Category: Build Progress

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
Entire Ground Floor’s Rooms are Mapped Out and Footplates Installed

We resumed the task of laying out the footplates for the entire Ground Floor rooms. We had to tidy up all the excess jumble of bits and pieces that used to live in our outside Store room and we moved all of it into our new Entertainment Room, sorting them into related piles. We will also build some metal shelving and place them in the Entertainment room too to aid in more items to store while we develop the internal rooms and installation of all the utilities.
The second half the building (the Cloakroom, en-suites, Bedroom 2 and 3, various cupboards and the Bathroom) was mapped out, drawing our coloured lines straight on to the concrete floor. We then surveyed the height of the concrete slab and discovered that one section had a very high level. The relative height difference was 23mm from lowest to highest spots but there was one even higher local spot of another 10mm! We definitely over-did the amount of concrete when making the floor slab several years ago! So we ground down that spot down somewhat but we will treat this particular slab as a special case and have a different finishing level (which means that we just reduce the length of all the stud posts).
Over the next 2 days We pulled out a heap of 63mm CLS timber planks and laid them out over the entire floor, cutting to fit etc. Next, we did drilled anchorage holes and putting in concrete screws to secure all the timber pieces. We used over 150 screws, each being 100mm long by 7.5mm thick.

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-1

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-2

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-3

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-4

Floor-plates-for-all-rooms-fixed-in-place-5

The final two days was spent packing mortar underneath all the timber pieces everywhere, we needed four separate mixer loads, each having half bag of cement, three builder’s buckets of soft sand (40kg), a handful of fibre strands and a splash of emulsifier, along with the usual water. The laser was kept in one spot at our four way intersection point of our hallways and we used the detector to set all the footplates at the same height in absolute terms. The only exception to this rule was the extra thick concrete slab as mentioned already, and we lifted the detector up by an extra 10mm and set a higher level for the remaining pieces.
And on Saturday afternoon, the final task was to tighten the concrete screws for the footplates that we had put mortar under on the day before (it had set enough) to lock down the footplates and then tidy up the cement mixer machine, hose and other bits and pieces, now that we have finished needing mortar for at least several years, the mixer can go back into storage again, around the back of the building.

Next week will see us doing the job of pulling out another set of CLS timber to put on the second layer to reinforce the footplates, glued and screwed down, and then start marking out exactly where every single stud post will go, taking into account doorways, cleared sections for utility conduits and pipes to go upstairs and other design requirements too.

5 December 2020
Laying Out Footplates for Kitchen, Bedroom 1 and Great Room

After doing other tasks and chores for most of this week, we started on Friday afternoon, the task of mapping out the shapes of the Kitchen and Bedroom 1, with the Great Room alongside them and the laying out of the double layer wooden footplates that will anchor the walls. These footplates will be bolted and mortared down to the concrete floor slab, but first, we printed out from the computer, a set of plans with dimensions and proceeded to literally draw coloured lines on the said concrete slab. We used a string pulled very tight to generate a straight line and mark the floor with spirit pens. We positioned each wall according to the plans and made adjustments to take into account the metal support legs for the Skylight and Roof. The metal legs were not quite in the positions that the plans dictated, but only a few centimetres out. Also, we decided that we would move the Kitchen and Bedroom 1 walls nearest to the Great Room further inwards, so we could avoid having the metal legs intruding inside our Utility Channel that runs around the whole room, with electrical cables etc.

The next job was to do a survey and measure the height of the concrete floor at regular points along each of these walls marked out on the floor and find the highest and lowest points. We used our laser level machine and found out that our recorded numbers ranged from 143mm (the highest point) to 163mm (lowest point) which meant that our concrete slab rises and falls by 20mm across the floor. This would have meant that our mortar line would have to be 25mm thick to accommodate these variations, but we realised that only one wall had the “worse” highest points so we hit on the idea to plane down the thickness of the CLS plank by 8mm for just that wall section alone. This meant that we reduced the amount of mortar to a maximum of 17mm thick in some locations and the thinnest places would be just 5mm. This was much more reasonable. We proceeded to plane down two CLS planks, 3.6metres long from 38mm thick to 30mm thick and placed by the Bedroom 1 and Great Room wall section.
For the rest of the walls, we pulled out a further ten planks of treated timber, the 63mm by 38mm CLS pieces and sliced them to fit to the drawn lines. They all had 6mm pilot holes drilled, ready for the concrete bolts but first, to help drill the holes into the concrete slab.
The final task of the day, and week, was to trim and slice the wood to fit around the bottoms of the metal legs, taking into account the metal pads and bolt heads etc.

First-set-of-footplates-ready

Upon the new week, we will drill and mortar these planks into place, put on the second layer of wood and then start mapping out the next room, Bedroom 2, Bathroom etc.

