Roselea

Category: Build Progress

  • Preparation And Construction of Waste Air Ventilation Ducting

    This report covers all the work for building the Waste Air Ventilation main ducting, divertors and connecting of the first fan. We had started this particular job way back at the beginning of Summer but due to various issues including the temperature being too unbearable upstairs and being interrupted to do other tasks, it has taken this long to complete.

    Preparation

    Over the last few months, being interrupted by various things including very hot weather which made the upper floor almost unbearable, we have been preparing the materials so that we construct the Air Ducting upstairs. We ordered another pack of 25mm by 38mm battens which will be used to help anchor the sides of the air ducting.
    The material we are using, is all the left-over sheets of the chipboard floorboard pieces. We have 17 sheets of 18mm thick boards and 14 sheets of the 22mm boards. We are going to use the 18mm thick ones for the upstairs air ducts.
    But first, we wanted to give all these sheets, both of the thicknesses, a couple of coats of acrylic varnish, to provide moisture resistance and a smoother surface inside the ducting. So, we laid out all the pieces of the 18mm boards right across our Great Room, pushing them together using their tongue and groove joints, and then sprayed the varnish all over.
    We also ordered another tin, this time a 20litre giant pot of satin finish varnish for only £100.
    Then, we repeated the same job and did the 22mm thick boards as well, using some of the new varnish.

    The next job is to slice off the two long edges of tongues and grooves by running all of them through our table saw, with the fence set to trim off the tongue and grooves. We now have two piles measuring 580mm wide pieces of material, ready to be sliced up to make the pieces for the Air Duct.

    Then, we sliced up the 18mm boards, into two pieces, measuring 270mm wide and the left-over piece measuring about 305mm wide. We decided that the maximum size of Air Duct we can make by using these chipboard pieces, will be 270mm tall by 250mm wide internal dimensions. We going to mount the Air Ducting tucked hard underneath the sloping roof so the design will be having a taller back vertical piece (the ones measuring 305mm high), which will have an 18mm wide slot cutting 10mm into the surface, near the top, so that it will support the lid, without needing a screw or bolt. This slot will be 270mm off the bottom edge, which of course, matches the height of the front vertical piece which also measures 270mm tall and the lid will go flat over that piece and get bolted down. We had 17sheets and therefore we had sliced 12 of them to create the first batch of pieces, and then we sliced the remaining five sheets exactly in half, measuring 287mm wide. We now have ten pieces which will go towards the pile of lids to cover the Air Ducts.

    The next step is to cut that groove in nine of the wider 305mm pieces, so we set up the router machine into our modular bench and used a 12mm diameter square cutter. We set the fence so that we could cut this slot at exactly 270mm from one edge.

    One problem we had with this task, was that our cutter bit broke. We were working it too hard and it was only on a quarter inch shaft. So we swopped over to half inch shaft but the only short cutter we had is 19mm wide (exactly three quarters of an inch), but that was ok because we have decided that the slot needs to be very slightly bigger than 18mm because of very slight wobbles in the creation of the slot, plus also the lids are not absolutely flat as well. We didn’t want to have to push hard or hammer the lids into the slot, and causing problems later on. We will put in a rubber draught excluder strips in the back of the slots so that the lids will form an air tight seals.

    Construction

    The next stage is to work out the minimum position for the back vertical piece (the one with the slot in) so that it sits as near as possible to the sloping roof, but maintain a dead straight line. We achieved this by using our trusty old green laser line generator, stretching all the way from the Gallery end, to the other end of the house, some 15metres away. We are doing the back triangular void spaces and it is one of the major Air Ducts, to carry the waste air away from the Skylight and the Great Room, plus also waste air from all the bedrooms downstairs, the bathroom, Tech Cupboard and all three ensuites too.
    We had to move the laser line out away from the sloping roof a bit, to make sure that our vertical piece fits anywhere along a straight line. Then, we screwed down a line of 25mm by 38mm battens, which will serve a solid anchoring points to hold up the back vertical pieces. We turned the corner to go along the H section and finally a short section, another right angle corner, going towards the hole going down into the Utility Cupboard downstairs.

    We then started laying out the prepared ducting pieces, specifically the back vertical wall, and realised that three lengths is too big to fit into the large open space behind the cold water header tank. These three vertical pieces are smaller and do not have a slot cut into them, because they will have more normal lids screwed down on both back and front edges. But, three lengths, each measuring 2.4metres long, adds up to 7.2metres, and it is too long. Both ends is intruding into the tight sloping roof and therefore we cannot use screws to clamp down the lid. This means that we had to remove 1 of these pieces, and situated the two remaining pieces so that they align with the access doorway for this storage area. It turned out rather fortunate because it ended up with a whole 2.4metres length piece just terminating nicely at the corner at the H roof.
    So we trimmed off the unnecessary groove end and slid every board along so it is good and tight on all the tongue and groove joints.

    We then turned the corner and here we decided that we could use that third piece that got rejected from earlier, and position it into the dormer section so that we could put on a larger piece to serve both a lid for the air duct, but also provide a shelf connecting back to the back wall of the dormer. This left a piece of 1570mm long at the beginning and a second 500mm piece to finish off the H section, just after the dormer piece. The final E section, was easily accommodated with a single length, which will have to be trimmed down when we are ready to design and build a shaped and smooth divertor to get the waste air down into the Utility Cupboard.

    One of the task to do, was to glue in little wedges between the sloping ceiling and the top of these back boards so that the whole ducting is good and solid. We had loads of cut-off pieces from another job a couple of years ago, an angled piece and it was very handy chopped up into 4inch pieces.

    Starting the Extract ducting

    Starting the Extract ducting

    Now, we proceeded to mount the front pieces of the air ducting, which all has now eight little pocket holes drilled out along the bottom edge on each board. We put on the lid and drilled bolt holes, two of them, in each lid. The front pieces had their original tongue and grooves so we could just slot them together to form a continuous line and once we had put on all the lids and their bolts, we could drive screws into the pocket holes and anchor the front board into place. When we got to a right angle turn, we stopped 700mm from the end, to allow for a decent sweep bend to help guide the air around these sharp right angle bends. We continued along the next section, the H, and again stopped 700mm short and finally, put the last front piece, but not fixed down, ready for the transition for the air to be bent downwards into the Utility Room.

    The next task was to cut upwards into the roof rafters, at very specific locations, to open up access to the air duct we had previously built many months ago, that runs inside the roof rafter space. There are two of these “chimneys” that will draw the waste air from up in the Skylight and it is a rather major element of our ventilation system. So, we needed to gain access to these chimneys. We carefully sliced our way through the 11mm OSB layer, and then sliced into the 25mm thick PU foam boards as well.

    Exit of left duct from skylight

    Exit of left duct from skylight

    The second chimney, located at the north end of the Skylight, has the valley ridge beam intersecting at the bottom of the chimney which added to the complexity but we we fitted a small piece of flexible thin plastic sheet material and curved it from the sloping chimney, on the right side, and terminated it on the wooden back board of the air ducting. Next, on the right side again, we put an angled piece of board to join from the sloping edge of the chimney’s hole and the lid of the air ducting. We then put another triangular piece of chipboard “lid” on the left side and then fitted a vertical piece to join to the left side of the chimney’s hole. Now we proceeded to spray PU foam into the corners, mostly concentrating on the left side, to build up a solid layer which we then scraped it to form a gentle curving surfaces to guide the air around that is gusting down the chimney. We covered up everything with aluminium tape to seal it up and give it a nice smooth surface. The final piece to make is a removable front cover which we used a piece of 12mm ply.

    Exit of right duct from skylight

    Exit of right duct from skylight

    Connecting waste air from skylight to duct (I Wall)

    Connecting waste air from skylight to duct (I Wall)


    Moving along the ducting, to the first corner, what we call the H-I corner and then created a sweep bend by inserting three more pieces of the thin plastic sheet material. We cut a tiny little groove into the floor by using a router with a tiny 3mm cutter bit. The router was then affixed to a long piece of ply where we could screw through at various radius positions into the floor, which then guided the router to move in a perfect curve. We did this for our second middle strip of plastic because it was in the middle of the air stream and it needed minimal fittings to keep the air flowing smoothly. We did a mirror of this slot in a piece of OSB board that forms the lid. It measures more than 700mm square. We pulled the second strip of plastic into the slot and then applied a little bit of construction glue to fix it into place. The first and third strip of plastic were fixed to the back of the ducting and around the inside of the front board respectively. These were fixed into place using short little dome head screws and a strip of aluminium tape covering up the edges. Finally, we inserted a diagonal piece of vertical board to close off and protect the plastic.

    Air duct corner with vanes

    Air duct corner with vanes

    We then repeated the whole process again for the second corner, in the H-E corner.

    The next situation to deal with, is the point where the air needs to join together with the other main air ducting coming along the front of the house, and then being swept down into the Utility Cupboard downstairs in the Utility Room. The hole in the floor is tucked right underneath the sloping ceiling as it needed to enter into the cupboard downstairs as close to the back wall of the cupboard as possible. This means that the main ducting has to be slightly bent backwards and also reduced in height as well. We carefully slice up some of our chipboard material to form a back vertical piece measuring 190mm high and we glued and fixed this piece to a batten screwed into the floor just behind the hole. Then, we cut an angled sloping piece for the left side that goes from the back of the hole and grows taller slowly until it reaches the end of the normal ducting back board (the one that has the slot in it). It is quite a way away so it is a gentle change of direction.
    Now tackling the other side, the right hand side, we decided to keep the ducting height at the same height because all we needed to do was to join up to the channel that has been running under the floorboard (inside the first floor joist space), bridging across the Study. The channel comes up through a hole measuring 350mm wide so we knew that it was ok to keep the internal height to the 190mm we already used earlier because the total cross sectional area is comparable to the rest of the air ducts. So we cut and screwed into place several pieces to form a box and a lid for the hole and connected back up to the Utility hole.

