This week (apart from one day on Friday lost due to other commitments) was spent constructing the complicated framework for supporting the remaining Hallways, going up to the Great room, the crossroads and the bigger section under the stairs and up to the Front door.
One of the tasks we had to do first before all that was done was to dismantle our large 8foot ramp that have been serving a very useful unction when we needed to bring in a trolley load of 8foot by 4foot sheet material or a pile of floorboards. It has been there for a few years and now it is gone, the pieces recycled for other jobs around the house.
The assembly of the framework was a slow process of setting the main outer rails down a section, supporting it with clamps while then progressing bit by bit using our green laser line generator to mark where each leg needed to be sliced so it can fit under the rail just about right, to avoid lifting it up or being too short and missing the concrete floor entirely, which meant repeatedly going back to our chop saw and nipping off very thin slices. We even took to grinding the concrete floor itself to help settle these legs in place. There are dozens and dozens of these blessed .. I mean lovely legs, doing a vital job of holding up the flooring for all our hallways.
One of the section that we thought didn’t need liftable panels was the route up to the Front door area but we realised that we couldn’t achieve that goal because we don’t have any pipes or air ducts ready to be permanently installed so we had to create a narrower lifting up section to allow us to install the necessary utility pipes etc, up to the front door, to serve the Entertainment room, the Front door itself and the stair lift mechanism too.
We completed the framework under the stairs which will holds various storage segments, some will pull out on wheels and a larger section for walking in. We had to put down temporary framework around the bottom of the staircase where the stair-lift mechanism will reside but again, we didn’t have any of the pieces that will make up the platform module or the pulling chain and cog wheels. We will have to come back to this area and unscrew the floorboards later on.
There was one sticking up conduit, coming out of the concrete, it is one of our temperature probes for monitoring the soil temperature between our energy modules buried underground, so we connected additional 20mm plastic conduit and routed it around to where the main gathering of the access point to this large Energy module situated under the Kitchen and Bedroom One.
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One of the consequences of putting down the framework, right up to the Front door area, is that we cannot open the temporary front door! It is too tall, or rather too deep. We will have to slice off a small piece off the bottom of the door before we can open it again!
That will be one of next week’s tasks, as well as filling in some of the area with insulation and then proceed to cover all this lovely framework with floorboards. Hurray!