28 November 2020
Second Delivery of CLS Timber Arrives

Our remaining timber arrived Thursday yesterday late afternoon. There were 348 planks in this second delivery, adding with our previous one of 99, we now have 447 planks of 63mm by 38mm CLS untreated soft wood, each measuring 4.8metres long.
We spent the last hour of Thursday and several hours on Friday morning, moving the entire load into the house and storing them all down in our Great Room.

Lots-of-wood-ready-to-use

We are missing one plank plus also one of the pieces was seriously damaged so we have requested replacements

27 November 2020
Concrete Beams and Blocks Forms the Lid for the Entertainment Room

This week it is the turn of the Concrete Beams and hundreds more of the concrete blocks to be hoisted up and laid out to form the roof of the Entertainment Room’s internal sound proofing shell.
The first job was to construct a lifting hoist location where each individual 120kg beam is lifted up and swung around, to get pass the skylight metal leg and lowered down to the top of the concrete wall.

We got three of our shorter metal scaffolding modules, plugged them together and then clamped the whole thing to the wooden wall. Then we got our metal hoisting arm up (only just fitted, avoiding the skylight) and then attached the electric winch.

EntRoom-Setting-up-hoist

EntRoom-Hoisting-a-beam-up

We first lifted two beams up and got them positioned over the far end of the room, near the window. This allowed us to then set and position the second of our heavy duty angle iron piece, with clearance holes drilled into it and then glued and screwed on to the wooden legs of the external wall.
Then we sliced up one of our paving slabs down the middle to give us two similar pieces, 900mm long by 300mm wide, plus a small bit left-over from the previous time of using the paving slabs at the bottom of the window, to make a filling in piece measuring 240mm wide by 300mm deep. Then, we glued on half bricks on the edge of all three pieces so that they can sit on the concrete beam and form the lid over the window, sitting on the metal angle iron and the beam. We wanted to raise this “lid” higher to maximise the space above the window to ensure that we had enough room for our mechanism for controlling the automatic window blinds. We glued these composite pieces using regular PU glue to stick them into place.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we proceeded to lift up the remaining eight beams and 162 blocks, plus 5 further blocks sliced down the middle to form the finishing piece in each row.
We used spray PU foam to act as a glue and space filling at the same time on each block as we inserted a block along the beam. Not forgetting the two driveway 50mm thick concrete bricks were placed at the start and end of each beam to fill in the gap between them sitting on the wall.

EntRoom-Gluing-blocks-in-with-foam

The last day, Thursday, we had to fill in the tenth row which was half the width so we sliced nine blocks in half to produce a filling in piece, measuring in a set between 190mm to 200mm wide and also cutting down two more bricks to fill in the final space on the wall.

EntRoom-All-blocks-installed

We had a half bag of cement powder left over so adding two buckets of soft sand, we mixed them together in a dry form, ready to vibrate in all the joints on the roof. But first, we nicked a quarter of it to make the normal mortar “muck” to stick down the last row of half blocks to the top of the wall and finishing off the whole roof.
Then we proceeded to pour the dry mix all over the roof, brushing it over all the joints, banging and vibrating the roof using a piece of wood and club hammer and filled up the cracks between the blocks and beams. Finally, we went over the roof surface and sprayed a small quantity of water to help activate the cement and harden it up.

EntRoom-Grouting-the-blocks

EntRoom-Blocks-grouted

The rest of Thursday and much of Friday was spent tidying up all the equipment, taking down the winch motor and its metal lifting arm, sweeping the floor and creating a “rubbish” bag down the bottom of the garden (using one of those large ton bags and four old metal re-bars to act as legs) and moved all the broken and sliced concrete block remainders, dismantle the various wooden templates and finally moved the cement mixer away from the Front door area.
One thought that came up, was to get the ceiling battens installed now, rather than later on because we might forget to do it before we put up the First Floor Joists, which may impede our attempts in screwing up the CLS 63mm battens up inside the Entertainment Room. So Saturday was spent in doing that to get it all done and dusted before we forget and before we dismantled the wooden platforms too. We drilled six holes through each row of the concrete blocks (they are 6mm holes), just alongside each concrete beams, a total of 60 holes for the 150mm long screws to go through and grip the CLS plank of timber.

EntRoom-Roof-sprouts-screws

We used 3.6 meter long 63mm sized pieces because they very nicely brought the surface of the ceiling just clear of the concrete beams, which makes it very easy to then screw and glue up the ceiling boards later on. We then screwed the wood up leaving a gap which we sprayed PU foam glue into, after which we tightened the wood up squashing the foam tight.