    Waste Air from Kitchen and Great room 1

    Waste Air from Kitchen and Great room 1

    At this point, we needed an air diverter module, to help join the two stream of air and sweep both of them downwards. We got two pieces of 6mm MDF sheets and cut a series of shallow curving slots, using our router on the rotating arm like before. The hole in the floor that we wanted to bend the air around, measures 230mm wide by 570mm long and we decided that two thirds of the left side of the hole will serve the air ducting coming from the left (this has the majority of all the building’s waste air coming from the Skylight, Great Room, and all the rooms at the back half of the house) and the other third will serve the right hand ducting (air coming from the Conservatory, a bit of Great Room, Kitchen and Entertainment rooms). So we needed two curving strips of plastic for the left side, and one piece for the right side. We drew out the curves on the MDF to make sure that we got the layout correct and then cut the three slots. We mirrored the slots in a second piece. So using construction glue, and lots of fingers, wiggles and cursing managed to get all three plastic pieces into their slots and placed four bricks on top to hold everything together while the glue cures.

    We then trimmed the excess MDF material away so we ended up with a neat module that would slide up from below. Well, that was the plan. We discovered that we very slightly made the width a couple of millimetres too wide. When we pushed the module up, it started buckling the thin plastic curved bends. So, we had to get our power planer to remove a thin layer of the chipboard material that has lined the hole. After making that awkward adjustment, we finally got the divertor module up into place and locked down with screws.

    Air duct connecting upstair to utilty (1)

    Air duct connecting upstair to utilty (1)

    Air duct connecting upstair to utilty (2)

    Air duct connecting upstair to utilty (2)


    Now, we can put the various lids on top, some of them were permanently glued and screwed down, while the remainders were bolted so we could lift a lid section for maintenance etc.

    We now have that section done! We are getting there!

    The next bit to do, is the ducting running along the front of the building, as mentioned already, coming from the Conservatory etc. At this point, we have run out of 18mm thick chipboard planks, especially the back with the slot pieces, and also lids. Therefore, we had to cut up several boards from our 22mm pile. This meant that the slot needed to enlarge to 22mm wide, which means that the height of the front piece had to reduce to 260mm (losing 10mm, which is not too critical). So we made two back boards (measuring 2400mm long) and we did our trick like before, using our green laser line generator to find the best line to follow underneath the sloping ceiling. We put down a length of batten and then screwed these pieces into place. The only complication, well, a major one, is the left end where we needed to duck under the slope of the corner of the ceiling, cut across the corner of the stairs and join up with that bridging channel going under the Study. It is definitely much more of a bend and we needed to control the air flow more neatly, with proper sloping lids etc.

    At this moment, we realised that we needed some more ducting mechanical devices, mainly, flow control valves so we decided to order a whole heap of bits and pieces. We ordered twelve round 150mm air vents, two 200mm air vents (for left and right side of the Great Room) and a single large 250mm air vent (that goes right at the top of the Great Room, right up in the Skylight). Plus also a couple of 100mm and 80mm air vents too. Next, we added a piece of aluminium flexible corrugated “stretchable” pipe measuring 200mm wide and finally, we put in two 50mm thick by 300mm square dust filters. That took a week to come.

    So, we carried on getting that complicated ducting built. It took a lot of measuring, fiddling, trimming etc. before we managed to get a completed duct.

    Waste Air from Kitchen and Great room 2

    Waste Air from Kitchen and Great room 2

    Another section that we also started working on while we waited for that order to come, is building the divertor and filter that goes in the Utility Cupboard downstairs, to join to that hole (now in the ceiling ) that joins to the air ducting from upstairs. We needed to get the filter (the one we are ordering) to be removable because the cupboard is only 500mm deep and the filter is 300mm square and we would need another 300mm of clearance. Then, the fan motor itself needed to be positioned, before the output of that goes into the heat exchanger. We bought some 25mm right angle “l” shape plastic so that we could make a cage like section to hold the filter and allow it to slide in and out. We also created two large circular collars to make an adapters for connecting to the fan.

    Then we progress to creating the large box that will sit underneath the chimney and inside this box will have sweeping curves of plastic to help guide the air around the corner as it is being sucked downwards through the hole in the ceiling. We put in six curves, ranging from a tight 100mm radius curve near the filter, gradually stretching out the curves until the outer bend is measuring 400mm radius. We marked out the centre points for each quarter circle on both the back of the back and the front (the “lid”) and used our little router on a rotating arm to cut all the slots.

    Redirect and Filter box side with slots for vanes

    Redirect and Filter box side with slots for vanes


    We measured the height inside the box which was 361mm to 362mm and the slots we just cut were 5mm deep so we proceeded to slice our sheet of thin plastic, cutting a strip of 370mm wide. The width of the sheet is 1250mm and we realised that we could generate three of the curves out of one strip, namely the 400mm curve, the 340mm curve and the smallest one and there is no left-over. So with the second strip, we cut the final three pieces, the 280mm curve, the 220mm and the 160mm radius and we had about a 200mm left-over piece.
    Redirect and Filter box with vanes installed

    Redirect and Filter box with vanes installed


    Now, we wanted to test fit the whole box module for real, up inside our Utility Cupboard, before we glue it all together and make sure that it fits as we planned. And, the result of the test fit was .. .. OK! At least, within acceptable tolerances. It is not perfect but it will do!

    One thing we needed in this box, is a 100mm flexible pipe socket so that we had the capability of drawing air from inside our Utility Cupboard like for example, the Central Vacuum system and the Drying Cabinet. We glues on an extra 150mm square piece of 18mm OSB on the right hand side of the box near the bottom, and then proceeded to cut a 114mm diameter hole.
    We also put in a “end-stop” on the inside of the hole, to make sure that the flexible pipe won’t crash right through and damage the internal curving vanes

    We now can proceed to glue the lid on and apply glue around the inside corners of the box and screw everything tight. We then gave the whole thing a good thick coat of acrylic varnish.
    After lunch, we glued in all six curving vanes with more construction glue and left that to set hard overnight. We then constructed the lid for the filter compartment, using two bolts and captive nuts to hold it down tight on a double circumference of draught excluder rubber strips.

    Next, we put the electric fan unit standing next to our divertor module on the floor (it being a nice flat surface) and made a couple of wooden battens for the fan to sit on. We happened to find an Oak piece of wood that was thick enough (27mm thick to be precise) and we prepared this batten with further holes so we are ready to mount the fan up on the wall inside our Utility Cupboard. We are using 50mm long coach screws with a hex nut heads, to make it easier to use an long extending bar to reach pass the bulk of the fan. We also used the same type of screws for holding up our divertor, one in each of the four corners, which we prepared as well.
    Then, we manhandled it up onto the wall, aligning it up to the hole in the ceiling and applied a good thick dollop of construction glue around the rim of the divertor and pushed it hard up on the ceiling, and carefully drive in the four coach screws to lock it into place. It was the fan’s turn next and we got that up onto the wall as well, aligned it up to the divertor so that the circular adaptor joined together with the fan and also drove the screws home.

    Redirect and Filter box installed

    Redirect and Filter box installed


    We did a quick test by plugging in the electrics and gave it a quick run at various different power levels. All our upstairs ducting all had air being sucked down the open ends, there were three open ends at the moment. We will measure the air flow rates later on but for now, it is looking very good. We did noticed that a section running through the ceiling space above the Front Door, at the bottom of the staircase, had an obvious air rushing noise but we do not have the ceiling plasterboard up there yet, and also the fan was running at maximum power too.

    In the meantime, we carried on with the main airduct upstairs and we fitted our two new larger air vent covers that pokes into the Great Room, one at each end of the Gallery 8feet up. These air-vents are 310mm in width so we needed to cut a circular hole 270mm diameter using our jigsaw. We then sprayed in loads of PU foaming glue to stick the white coated metal into place, without having to use a cross bracket etc. We used a length of string tie to a large concrete block to pull tight the air-vent while the glue finished expanding and cured solid.

    Great room waste air grill

    Great room waste air grill


    We cleaned up the excess foam and fitted the inner white cones and we now have two white air vent covers in place.

    The next job was to mount the metal air flow dampener unit (it has four rotating narrow vanes that opens, or closes, to control the amount of air flow), it measures 200mm internal air flow width but the whole thing including its flanges measures 260mm across and 70mm thick. We have three of these units, one for the air inlet on the left end of the Great Room, a second one for the right side of the Great Room and the third one for the ventilation coming from the Conservatory.

    After considering the placement of the Conservatory side channel and where it will connect to the main ducting, we constructed the rest of the front portion of the duct going towards the Great Room where we located the metal gate valve. We had to make another circular adaptor, this time only 200mm diameter, to connect up the flexible aluminium pipe to the air vent in the Great Room wall.

    We did the same for the other side of the building, to get the right side ventilation connected to its gate valve unit but we had a slightly more complex situation to deal with, in being very close to the chimney that is coming down from the Skylight. One of the thing we wanted to insert into the air stream, is a fir flow rate measurer, a temperature and humidity sensor as well. But we don’t have enough room for a removable lid and slide in a square module etc. So, decided that we would slightly rotate the circular adaptor by 20degrees so it pointing towards the vent sitting in the Great Room wall. Because the lid is relatively small, we decided to glue and screw it down permanently.

    Then, we went back to doing the side branch of the ducting, for the Conservatory ventilation, coming through four purple 100mm wide plastic pipes. We bent them down and put all four of them into an single line, held in place with a block of wood measuring 260mm high and 600mm wide, which had four 114mm holes drilled into it. This in turn was screwed down onto the floorboard slightly angled so it is pointing towards the main air ducting. We established a good location for the gate valve and built a receptacle with more little pieces of 45degree triangle battens and then built up the back and front walls to and from the purple pipe adaptor. The last piece of front wall was extended with a little piece and that was glued and screwed into place too. Finally, two lids were constructed to cover up this side branch, held down with the usual metal bolts and captive nuts.

