Yesterday and today, both at 9am, saw the delivery of another major supply of building material, this time, the finishing wall and ceiling surfaces for our house. The fermacell is a high quality sheet material, made of gypsum mixed with recycled newspapers. The paper is shredded into tiny strands and mixed with the gypsum and compressed into a very flat 10mm uniformly think board, measuring 2400mm by 1200mm. We ordered 430 sheets which we calculate should cover all our walls and ceilings for all the ground floor and first floor rooms. We also ordered 96 sheets of the more traditional plasterboards, because it is less than half the price of fermacell and we are wanting to use the plasterboard sheets to make a heavy sound-absorbing layer in the construction of the first floor flooring. We will lay two sheets on top of rubber underlay or perhaps thin glass wool that will get compressed down by the weight. The main benefit is to isolate the flooring surface from the ceiling joists so much of the contact and airborne sounds will not penetrate down into the ground floor space.
The first morning saw the arrival of five pallets, all carried individually down the Loke on a neat little diesel powered fork-lift truck that came with the delivery lorry.
Moffett-Forklift-in-action-delivering-Fermacell
Then, we put one of our brand new tarpaulin sheets (we bought them ten years ago!), measuring 9metres by 14metres and folded it in half so we had 9metres by 7metres. This covered our first two stacks just nicely and we put on two wooden sheets over the top to protect the plastic tarpaulin from being clawed by wood pigeon and neighbour’s cats or even our resident fox. Everything was then strapped down to secure it against the wind.
First-days-delivery-all-wrapped-up
The second morning was a manic rush because the wonderful driver (Not!) arrived at the crack of dawn at 8am and we weren’t even dressed and one was in the toilet! O Boy!
He came with our final four pallets of more Fermacell boards, each pallet having 60 sheets on board and the whole pallet weighing 2.1 tons ! To make it even more manic, we were having heavy rain showers frequently so we quickly dashed to get our second tarpaulin up and covering the second pile. We found two more 11mm OSB boards to weigh it down and protect the plastic, like before. We left it like that for a couple of days until it mostly stopped raining and we could go back to finally strap down the stack and it can survive long term.
Second-delivery-of-fermacell
Anyway, we have all the building material on hand now, to pretty much finish all the interior surfaces, on both the ground and first floor, which we hope to have done some time next year. We have avoided having to pay any future price increases, and amazingly, the fermacell sheets were at a very reasonable price of about £16 per sheet now, compared with £13 when we bought loads for the Garage ten years ago. Not bad!!