EntRoom-Ceiling-support-battens-

EntRoom-Ceiling-support-battens-glued

So in just over three weeks, we constructed a complete concrete shell from start to finish! Not Bad! And it took only a little bit longer to build the wooden framework that surrounds the whole room. Very nice to see that all complete.
The next job is to start bedding down the footplate (double layer of treated CLS planks) that makes up rest of the rooms onto the concrete floor.

21 November 2020
Concrete Shell Almost Finished

Monday, we did two and half layers in building up our wall inside the Entertainment Room, that is over seventy blocks! We completed layer 4, then number 5 and number 6 and a little bit of layer 7.

Entertainment-room-Blocks-Row-6-Finished

Entertainment-room-Blocks-Row-7-Started

Tuesday, it was a half day because we are reaching the limit of lifting up the 20kg concrete blocks high enough to get on to the progressing walls whilst being able to see if they were in the right place. We finished layer 7 and a section of layer 8, for which we had to use one of our mobile platforms so we could use up most of the mortar mix we had. The remaining of Tuesday and Wednesday was spent building a safe, spacious working platform for us to stand on and continue building up the wall and finally put on the roof without compromising our effort and muscles. The platforms were made from the same basic frame work as the external one used for the roof, we just adjusted the length of the legs to suit.
The last part of Wednesday was spent moving 121 concrete blocks and making four piles in the middle of the room, ready to be lifted up onto the platform. We couldn’t immediately start a new mortar mix because it was far too late in the afternoon as it generally takes three hours to apply that amount of mortar to the 50 blocks or so. So instead, we moved enough blocks to finish off the final three and half layers (number 8, 9, 10 and 11) before we reach the critical twelfth layer.

Thursday saw us put up over eighty blocks to finish off layer 8, get layer 9 and 10 done completely and on Friday morning, to did layer 11. We also put on the lintel over the doorway.
For the rest of Friday, we laser surveyed the height of the wall to find minimum and maximum variations so we can adjust the height of the final twelfth layer. As the result of this survey, we sliced up 27 blocks of 135mm high, 9 blocks of 185mm high and a couple of 70mm thin ones over the doorway (sitting on the lintel).

We test fitted all these blocks in “dry” mode, including cutting down those blocks in corners and around the windows so everything was ready for the final stage in completing this twelfth layer.
So finally on Saturday afternoon, we mixed our usual load of mortar and proceeded to stick down all these shortened blocks and again, using the laser level , we made sure that they all finished up nice and flat.

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-1

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-2

Entertainment-Block-Walls-Done-3

So this concludes the building of the concrete walls and on Monday, we can start the massive job of lifting the ten 120kg concrete beams up and plonk them on our new wall!! No Sweat!

14 November 2020
Concrete Wall Grows Taller

For this new week, we started the task of building the concrete shell that will sound proof our Entertainment Room. The first task was to make a template to help us align the rows of blocks so we put together a piece of plywood with a straight CLS timber to stiffen the board and stop it from curling. Then marked out two lines set apart by 225mm which is the height of a block plus a layer of mortar. Then we marked along the lower line with marks spaced at 450mm (the length of a block plus a mortar).

Block-alignment-and-spacing-Template

Then, in the mid-afternoon of Monday, our Concrete Blocks Arrives. We had ten pallets to unload!
So on Tuesday, we could start laying out the first layer of blocks around the room, making adjustments, and then tackle the job of slicing concrete blocks to the required size. For this we created another jig, see Jig to Slice Concrete Block to help us.
On Wednesday, our Ten Concrete Beams Arrive very early, but we had other tasks to do in the morning and the afternoon was spent dealing with the beams.
So we didn’t actually start putting our blocks into mortar until Thursday and it was a very long day. We got all the equipment out, the cement mixer, wheelbarrows, the plasticiser, water hose and measuring jug. We got our first load of mortar done and didn’t finish that load until well past 2pm. We had a quick lunch and resumed at 3pm. The second load got us all the way around the circuit of the room plus half the second layer, and we finished 7:15pm! We had put down sixty blocks, each weighing 19kg each!

First-days-block-laid-1

First-days-block-laid-2

The next day, we got the second row done, including stopping and starting either side of the door entrance (we created a quick wooden guide to ensure that we had a 50mm clearance to the door frame, so we can insert a vertical plank of timber to create the inner framework). We got all the third layer done too and got further around on the fourth layer, but this time deliberately avoiding the window area as that needed special attention.

The final day, Saturday, we tackled the job of putting an extension of our concrete shell out towards the window. We found a heavy duty angle iron in our supply, a left-over length from when we were building the steel framework up in the skylight. We sliced off two length of 2050mm each, de-rusted them thoroughly, and then drilled five clearance holes. Both were painted with a rust protective zinc paint and then the first one (with the holes) was placed onto the concrete outer wall underneath the window.