    Great room and Conservatory waste air join main duct 1

    Great room and Conservatory waste air join main duct 1

    Great room and Conservatory waste air join main duct 2

    Great room and Conservatory waste air join main duct 2


    Then we tackled the fiddly job of putting on a flexible ducting, to connect up the Great Room vent to the end of the main ducting. We used 200mm diameter aluminium corrugated tubing, which allowed us to stretch and bend the pipe so it can transfer the air from the Great Room in a reasonably gentle way. The vent on the Great Room wall had only a 15mm lip to attach the pipe to, so we decided to assist this by sticking on lots of acrylic double sided sticky tape, going around several times this lip on the vent. We cut a 500mm length off our stock and managed to slide it on to the metal vent and pressed the aluminium hard down into the thick sticky surface. We reinforced this joint with two 400mm long plastic cable ties to hold it tight. But, it was quite a struggle to pull and stretch the tubing, and then bending it over so that it can slide onto the circular adaptor we made sticking out of the main ducting. We eventually got there without ripping the aluminium foil that this tubing is made of.
    We stuck it into place with lots of aluminium sticky tape on both ends.

    Great room connected to waste air duct

    Great room connected to waste air duct

    To finish this very long drawn out task of building the Waste Air Ducting that has stretched across many months of elapsed time, but only a few weeks in actual work time .. We built a curving divertor for the second chimney coming down from the Skylight and built a boxing around the hole in the ceiling. It is a repeat of the first chimney we did earlier, but it was a little bit simpler this time, not having a diagonal valley beam intruding.

    Waste air chimney joins duct @M end

    Waste air chimney joins duct @M end

    While we are doing this particular job of building the ducting, we thought we had better do one of the final jobs, which is to varnish the internal surfaces of the air duct, especially along the floorboard surfaces. So, we unscrewed all the lids, then vacuumed every inch and painted a good thick layer of acrylic varnish on all exposed wooden surfaces, to help seal it against moisture and reduce the chances of unwanted biologicals gaining a foot hold.

    With removable lids, we can inspect any part of our ducting and give it a thorough clean every now and again.

    Testing and Results

    So before we put the lids back on, we then tested the flow rates in various positions with our new portable anemometer and seeing what volume of air we can generate. We wanted to learn to how much air the fan is able to pull, with and without the filter, with and without long ducting so we can detect and appreciate problems, and fix them if we have any.
    We deliberately blocked one half so that we could measure the air flow down along one ducting journey and learn how the air flow rates changes. We did the same in the other half of the system.

    We started at the beginning, immediately just above the Utility Room and measured each side just at the point where the ducting is turned downwards. We left both sides unblocked, and we also took out our filter which is situated just before the fan downstairs in the Utility Cupboard. Our new air flow measurer, can calculate the volume of air movement in real time, so long as we had supplied the cross sectional area of the ducting we are measuring. For example, the “holes” on either side of our divertor, measures 230mm wide and 180mm tall, which makes a cross sectional area of 0.041 square metre. The meter needed the final number in square metres, hence the fractional number. Then we got a series of readings in various bits of the air flow, and calculated the average between those readings. The very clever hand held meter also performed this calculation as well!
    Here are the results:

    • Right side (no filter) – 15 cubic metres per minute (m³/min)
    • Left side (no filter) – 31 m³/min
    • Right side (with filter) – 12 m³/min
    • Left (with filter) – 22 m³/min

    If we combined the figures for the “no filter” mode, we get an accumulated value of 46c.m./min and if we multiply that up to cubic metres per hour, which is 2760 cubic metres every hour, this value is very close to the advertised performance as specified by the manufacturer. This is very good !!
    By the way, we are deliberately running the fan at maximum power, just to see what we can get. It is more likely that we will be dynamically controlling the fan speed all the while, and keeping it as low as possible, while fulfilling the demands that each room is wanting.

    Then, we proceeded to block each side and see what the new flow rate was on the other side .. as follows:

    • Left (with filter) – 28 m³/min
    • Right (with filter) – 25 m³/min

    So leaving one blockage in place, on the left side, so we could test several parts of the ducting, going along the front of the house, as we put back the lids again. We measured the flow rates and it seems to settle down to about 23 m³/minutes by the time we reach the Great Room vent and the side branch that is going off to the Conservatory. That is not too bad!

    Then, we went around the other half, putting back the lids and measuring the flow at various points, and we were getting a value of 28 m³/minute.
    It really didn’t start dropping off until we reached the far end, coming up to the other end of the Great Room. We were reading a value of 20 m³/min. which is not surprising considering how long our ducting is!

    And finally, we tested the two chimneys going up to the Skylight and they gave a flow rate of 18 and 20 m³/min for the South chimney and North chimney respectively.

    This concludes most of the work upstairs for the main bulk of getting the waste air drawn out of our house. There are little jobs left to do upstairs but we will do those later. We want to start on a different job!!

  • Created Oak Utility Panels

    Today, we decided to complete one of the last things to do inside our Cloakroom, namely making two Oak panels for covering up two Utility Channel “holes”. We found a planed plank of Oak timber on our rack in our garden shed. We must have had some left-over pieces from a previous job couple of years ago. It was a large enough piece to fit the requirements of making a 125mm tall panel cover and long enough to cover up two holes measuring 365mm (one near the toilet) and 400mm long (near the basin). These Oak covers will overlap the holes by 12mm on the top and bottom edges and at least 25mm at the beginning and end of the covers. This will protect the edges of wallpaper all around, but the larger overlaps will allow for magnets to be stuck into the wall and the Oak, to help hold the panel in place. Our piece of Oak we pulled out of the shed was 1200mm long by 160mm wide. We first trimmed it down to 125mm using our bench circular saw and then got out our router. We used a large 19mm straight cutter to cut away the back to form the lip on the top and bottom edges first. We noticed on our test piece revealed that the cutter would “chip” off huge splinters as the cutter was travelling along the Oak and hit certain grain in the wood which ripped large chunks off. So, we changed our approached and very delicately cut a very slim 1mm groove instead of trying to do 5mm in one go. This worked much better and this allowed us to carry on cutting the rest of the wood away without causing these splinters. We then changed over to the chamfer cutter to cut a 45degrees slope on the front, to make it a softer profile. Now, we can chop this long piece into two smaller lengths, measuring 425mm and 460mm each. Next, we trimmed all four corners off and applied the chamfer again on each end. Finally, we switched back to the straight cutter to remove the back material to make the larger lip at the ends.

    The last job was to fit some small magnets to both the Oak panel and into the wall surface as well. We found twenty little round ones measuring 6mm in diameter and 3mm long. We drilled a flat bottomed 6mm holes in four locations, two at each end of each panel and glued them in with superglue. Now, we put magnets on top of the ones buried in the wood so that we could mark on the wall where we would need to drill those holes. We put a blob of gel paint on the magnets and that successfully marked the wall when we carefully placed the panels back in position. We drilled the holes and at this point, we thought that the 3mm length would not be long enough to be successfully glued into the wall, so we changed over to 6mm length ones instead. We put on parcel tape on the back of the Oak panels and then put the magnets back on, put construction glue into the holes in the walls, making sure that all the dust have been removed, and finally, very carefully put back the panel on the wall, with the sticking out magnets squidging into the glue. We put a spreader clamp across to the opposite wall to help hold the panels in place while the glue sets.

    Oh yes, We gave the Oak three coats of Acrylic transparent varnish to protect the surface from dirty fingers and grease.

    We now have two Oak covers, ready for switches, displays, speakers, microphones, buttons and all sorts to be installed later on!

  • Cloakroom Decoration Phase Two, Final Top Coat For Floor And Sliding Door Installed

    We proceeded to paint the ceiling in the Cloakroom a nice sky blue colour (to match the colours in our wallpaper), but we also wanted to create some fluffy clouds so we cut some paper and stuck them to the ceiling, to cover the air vent and the three lighting units. They are of variable size and shape.
    We then decided that the clouds are not working so we painted the air vent the sky blue colour, to make it blend in more, and dab various colours of grey and white and blue to make the clouds more fluffy.

    Then, we painted the alcove where the vanity unit is going, including either side of the door entrance. This is a blue grey colour that approximately matches the colours in our wallpaper.

    Now we are ready to apply the final finishing top coat of resin to the floor. It is a pale grey colour. But, first, we sanded the rough surface, to reduce the obvious join lines and other bumps and rubbed around the edges. We noticed that there were holes so we filled them up with more filler.

    Cloakroom floor filled and sanded

    Cloakroom floor filled and sanded


    After, we were satisfied with the condition of the floor, we proceeded to paint the final resin top coat all over.
    While the resin was still wet, we sprinkled icing sugar all over the surface, to help roughen up the surface, to make it a better non-slip surface.
    Topcoat applied and sugared

    Topcoat applied and sugared


    After a day of waiting for the resin to fully cure, we then got a bucket of hot water and poured it all over the floor. Because we deliberately had a small slope rising towards the doorway, none of the water escaped the room at all. We used a sponge to stir the water, to dissolve the sugar and then picked up the dirty water with a couple of sponges. We repeated again with more hot fresh water and sponged it dry. We now have one finished flooring, fully waterproof and easy to clean right around the whole room, including underneath the toilet.
    Washing the Sugar off

    Washing the Sugar off

    The next job is to lay on the wallpaper we have bought for our cloakroom. It is special wallpaper and we carefully lined each strip starting with the one immediately behind the toilet and then working one way, leftwards towards the door, and then doing the final two strips to the right of the toilet, coming around on to the linen cupboard and turning a few inches on the side wall. We then carefully trimmed the bottom edge so it neatly terminated to the skirting and then did the same at the top. We had to dab a few edges and joints with more paste to help stick it down.

    The next step in decorating the walls, is to put on several coats of varnish all over the wallpaper, to provide a protective and water resistant surface. We put on a third coat immediately behind the toilet itself because it will get even more scrubbed as you would expect.

