thought. Yes we had deliberately made the whole piece bigger by half an inch, but it is good that most now fitted.
So back at the “q1” corner, we proceeded to place the piece around the downpipe, sitting on a brick to get it positioned just right and then drilled the four holes. We applied some blobs of mastic in and around the drill holes and along the top edge and then screwed the whole thing tight to the wall.

Next week, we will continue installing all these parts we have made in the workshop, along with all the strips of the 50mm polystyrene foam and cover all of it with slates; to form the skirt around the whole house.