Wall-support-steel-angles

Five holes were duly drilled and five concrete screws were driven in. we also put in a good amount of PU glue to stick the metal bar to the concrete wall to provide extra security and load bearing capabilities.

Bottom-wall-support-attached

Then we got two more concrete blocks and sliced them with a sticking out bit at the back. These blocks are the start of the vertical sides of the window alcove and they rest on the metal support and have a little sticking out bit at the back to reach the wooden framework of the window. we left a small gap and that will be filled up with expanding foam later on. Then we sliced up two paving slabs to create a shelf across underneath the window. These paving slabs are very, very hard and the diamond cutting blade had to work very hard, even just to slice 10mm deep into the 50mm thick slabs! We eventually sliced both sides and hit the slab with a club hammer to break it apart. We needed pieces 345mm wide and width in total of 1845mm wide. We made three pieces from our 600mm by 900mm slabs.
Finally, we were ready to stick all the pieces into place, so mixed up a small portion of mortar and using some left-over Stixall glue (on the metal bar and between the paving slab pieces), we got it all assembled, including finishing off the fourth layer around the window.

Bottom-of-window-enclosed-in-concrete

We can on Monday to continue putting up the next eight rows in reasonable ease (apart from the growing height), until we reach the top when the next complicated bit needs special treatment, the ceiling!!

7 November 2020
Ten Concrete Beams Arrives

Suddenly at a bright early hour, our concrete beams, all ten of them, arrive! We had to parked them on our driveway in such a position so we could then transport each beam inside the house through the Side Door, without hitting problems like trying to turn a 4metre long object around a sharp 90degrees turn! We also had to keep the driveway clear to allow our car out too! Phew!

Conctete-Beams-Delivered

After doing other chores and tasks in the morning, we started the heavy duty of moving these beams into the house. We bolted two large castor wheels to a slab of timber, already predrilled with the holes because these 2inch by 6inch short planks were used several years ago when we were moving the huge steel RSJ beams!
But this time, we moved the 120kg concrete beams, once at a time, by clamping the wheels to the beginning of the beam and clamping a long wooden handle to the other end to allow us both to lift it up. Dragging the beam over to align with the Side Door, we proceeded to push each beam into the house, down the ramp and slipped past the various obstacles and parked them half way down in the middle of house, next to the metal roof legs.

Beams-carried-inside

It took us all afternoon to move the ten beams, being careful not to overtax ourselves and not to cause any damage to our house! The big challenge will be when we need to hoist them up and put them on our Entertainment Room concrete walls to form the roof! That’s another day’s Job!

4 November 2020
Concrete Blocks Arrives

The first load of new building material arrived today. 576 dense concrete blocks arrived with a ton bag of soft sand, eight bags of cement, two large paving slabs and one concrete lintel.

Concrete-Blocks-and-Sand

The remaining 74 blocks will be delivered soon, along with the 10 concrete beams. We are glad that we beat the lock-down deadline!

2 November 2020
Stud Wall Built and Covered in Fermacell Boards

This week, we started on building our timber Stud Wall that surrounds the concrete shell that encloses the Entertainment Room. But before that, we created another piece of equipment down in our Great Room area, to help us chop up the various timber planks into precise lengths required for each wall around the house (see Chop Saw Plank Slicing Station).
We marked out on the footplate the spacing for all the stud posts for each section of the wall, requiring a 400mm separation of the posts for the 89mm wide walls (the left and right sides of the room joining the Utility Room and hall leading from the front door) and a 600mm spacing for the end wall opposite the window. We duplicated these marks on another set of horizontal planks we made, ready for the top plate that goes on top of the stud posts.
We then chopped up twenty-one 89mm CLS and eleven 63mm CLS planks measuring 2638mm long, then two 2600mm long pieces, both being the 89mm CLS width and finally, an one off 2804 length of 63mm CLS.
We proceeded to nail each post into place using 90mm ring-shank nails and put on the top plate planks on too. We also glued two of the 63mm posts to the steel leg (holding up the Skylight and roof).

Entertainment-Studs-Finished

The last job of the week was to nail up sheets of the fermacell boards on the inside surface of the stud walls to improve the sound deadening potential of the whole Entertainment Room. We placed each sheet horizontally, over two and bit rows and applied to all the edges with PU construction glue to ensure a continuous uniform and solid barrier.

Entertainment-Fermacell-all-installed-1

Entertainment-Fermacell-all-installed-2

Entertainment-Fermacell-all-installed-3

We are now ready for the concrete blocks and beams which will hopefully will be delivered Monday and Tuesday, just before the lock down is enforced. That will keep us busy for a few weeks.

31 October 2020