    We then sliced a thin piece of oak off one of our planks and then run it through our router to give it a gentle moon crescent shape. We rubbed it smooth and then gave it a coat of PU varnish with a mid-brown dye. We stuck it on the edge of the wallpaper that just came around the linen cupboard corner. This will protect the edge of the paper from being damaged.

    Then we noticed that some of the blue grey walls were showing signs of wear and tear, probably caused by when we were doing the vanity unit and the lower shelf underneath. So, we gave the grey walls a touch up coat of paint.

    The next step is a very important one, is the mounting of the toilet!! We carefully cut through the wallpaper to where the two pipes needed to come through the wall, then the two bolts sticking out, ready for the toilet and finally, the square push button module for flushing the toilet. We followed the instructions for measuring the length of the two plastic pipes, one for supplying the flushing water and the bigger pipe to take away the water. We then push the toilet on to the two bolts and made sure that it was level. We tightened the nuts until the toilet was nearly back against the wall, at which point, we ran a line of clear PU sealant between the edge of the toilet and the wall and finish doing up the nuts tight. We carefully scraped any excess away.
    And finally, we installed the flush buttons module. We connected the tiny air pipe from the cistern and then clicked the module into place. It has magnets to hold it tight. Very clever.

    We then press the button .. and it flushes !!
    And no leaks !!

    The other thing we did was to connect up a temporary tap to our cold water supply. It is an ordinary tap, with a multi turn knob. Nothing fancy. We now have the ability to have running water. We got soap in a bottle, plus also a bar of soap. We did buy a plug for the sink but it wasn’t a very good quality as it doesn’t hold the water for hours and hours. We will have to find another one.

    We then ordered a large mirror measuring 600mm wide by 1200mm tall. It is a frameless and also has hidden hooks so it hangs slightly proud of the wall. We also bought a toilet roll holder and a hand towel holder, plus also a toilet brush and finally, a small swing lid rubbish bin.

    Cloakroom Finished 1

    Cloakroom Finished 1

    Cloakroom Finished 2

    Cloakroom Finished 2


    The last thing we did for the Cloakroom, was to install the sliding door module. We didn’t get as far as implementing the compress air system because we decided that the sliding mechanism we spent a few weeks designing isn’t working as well as we hoped. We will mount what we got and make use of it for now, but, we will use a different sliding mechanism in the future and replace this one with a new one. We probably will move it to the Kitchen because it is likely that the sliding doors will be rarely used.
    So we managed to get the module up inside the wall and screwed it into position. We then got a sheet of OSB board and sliced it up into two 450mm wide by 2100mm tall pieces. We then cut a narrow piece of MDF board and glue that to the edge. Next, we bent a couple pieces of aluminium 40mm wide flat bar to make a couple of L shaped brackets, with a slot cut in the top to allow the hanging of the two halves of the door to hook onto the carriage. We then cut a couple of finger grooves on the edge of both doors, on both sides so that one could open and close them. The last thing we did, was to use short length of draught excluder brushes and mount them near the bottom of the door, one on each side of the door so that the brushes are very slightly pressing into the surface and this holds the door nice and steady.

    Temporary Cloackroom sliding doors

    Temporary Cloackroom sliding doors

    This is just a temporary doors, as it is only 11mm thick. We will replace them with proper 45mm thick ones with frosted patterned glass later on.

  • Vanity Unit Designed and Created

    We started another job recently, this time to design and create our Vanity Unit for our Cloakroom. We wanted a simple design, in a natural darker colour, to match the décor and not to be too big, or too small, but just right! We always liked the design of the basin bowl to be “cut” into the vanity work surface itself so that everything is flush and smoothly flowing from one surface into another.

    So, the first job is to design and make a mould for the bowl itself. We glued together five layers of 25mm thick insulation boards, the largest one measuring 270mm wide by 450mm wide, shaped like a letter D. Then, the next layers were consecutively shrinking smaller around the curvy parts, but aligned up on the flat edge. It is now looking like a domed shaped pyramid, with the steps to get to the next level. We then, used a surfform shaper to remove the excess material from these steps, to smooth out the whole thing into a gentle curving bowl.

    Starting the bowl blank

    Starting the bowl blank

    We then scraped around the flat back edge, to give it a pleasing softness to the two outside wings and scraped all over the bowl to improve the shape.

    We then covered this foam layered object with two-part wood filler material, to fill in all the holes that accidentally get created and then sand it more thoroughly all over again. We repeated this process several times, patching small areas with more filler, until it was looking good.

    The last piece to add to the mould, was the reinforcing drain hole layer. We will need to drill a hole in the bottom of the bowl eventually, therefore, it would be good if that area of the bowl should be reinforced with extra layers of glass fibre when we come to make the actual bowl itself. So, we found an old 100mm diameter disc and chamfered one edge with a flat 45degree slope, to make the glass fibre strands to bend and lie into the mould without sticking up. We stuck this wooden disc, which was only 11mm thick with more of the wood filler and then filled in around the edges, to make sure that it doesn’t have any “concave” hollows or pits, for the finished product to accidentally get stuck to the mould when we try taking them apart!

    We noticed that the edge around the top of the bowl mould was rather jagged and we couldn’t get the wood filler to stick strongly enough so we went on to Plan B.
    We laid the mould flat on a large smooth board with had parcel brown tape stuck to it and then covered the whole thing with Gel Coat resin and leave it to set.

    Blank filled and sanded

    Blank filled and sanded

    While that was setting, we got some 10mm thick cement board and sliced it up into two 300mm wide pieces. We then glued them together using PU gun foam glue and flattened them together with six 25kg concrete blocks. Next, we very carefully measured the gap in the Cloakroom where the Vanity Unit is going, into the alcove that is formed by the Linen cupboard. We needed to measure both the widths at the back and front, plus also measure the angle of the wall surfaces which turned out to be 89.6° for the left back corner, and 91.6° for the right back corner. The back width was 755mm and the front edge measured 760mm wide. So we transferred these measurements to our double thick cement board and sliced the left and right edge very carefully.
    In order to help us fit this cement board “worktop” into this alcove, we got two pieces of battens and screwed them onto the wall at a point so the top surface will be at 800mm off the floor. Even though we were very careful in slicing the cement board, it still needed rasping on some parts of the left edge, to make it slide in and fit right back against the wall. We also had to rasp the two corners because they are gently curving as well.

    When we carefully cut around the edge of the mould, to release it from the flat base, we noticed that there were still missing chunks around the edge, the resin is transparent so we couldn’t see how much resin there was and also we were running out of that particular batch.

    We took this opportunity to install a releasing mechanism to our mould, by drilling a 6mm hole right through the middle so that we could glue in an air pipe. We also widen out the entrance to the hole, the one at the bottom of the bowl, so that when we come to glue the flexible pipe in, we will seal up the joint between the resin skin and the pipe itself.

    so we stuck the mould back down again on the base (after putting more parcel tape over it) and mixed up a little bit more resin, this time adding a bit of colour, green. We blobbed a line of it all the way around the edge of the mould and also we dribbled some into our new hole to doubly make sure that the compressed air won’t “peal” off the wrong layer !!

    While that coat of filler was setting, we went off to cut two more pieces of cement boards, but this time only 200mm deep, and glued them together with the same PU foam glue as before, weighted down with four concrete blocks.
    Then, while we waited for that glue to set, we sliced 50mm wide strips off a 12mm thick cement board, to start making the upstand strip that will go around the edge of the vanity unit. We carefully drilled screw holes through the base board and up into the upstand pieces. We had to replace one piece because we didn’t drill out the pilot hole wide enough to allow the screw to go in without breaking the hard cement strip apart. We were successful the second time around after testing various sizes. It needed a 3mm pilot hole and a 3.5mm clearance hole, to allow the 40mm long 3.5mm wide screw to go in fully.

    By this time, the glue had set so we got our 200mm wide strip and place on top the other base board, because the same shape and size also fitted very well at the lower shelf position. So, we placed the larger piece on top of the 200mm piece and sliced off the excess ends. We rounded the back two corners, just like the base board and both of them slid into place very neatly.
    We positioned the batten for the lower shelf so it just sat slightly higher than the waste drain hole going through the side wall. We drilled a clearance large hole through the batten and then screwed the two pieces on to the wall. We decided that we only needed two of them, a left one and a right one only.

    We then painted them the same grey colour as the rest of the wall. We did the other battens for the main vanity unit as well.

    One of the last things we did at the end of one of our days doing this job, was to finish filling in the mould around the edge with the wood filler. We now can get that nice and smooth and we had enough time at the end of the day, to coat a final top-coat resin all over and let it set overnight.

    Upon the following day, we trimmed off the various drip marks hanging off the bottom of the mould and then proceeded to polish the mould with layers and layers of wax. We had a special tin of wax release substance that is especially designed for glass fibre resin production where the wax is put on to the mould so that the resin cannot stick to it and should pop off fairly easily .. we hope !!
    We put on six layers in total, each layer needing 15minutes for the wax to dry before applying the next layer.

    While we waited, we got on with another task of shaping the 50mm wide upstand pieces that we previously have cut and screwed. We put on a 50mm radius curves on the beginning of the two side upstands, and then, routed a quarter round on the front edge of all four upstand pieces. We continued to use this quarter round cutter to trim the front edge of the flat top of the vanity unit, on both top edge and bottom edge, to form a bull nose profile. We also did the same to the lower shelf as well.

    Now, we dived into the deep end and went ahead to cover our basin mould with three layers of glass fibre, with regular resin on each layer, and allowed it to cure and harden.
    We then trimmed the dangling “curtain” of glass fibre off the bottom of the mould, tidied up the edge

    Bowl with initial fibreglass layers

    Bowl with initial fibreglass layers


    Then we attempted to “blow-off” the finished basin off the mould by squirting in compressed air down the air pipe we had installed .. but .. alas .. it didn’t work!! OOOO Boy!
    We tried to jam two crowbars deep into the foam base of the mould, tied some string between them and tried yanking the mould off .. but .. alas .. NO Joy! It broke the foam material.
    This meant that we had to destroy our lovely mould! We hacked out all the foam and started nibbling the inner mould layer. It seems that the glass fibre basin part had stuck to our mould in several places, hence why we couldn’t release the mould. It seems that the waxing process didn’t do a complete coverage all over the mould. We are not sure to why. Phew!!
    It took us several hours to rip the foam stuff out and then carefully, chip away the thin layer of resin from the basin bowl. We ended up with a couple of spots that needed grinding to remove the excess material. We eventually got our basin bowl out of it .. But, we will have to make another mould for the other wet rooms that contains a vanity unit with a basin. Phew!
    Struggling to remove the foam plug

    Struggling to remove the foam plug

    Cleaned up!

    Cleaned up!


    Now, we can mark out the cut out shape for the bowl, on the cement base board of our Vanity Unit, and proceeded to cut the piece so we ended up with the bowl fitting snuggly into place. We blunted the blade on the jigsaw as it is very hard cement material.

    Now that we have a boundary between the flat surface of the vanity unit and the bowl, we now can position the locations for the soap depression, plus also for the nail brush and the plug itself. We set up the router to use a hemisphere cutter bit and using a pre-made template (a piece of 6mm MDF board with a 100mm circle for the soap dish, an oval elongated shape for the nail brush and a smaller round one for the plug) and carefully cut away the cement material until we had three depressions, neatly arranged around the edge of the basin bowl, starting on the left hand side and finishing with the plug depression centred, above the overflow outlet and the drain hole. There would be room for a bottle of liquid soap and then finally, the spout itself to give a gentle fountain of water etc.

    We then glued the basin bowl into the cut out zone of the cement base board, using lots of PU construction glue which is very sticky and very tough once it is set. We left it 24 hours to cure and harden. We stuck a couple of bricks on top to hold down the bowl (which is upside down) sitting on our work table.

    Glued in the top

    Glued in the top


    Then, we proceeded to put a little vertical piece of the same cement sandwich board we had left-over, to form a little barrier just under the front edge of the vanity unit and connects to the curve of the bowl. We did this on both left- and right- and sides. We use a small piece of 20mm wooden batten to help secure these pieces into place and then we put a gentle quarter round on the lower edge to remove any sharp edges, before we continued to glue these two pieces into place using 5minutes PU glue, we also stuck down the four pieces of our upstand that goes around the edge of the work top.

    It is getting there .. !

    The next task is to fill in all the corners with two-part resin base filler, to smooth the transition on all the joints, to provide a curve so that the glass fibre can be encouraged to bend around the corners without breaking, or popping clear of the resin before it had set.

    While we remembered, one of the final use of the router, was to cut another quarter round on the edge of the basin bowl that is touching the cement work top, again to allow the glass fibre to bend down into the bowl itself.

    We put in more filler around the upstand and use a 22mm tube to form a curved profile on all the 90degree corners and that was rubbed down smooth.

    We built a little “stand” to hold the vanity unit up and clear off the table so we can apply the fibre glass and resin all over, without sticking to the table etc.

    So, after rubbing down all the fillings, we blasted the whole thing with compressed air and move this and the stand to the Garage and stuck on two layers of glass fibre with resin all over the top surface and bowl.

    Fibreglassed all over

    Fibreglassed all over

    While that was curing, we got the second shelf and drilled a large clearance hole at the back of the shelf, centred. It is a 50mm wide hole to allow the push fit plumbing right angle connector up underneath so it can receive the waste pipe coming down from the trap and the bottom of the bowl itself. We then made a quick and easy legs to hold up the shelf, using two small pieces of OSB and carefully screwed two long screws on each narrow ends of the shelf, through a small piece of plastic pipe to act as a spacer. The whole thing held the shelf well clear of the table.

    Upon the following day, We then trimmed off all the sticking out straggling strands of glass fibre and turned over the whole thing so we could resin and apply more fibre glass underneath the vanity unit and especially doing the front half of the bowl, to strengthen it so it will be much stronger and resistance to being bumped into in the Cloakroom.

    While that was setting, we also did the second shelf and we covered it in glass fibre in one go, doing both sides at the same time, including going over the drain hole as well.

    Lower shelf resin coated

    Lower shelf resin coated


    After lunch, We proceeded to trimmed all the loose strands off both the vanity unit and the second shelf. Then rub all over everywhere and we put in extra filler here and there, to touch up areas that became a bit too thin after sanding the lumps away. We also thickened up the edge around the bowl and filling in air gaps that accidentally formed during the second stage of putting glass fibre on. We also decided to put the white filler on all the flat surface, to help remove much of the gently wavy surface.
    All filled and sanded

    All filled and sanded

    At this point, we are reaching the moment where we need to apply the final colouring layers, but, we do need various plumbing bits and pieces, like the over-flow and the drain hole, to come from our suppliers.

    So, in the meantime, while we waited for our plumbing order to arrive, we got on with colouring up the second shelf, with the final dark grey with a hint of blue in it. We also collected up a collection of tiny pieces of glitter of various colours, sieving out all the larger lumps. We put the shelf back on the support stand so that we could coat both sides in one go. We mixed 200g of the grey / blue mixture we previously settled on. We experimented with lots of different shades of greys and different levels of blues as well

    And we settled on this darker shade of grey and were happy with the blue content as well.
    So we coated the second shelf with the grey colour and while it is still tacky, carefully sprinkled on our tiny pieces of glitter all over, on both sides of the shelf. Then, later on, several hours later, we applied a protective clear coat of resin which is designed to help seal everything in and provide a very smooth finish.

    By now, our plumbing items arrives, a over-flow plastic pipe so we drilled a new hole into our basin bowl, just below the rim, using a core drill of 27mm diameter and then digging out a little bit of the cement board underneath and behind the bowl. We then glued this plastic right angle pipe in with lots of the plastic filler, covering up the threaded part and over the flange at the back, and squashing it all together by using the nut to push the filler tight into the thread and the surrounding area. After it had set, we sliced off the plastic nut and the remaining pipe that was sticking out into the bowl area. We sanded it smooth and then touched up some small hollow bits until we got it lovely and smooth.

    The next job was to install the drain hole and plug. It measures 41mm across on the threaded section and the flange is 61mm across. So, we used a 44mm core drill but we added an extra piece of wood, cut into a circle, a piece of 3mm thick plywood, also cut to a 61mm circle and positioned it behind the core drill bit. We stuck on a small piece of 60grit sandpaper on the wooden disc and then locked the core drill on to its holder. We then got a middle position in the bottom of the basin bowl and drilled through the thick layers of glass fibre and resin material from underneath first, then turning over the whole thing, continued to cut the remainder of the hole from the bowl side downwards. Then, we did continue grinding the surface away using the little sanding disc we had attached so it created a little hollow for the flange of the drain hole to sit neatly into place and just be below the surface. We chamfered the hole a little bit to allow the plastic moulded drain hole unit to fit in better etc.

    We then trimmed down the long threaded part so there was just enough thread left to attach a solvent weld adapter to let us fit a right angle 32mm waste pipe piece, to bring the waste pipe back towards the wall and then turn to go down towards the second shelf and the large clearance hole we have already made.

    The last thing we did for this particular day, is to coat the grey / blue gel coat on to the under side of the vanity unit all over and then sprinkle our glitter everywhere. We used a small fan to provide a gentle wind to blow the glitter up onto the vertical surfaces. We have just been holding up a pinch of the sparkles about 2 feet above the target area and sprinkle it that way. but, that doesn’t work so well for vertical surfaces so we used a little fan instead.

    Upon the next day, an interrupted day with a external meeting to attend, we put on the final glossy top-coat resin on to the back half of the vanity unit (it is still upside-down) because the grey resin is very slightly tacky and we felt that turning it over wouldn’t be a good idea without causing problems like getting stuck etc. So, the top-coat went on to cover up the grey and provides a very hard finish.

    We had a little bit of time before lunch so we took our finished second shelf, cleaned off all the dribbles around the back edges and fitted it in our Cloakroom. Well, not actually fitted exactly, I mean, with glue and everything! Just resting there on the support battens so we can sort out the waste plumbing pipes that will be coming down from the bowl. We are using push-fit plumbing parts, to take the waste water through the trap (which is above the shelf) and then turns a right angle immediately underneath the shelf. Then, a short distance at an angle to a second bend but this time only a 45degrees bend before a longer straight run all the way to the final socket that is buried in the linen cupboard wall.

    Waste Plumbing connections

    Waste Plumbing connections

    Just before lunch, the glossy top-coat has harden completely so we turned the whole Vanity unit over and then applied the grey / blue gel-coat mixture all over the top surfaces and inside the bowl, to complete the coverage.

    Then, after the aforementioned meeting, we use the last hour of the day to apply the glossy top-coat resin all over the grey surfaces, all in one go so that we do not get a join line or something.

    The last job to do was to clean all the back edges, similar to what we did to the second shelf and tidied up the drain hole so it will provide a flat surface for the attachment to fit snuggly down tight, which we sealed in with black sealant. We then finished off the last bit of the waste pipe from underneath the bowl, including connecting the overflow output and join into the vertical trap. We cut down the long excess lengths of the drain hole attachment so it fitted closer to the bowl and reduce the unsightly views of waste pipes etc.

    Vanity unit complete

    Vanity unit complete

    That pretty much finishes the construction of the Vanity Unit for our Cloakroom. The next job is to make our waterfall tap and we have some ideas which we would like to try out first. We may have to buy a waterfall tap but they are difficult to find without any mixer handle built-in.

  • Hall Hatches Improved and Ready for Bolts

    While we waited for our latest modification we have done to our basin bowl mould, we decided to do one of the tasks that have been outstanding for quite a while now, which is to do two things. One was to glue in the captive nuts in the lid. We noticed that sometimes, they would pop out when we push in our special hatch keys, to screw the handle and then lift the hatch up, but instead, would pop the nut out. So, we went around all twenty-three of them and glued all these captive nuts back into place using construction glue. We also populated missing ones as well.
    The second task we did to these hatch lids, is to drill out a clearance embedded hollows, to take a 14mm washer and hide the head of a bolt so that both are below the surface. Then, we drilled a 6mm hole through the rest of the material which will allow a 35mm length bolt to poke through and will connect to another captive nut that will be screwed into the framework of the floor joists. We have positioned four of these “fixing down” points around the four corners of the hatches, 60mm in from each edge. We will have to glue a block of wood into each of the corners of the framework, but, we can do that later on.

    We had selected two of these hatches, to test out this technique last week and glued in a 63mm square block of wood in each of the four corners, and so we could see that when the 6mm hole was drilled, it went into the block underneath which was widened out to a 8mm hole, to allow for the captive nut to be itself screwed in as well. Then, the lid was bolted down nice and tight, to stop the various clunking noises when walking up and down the hallways.
    It worked very well.

    Right, that is another job done .. well half done .. we still have to glue in those wooden corner blocks .. but that it another time .. while we are waiting for glue or paint to dry somewhere!!

  • Hot Water Tank Kitted Out and Installed Into Utility Cupboard

    One of the jobs we have been working on now and again, in between other jobs, is putting together all the internal bits and pieces for our Hot Water Tank. The heat exchanger is now ready and we slid it into the tank. Then, we aligned the three pipes inside, with their elbow bends on top, and drilled clearance holes for a series of tank connectors, one for the 28mm pipe and two for the 22mm pipes. Plus also another 28mm one for a short piece of pipe, to pair up with the other 28mm pipe that goes down to the bottom of the tank. That covers the two main types of water flowing in and out of the tank. All four needed their elbow bends to be soldered into place.
    But, that is not the end of these tank connectors, we then did another one for a 15mm pipe, a piece of copper pipe which we put a 90degrees bend on it and that will be a cold water feed to top up the hot tank if necessary. The final water type tank connector we inserted, is for the overflow relief pipe, just in case the filling mechanism didn’t halt the filling when it should have done so.
    All those connectors were mounted just under the flange at the top of the tank, on the long side, and they all have external right angle bends, ready for plastic pipes to be inserted in.So, on the short side of the tank, we then drilled a series of holes, this time, for the electrical types of connections going in and out of the tank. The first two were float switches, for controlling the cold water filling system. They are positioned so one will detect the water level dropping below the 100mm mark which will cause more cold water to be fed in. The second float switch is positioned just underneath the overflow outlet so we can detect a failure to halt the filling process and cut off the electric supply to the pump or valve etc.
    Then, the next holes to drill out, were seven holes, to allow nylon glands to be fitted, which has a screw cap that tightens down on electrical wires (two of them actually have 10mm plastic microbore water pipes coming through as these are conduits for two temperature sensors to be inserted into the water). The other five glands will have a bunch of electrical wires going to a mixture of 50V DC heating elements and a couple of 230V AC Mains heating elements, to dangle down inside the tank near the bottom.

    Hot tank with everything plumbed in

    Hot tank with everything plumbed in

    Now having fitted everything that will go inside the Hot Water Tank, we moved it into the Utility Cupboard, to end up in the corner, tucked out of the way.

    But first, we need to put in a solid block of PU insulation foam boards, to surround the tank, to insulate the tank, with a thickness of 100mm all around. We had a collection of 25mm thick sheets that were left-over from other jobs so we put in four layers on the bottom, measuring 800mm deep and 500mm wide. Then, we put in a piece of DPM plastic across the whole area, sandwiched between the third and fourth layers, to act as a captive water tight barrier, so we can detect any future leaks, using an electronic sensor. This is a last ditch detection system so that we are made aware that the tank is leaking somewhere and that we have to rescue the situation.
    Next, we put in four more layers of the PU sheets, this time, the left-hand side of the tank. They are 800mm wide and went to a height of 1800mm for the first three layers and a slightly shorter 1700mm high piece for the final layer that is next to the tank and fits just under the flange.

    The third block of insulation is the back wall, this time measuring 400mm wide and a similar height as the previous load. We jammed them in so it keeps the left side layers nice and tight.

    Start of hot water tank insulation

    Start of hot water tank insulation

    We can now man-handle the tank into position, sitting on the block of insulation and shoved over so it is tight next the left block. We then resumed sliding in more sheets, this time, only measuring 700mm wide but we could only get 90mm of foam boards into the available gap, which we achieved by putting two layers of 25mm sheets and a single 40mm thick sheet. Also, we reduced the height by 100mm as well, because all the pipe connections are in this location. We will probably fill in this gap with glass wool insulation later on once we have fitted the various pipes into place. We are also likely to slide in an additional 40mm PU board that will fit in between two CLS wooden legs that are part of the cupboard framework. That will provide some extra insulation as well.

    The final step in covering up the tank is the front and we put in two layers of 25mm sheets measuring just 300mm wide and 1600mm high, and a final 40mm thick one to finish off.

    Fitting last of the insulation to the hot tank

    Fitting last of the insulation to the hot tank

    The final piece for the tank, the lid. We got a small left-over piece of 12mm cement board and cut it down to fit on the full dimension of the tank plus the flange around the top, and cut it to fit. We stuck a couple of layers of 40mm foam board on top as well.

    That concludes the assembling of the Hot Water Tank and fitting it into the Utility Cupboard, with its insulation completely surrounding it. We will do another soak test and this time, rig up an electrical circuit and heat up the water to a good 90°C to test everything. This is a good time to do that as the electricity prices are very cheap during the night, plus also, we are getting lots of solar at the moment, which will help reduce the cost of heating up 288litres of water and then letting it cool down by natural means so we can find out how long it takes with the amount of insulation we have put on.

  • Repair the Hot Water Tank

    At last, we tackled the annoying problem of fixing a leak in our new Hot Water Tank we constructed a few weeks ago. Just to recap the situation, we discovered that our mould we had made to shape the fibre glass resin on to, had little ripples in the release tape we had stuck on. These little ripples has create little grooves in the finished resin surface. One of these grooves was deep enough to breach the inner skin and this allowed the water to escape. That is the situation .. O Boy!
    So, we tackled this problem by having to climb, or rather, crawl inside the tank which is lying on its side. We vacuumed the inside and then rigged up a fan to blow forced air into the tank, to make absolutely sure that we are getting fresh oxygen and removing the chemical vapours. We went through the whole tank and scrubbed all these grooves with acetone, to clean out them and prepare the surfaces ready for a fresh application of more resin. We have to do this work in two stages because we cannot turn ourselves over to work upwards, so, we had to rotate the tank over.
    We mixed a small quantity of resin and added some yellow dye, which turned the red colour to an orange shade. This will give us a feedback to where we had applied the resin. While wearing our mask with the activated carbon filters, we proceeded to dab each of these grooves. We turned the tank over and did the other half as well.

    Sealed up the defects in Hopt Tank

    Sealed up the defects in Hopt Tank

    We left it to cure and harden overnight.
    Now, it is time to give it another leak test, we got out our garden hose again and started filling. .. In the meantime, while it was filling, we went to find a piece of 12mm cement board, traced the outline of the top of the tank and sliced it into a lid. This will sit on top, on a ring of rubber around the edge and keep the steam and hot air in the tank.
    Oh No !! !!
    We still have the same leak as last time !
    After trying to see where the hole is, on the inside of the tank, we had the idea of using compressed air to blow backwards from the spot where the water is steeping out and force air through the skin and hopefully make air bubbles appear on the inside. We eventually stuck on a 4inch square piece of thick plastic, with a ring of butyl thick glue around a circle and then clamped it on over the site. We carefully sent small burst of air into the white plastic pad, through a hole in the middle and .. we had a stream of air bubbles blowing into the water!
    Plate attached to allow air injection

    Plate attached to allow air injection

    Injecting air to find the leak

    Injecting air to find the leak

    Bubbles showing where leak is

    Bubbles showing where leak is


    We got a dark wax crayons and drew a small circle around the site where the bubbles came out. It had to work underwater!!
    Then, we drained the tank so that the level of the water was 6inches below the “hole” and then drew a wider circle using our marker pen. We sanded heavily this zone, to make sure that the surface is well “roughened”, to help stick the new layer of resin over that spot. We also heated up both sides with a hot air gun, set to 100°C maximum, to thoroughly dry the fibre glass and drive out any moisture trapped within the fibre glass itself. It needed to be as dry as possible so that the new resin will stick properly. We rubbed the entire zone with more acetone, to soften the resin and make it more attractive for the new liquid resin to stick better as well. We mixed a small amount and then applied it to the 4inch zone inside the tank. We had left-over so we painted the wall near the top of the tank, where we are planning to have various connections made to pipes etc.
    Again, we left it overnight to allow the resin to cure fully, before refilling the tank back up to normal levels again. To see whether we have fixed the leak .. or not!!
    ..
    No Leaks!! Hurray! Yippeeeee!
    At last!
    We left it full of water all day and it is looking good.
    We now have a repaired Hot Water Tank! Ready for the next stage of fitting the connectors and the heat exchanger coils ..

  • Constructed Hot Water Heat Exchanger Coils Plus Other Pipes and Sensors

    We have been spending a day here, a day there, whenever we were waiting for glue to set, paint to dry etc. etc. and got on with the task of designing and building a heat exchanger coils for our Hot Water tank sitting in our Utility Cupboard. We wanted to have a system where we could run in various hot water, or indeed cooler water sometimes, to transfer energy into, or out of, the tank. We are going to use lots of copper pipes, narrow 10mm wide copper pipes, and bend it into a coil, to form a tall rectangular spread out maze of pipe bending this way and that way, to form a column. We want to make four of these, so that they stand in a line, inside our Hot Water tank. They will be connected to a 22mm copper pipe and a tiny little manifold which will allow four 10mm pipes to join into the 22mm pipe. The 22mm would then go up to the top of the tank and exit to the outside world.

    So we were thinking of doing a series of “figure-of-eight” loops, wrapping the copper pipe around two 110mm waste pipes, set apart very slightly, making sure the overall dimensions kept within 150mm by 300mm. In fact, we made sure that the longer length didn’t exceed 270mm so that there was room to slide the finished article into our tank. We found some left-over waste pipe, made two equal length, measuring 250mm and then cut little slots at one end, all the way around, to form little bendable tabs. We heated up the plastic to bend these tabs out and then we screwed the two pipes onto a block of wood.

    We then started trying to bend the copper pipe around these template, but discovered straight away that the thin walled copper pipe kept on buckling and didn’t want to bend smoothly around. Oh Dear!

    So for Plan B! We decided to use our miniature pipe bender tool, designed to cleanly bend these microbore pipes but at a much tighter radius, of around 20mm, forming a bend that would be only 40mm across for a full circle. We still tried to use our existing template, to bend the copper pipe with right angle corners, and 60degree in the middle when we wanted to make the “figure-of-eight” shape but it was proofing very difficult. It was a matter of getting precise distances from one bend to the start of the next bend, to apply the bending tool in that precise location, to end up having the copper pipe going around the two upright plastic waste pipes. We had a little chaotic set of coils.

    Trying out pipe bending

    Trying out pipe bending


    By the way, we were using old copper pipe we had from a previous project some 15 years ago, so we were not losing material here with our experiments!!

    What we ended up, as you can see in the photo above, is a random collection of lengths and gaps, which gave us the idea that if we change our approach slightly, like for example, if we build a rectangular box and, instead of the two plastic tubes, we mounted two wooden pillars using 63mm CLS timber, to ensure that we had maintained a cleared section to allow the insertion of the immersed electrical heaters as well. This box measures 270mm long by 130mm wide.

    Frame to constrain tube bending

    Frame to constrain tube bending


    We did another test run and it was much easier to randomly bend the copper pipe at various points, so long as it obeyed the basic requirement of going around each pillar in a figure of 8 movement, it doesn’t matter where or what path the copper pipe takes. It looks quite reasonable.

    So, we committed ourselves to using our freshly bought boxes of 10mm copper pipes, and proceeded to bend one column of random lengths and angles, to bend the entire 10 metres of the copper pipe, all into that limiting rectangular requirements. It took a couple of hours to do the job, but we ended up with a column, vaguely rectangular in shape. We pulled the approximately thirteen loops out, stretching it out to about 1metre tall.

    First heat exhanger formed

    First heat exhanger formed

    On another day, while waiting for the Cloakroom paint to dry, made two more “coils”, this time only taking about an hour to do all the bends. The third one had a slight crumpling up of one of the bends so we had to chop that out and replace it with a new bend and soldered the replacement back into that location.

    Then we did the fourth and final one the other day. We now have four of them, ready to be assembled together later on.

    On another occasion, while we were waiting for a new tin of acrylic varnish to arrive, we got on with the job of assembling our four coils, to form a single module, ready to be slid into the Hot Water Tank. So, towards this aim, we put together a rough and ready simple template of our hot tank, just the back and two sides, measuring 600mm wide and 300mm high, and 1700mm long, emulating the shape and size of our tank. Then, we put in 100mm wooden blocks at the top, to make sure that the copper coils do not occupy too far up the tank and we did a similar thing at the bottom, but this time, only a 50mm blocks so we can guarantee a buffer of water underneath the coils.
    We then stretched out all four coils, to fill the majority of the space. We noted that we could, and did, slide in pieces of 18mm and 22mm thick boards in between the coils, including on the outside too and that helped keep them much neater and separated from each other.

    Now these four separate coils needs to be connected together. I mean the actual copper pipes at each end, so that the water coming in, and out, of the tank, via a 22mm copper pipe, can be split up and flowing around the four group of coils, transferring the energy in one direction or another.
    We got a very neat brass adapter that fits to a 22mm size copper pipe and four 10mm holes, arranged in a two by two grid, on the other side. We managed to carefully bend each separate coil “tails”, sometimes with an extension piece, and connect each tail into this adapter. Then, we cleaned all the joints, put on flux and then got our gas torch to heat up all the joints and melt solder in the joints.

    Heat Exchangers Base

    Heat Exchangers Base

    Heat Exchangers base manifold

    Heat Exchangers base manifold



    The 22mm copper pipe went up the middle and pokes out the top end.

    We then repeated the process to the other end of the coils, and soldered the adapter and joints in a similar manner. This time, we put on a little short piece of the 22mm pipe. Both of these pipes will have elbow right angle bends but we will do that later on when we got the whole thing inserted into our tank.

    We then bend a small piece of 10mm pipe, into a “U”, to make a “foot” to take the weight of the heat exchanger and also maintain a 50mm gap at the bottom of the tank. That was also soldered into place too.

    Then we slid in a length of 28mm copper pipe down through the coils and anchored that into place by twisting some thick copper wire we found in our left-over cable scrap box. We also threaded some more of the thick electrical wire (we stripped off the plastic coating) and anchored the coils together as well, to stop it wiggling around.

    Heat Exchangers in place

    Heat Exchangers in place


    Another additional little task we did, was to twist little pieces of wire on the outside of the coils, between it and the walls of the tank, to provide a simple way to make sure that the coily module will sit nice and centred in the tank and keep away from the wall surfaces. We had to solder these pieces into place, to stop them twisting out of alignment.

    All these pipes (the two 22mm ones plus also two 28mm ones) and also a 15mm filling pipe that we haven’t mentioned yet, will all need a tank connector mounted at the top of the tank, to allow the copper pipe to gain access to the outside world. But, we want to slide the copper pipe right through these connectors, but that can’t happen until we have grinded an internal flange away. We used a 16mm HSS drill to ream out the 15mm tank connector, and used a tungsten carbide grinder to do the job in the four larger connectors.

    Tank Connectors reamed out

    Tank Connectors reamed out

    finally, we could do a “leak” test at last! We connected up our compressed air adapter which we had previously assembled, using various plumbing bits and pieces, joined to our tyre adaptor. We push it on the 22mm pipe, blasted air down inside the long coily pipes, to remove any rubbish. Then, we put on an end stop on the other 22mm pipe and built up the air pressure inside the pipe. We had a hissing sound!! We squirted some soapy water on everything, to track down the source of the hissing noise and eventually located it to a repaired section where one of the inline joints was leaking. It took us two goes to plug the gap in the joint with melted solder. We then tested everything again and this time, we held tight! Our testing adaptor has a digital pressure gauge and we put in 3.90bars of air and it stayed steady for a couple of hours, only very slightly dropping to 3.88bars, which is probably as a result of temperature change. We had squirted more soapy water on all the joints and see if bubbles formed like a little miniature volcano .. but none developed. Yippee!

    The last thing we did, was to slide a length of plastic 10mm pipe down in among the coils, to serve as an temperature probe. We sealed the bottom end with a brass end cap compression fitting, to make it water proof, but also, to provide a good metal heat sink to help warm up the thermometer sensor that we will slide down inside the 10mm plastic pipe. We even put in a blob of thermal transfer paste, to help improve the connection between the thermometer sensor and the hot water that it will be measuring near the bottom of the tank. We did another one, but a much shorter one, to measure the top of the tank.
    That concludes making the Heat Exchanger module !!

    The next job is to patch up the tank itself and then we can install the heat exchanger in for real, and connect all the pipes through those tank connectors to the outside world!!

  • Sorting Out Pipes and Doing the Floorboards

    We have been tackling our Utility Room, to sort out the pipes that have been “coiled” up in a untidy bunch for quite a while now, so that we can assemble the rest of the floorboards in the room. Why you may ask? It is because we actually want to get on with implementing and building the main Air Ducts that runs around the triangular void space up on the first floor, and we are going to use our left-over sheets of the 22mm thick floorboard pieces. But, we need some to finish off the flooring in this room, our Utility Room first! It would be really annoying to discover later on that we don’t have enough of these specially made sheets that has proper tongue and groove joints on all four edges and they cost an extra premium for that.

    So, we have been sorting out the water pipes that are bunched up, all coming from various sources all over the house. There are a pair of pipes from each of our five Energy Modules, a pair of pipes that goes to and from the two extreme corners of the house, ready to connect to our Swimming Lane, and finally, an additional pair of pipes, this time coming from our Garage and the Thermal Solar System that we will have mounted on the roof.

    But, first, we had to lay down the other half of the Swimming Lane connection that comes from the very very far corner, outside the Patio area. So, we had to lift all the hatches down our Hallways and across the Great Room, and slide in a single length of 15mm plastic waterpipe, connecting to the length of pipe that is coming underneath the Great Room flooring. And terminating in our Utility Room. Hence why we wanted to get that done now so we didn’t forget it later on.
    We sorted out the bunch of pipes so that all the high filling pipes were grouped together, all seven of them and then the second bunch had the low filling point pipes. Then we cut two 95mm round holes through the cupboard wall underneath the flooring level, as high as possible and separated by about 100mm between them. We then pushed the collection of pipes through these holes, untwisted them and then anchored them up the wall, ready for further work later on.
    This includes connecting two 22mm pipes to the Garage’s Solar System as well, and having that coming around and joining with the other pipes.

    The other major pipe we sorted out, is the circulating hot water system, using our 28mm pipework. We needed that pair of pipes to curve around and enter into the Cupboard as well. So we drilled two 38mm diameter holes near the other holes we did earlier, over near the air ducting so they were relatively close to the Hot Water tank etc. The hot water only needs to connect to the pump, a flow rate sensor, temperature sensors and a couple of isolating valves plus also a couple of draining points.

    Plant Cupboard Incoming pipes

    Plant Cupboard Incoming pipes

    Now that we got the pipework sorted, we now can complete the floorboards for the Utility Room, making sure that we use enough chipboard floor pieces, to cover the entire room. We won’t glue or screw them down because we still got a lot of stuff to do underneath in that space, like building the Air Ducting and putting in several more conduits for connecting data cables etc.

    Utility floor completed (1)

    Utility floor completed (1)

    Utility floor completed (2)

    Utility floor completed (2)



    We needed two and a half more boards to get it all done.

    It was quite tricky in getting the last section done, the doorway area going into the hallway. It was a funny “L” shape piece, with a little notch cut out as well, to fit around the corner of the cupboard. The last piece was relatively easy and only needed to glue on an extra 50mm wide strip of the chipboard floorboard to finish the job.

    With that now complete so we can start working on building the Air Duct upstairs !!

  • Construction and Decoration of Cloakroom

    Now that we have finished installing the air ducting and water pipework that are travelling underneath the Cloakroom, we are now tackling the task of building up the inner surfaces of the walls inside the Cloakroom. One of the first jobs, is to put on horizontal utility rails on the door wall, so that we can have a small “control” panel beside the Vanity Unit and the entrance of the door, to provide knobs and buttons, to control the water coming out of the spout in terms of temperature and flow rate. Also, we would have a display to show the temperature when the water is flowing, and default back to showing the time otherwise. There would be a loudspeaker built in so we could have gentle music, or play gentle tones like the hourly chimes etc. finally, there would be a button to make the doors open!! We set this Utility Channel a little bit higher than our normal height, adding another 100mm. We wanted to keep clear of the Vanity Unit so that it is easier to keep the area clean and dry, and keep any water from splashing up to the Oak “control” panel.
    We also put another “control” panel over near where the toilet is situated. We created a niche in between two vertical legs, measuring 350mm wide. The niche is based on the same size and position as the Utility Channel, lifted up that extra 100mm higher. This niche will provide a place where we can put in controls for flushing the toilet, controlling the lighting levels etc. We drilled a hole in the bottom rail for a 20mm pipe, to go down inside the wall, underneath the floor and then back up inside the wall beside the doorway, to the other control box. Then we put in a short pipe connecting this control box to the Hall’s Utility Channel, so we can bring in data and power cables from the outside.
    The second control box also have a 20mm pipe put in the side and that travels down the wall and this time, goes across to the toilet and terminates inside the toilet internal framework. This will provide the means of adding extra features to the toilet, like having a heated seat, or perhaps have sensors to detect when the seat has been lifted up. A third hole was also drilled in the side of that control box, a smaller hole, to take a small 6mm plastic pipe, which also goes down the wall and across to the toilet as well, which will join with the existing bellows that causes the flush action to occur.

    We have measured exactly where these control boxes are, so when the wall boards have been installed, we can cut out the small segment of the wall, to to replace it with a piece of oak which will have the buttons and bits and pieces on them.

    We then turned to the task of installing the toilet framework and cistern into the body of the wall. We have gone for wall mounted toilets so it makes it much easier to keep the floor nice and clean, but also, hides away the cistern itself too. There will be just a small square access removable panel, so one could service the cistern, or even replace the filling mechanism etc. Everything is hidden inside the wall itself and will only show a small push button to flush the loo. We decided to take the opportunity to raise the toilet up higher than typical toilet bowls are, because it is sensible as we are all getting older. This metal framework provides a method of sliding up and down, to control the overall height of the ceramic bowl and we went for an additional 100mm higher, to make it come up to around 500mm off the floor, instead of the usual 400mm. Having done that, we then could measured the position of the large waste soil pipe and cut a piece to go horizontally from the stack, which then turns 90degrees upwards to join onto the elbow connecting pipe that comes from the ceramic bowl itself. Now, that we got this major pipework in place, we then could secure the framework into place using four coach hex-headed screws, two at the top and a further two at the bottom. That is it!

    Cloakroom WC Frame

    Cloakroom WC Frame


    We then connected the cold water 15mm pipe to the back of the unit, using a tank connector fitting to a copper pipe, which we soldered on a short piece of copper pipe and then bolted on a right angle bend which then had the plastic 15mm pipe inserted in and tightened down.
    Back of Cloakroom WC Frame 2

    Back of Cloakroom WC Frame 2


    We put in a couple of 20mm pipes, one of them coming from Bedroom One’s Utility Channel, to provide mains electricity if we ever needed that and the second pipe, coming across from the small control box already mentioned above.

    That concludes all the conduits and pipes going from here to there, including going under the floor as well, so we could get on with the next task. This is where we put in lots of glass wool pieces in that large space under the flooring, like we have been doing in all the other rooms, to insulate against the cold (or perhaps hot!) concrete slab.

    Cloakroom floor insulated

    Cloakroom floor insulated


    Then we glued and screwed the floorboard pieces that were already done (years ago!).
    Cloakroom floor down

    Cloakroom floor down

    This meant that we can now, and did, install the first layers of wall boards. The first layer is the usual 18mm OSB sheets and we worked our way around the room, doing each wall segment. Some of the pieces had pipes sticking through, like the 32mm waste pipe socket, waiting for the pipe to come from the basin, the bigger 68mm air ducting and the 15mm hot water pipe, to connect to the spout sitting on the Vanity unit. The tricky bit was the toilet wall, because it had two round holes to put in, plus also the “access” panel to the cistern, but also, a future rectangle access panel just above the ceramic bowl itself.

    At this point, we decided that we would install some additional lighting into the Cloakroom so we could see what we are doing better! We had various samples of LED lamps so we gathered three of them together and placed them on short pieces of 12mm thick plywood and hang them up inside the ceiling space so that they don’t intrude into the room itself as we will be moving around and fitting large pieces of our plasterboard sheets. We wired the lamps back out to the Hall and put on a pull-cord switch for a local control when we have turned on the Hall lighting.

    The next job was to trim the excess OSB material away from the door edges and also to cut out the Utility Channel that is beside the Vanity unit as well. At this point, we had a sudden thought that we had forgotten to make some provision for a future installation of more sensors and controls in and around the Vanity Unit itself, like detecting when the water is overflowing, or controlling the water by tapping the spout. So we needed an additional 20mm conduit installed, coming from inside the proposed Vanity Unit cabinet and going up to the Utility Channel we had just cut out. But, in order to do this, we had to sliced away a small portion of our new wall, to expose the hollow wall and the lower part of the utility channel framework itself. There, we drilled a 22mm down through the CLS timber for a conduit to fit through. We then took two pieces of our 20mm wide rigid plastic tubing and heated them to bend them 90degree right angles in them. Them using a small piece of 25mm wide water pipe, we could join the two halves together to form a single continuous conduit, going through the aforementioned hole. We finally, drilled a 20mm hole through the OSB cut-away piece, and then glued this piece back into the wall again. We will sand it all down once the glue has set rock hard and it will all disappear when we cover the walls with our plasterboard material anyway!

    Next, we sanded all the wall surfaces, to remove any splinters and roughen up the surface, ready for the glue. We also gently washed the walls down with a damp cloth as well, to remove the dust.
    Now, we can proceed to put on the Fermacell boards (our high performance plasterboards), and started on the back wall where the toilet will be hanging. We measured the locations of the various holes, including the “letter-box” future expansion, we drew a thick black line around the edge of the rectangular hole, wrote the exact measurements on the wall itself and then took several photos for future records ..

    Cloakroom WC Slot dimensions

    Cloakroom WC Slot dimensions


    .. and we continued to measure the other holes etc. The width of the wall in total was 1100mm so we collected up a sheet off our pile and took it to the Great Room where we had our working table set up. We marked out the newly measured locations of the four round holes (one large one, one medium one and two much smaller ones for the bolts) and the large rectangular hole for the “pretty” plate that has the flush buttons on it. These got drilled and sawn, as well as the whole sheet was sliced narrower to that 1100mm width. We test fitted the board back in the Cloakroom and we only needed to rasp some of the edges a little bit, to make them fit smoothly. Once we were happy, We dampened down the back side of the fermacell sheet, and sprayed PU foam glue all over the wall, put extra construction PU glue around the toilet holes and pressed the sheet into place. We then stapled it all over and screwed a half dozen of short screws in and around the various holes, to make sure that the fermacell is well and truly squashed flat against the OSB board, so that when the ceramic toilet bowl itself is bolted into place, it won’t crush, wobble or damage the fermacell material.

    We proceeded to cover up the other five surfaces in the room, including doing the surrounds around the door entrance way itself.

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (1)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (1)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (2)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (2)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (3)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (3)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (4)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (4)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (5)

    Cloakroom Fermacell Up (5)


    Before we could get on with doing the next step with the skirting boards, we needed to trim all the corners, plus also slice a small radius on the outside corners (the two vertical edges and one horizontal edges of the doorway, and also the corner of the linen cupboard). We had to open both of our doors to let out the cloud of fine gypsum plaster dust to slowly drift out of the house!!

    The next job was to put on the skirting board, but not a traditional wooden kind, but, made up using more fermacell material, cut to produce a heap of 100mm wide strips. We recycled many of old left-over pieces we had lying around on our sheet rack and from doing the current covering of the Cloakroom’s walls. But before gluing and stapling them on to the bottom of the walls, we passed them through our table router which had the giant quarter turn of a circle router bit and adjusted so that it sliced off a glancing chunk of the fermacell, to make a smooth and slightly elongated curve at the top of the skirting board pieces.
    We went around the whole room, which adds up to about 6metres in total, gluing and stapling each piece in place. The only section that needed special treatment was the section underneath the Vanity Unit, because it is where the fresh air comes out into the room. So we make a special piece where we curved up and over the “hole” and then filled in on either side with smaller lengths of the skirting boards.

    We then sanded the three outside corners, to make a gentle bend around from one line of skirting to the next line. All these skirting boards will be ultimately covered up with the glass fibre resin combination, going right across the floor and making a waterproof sealed surface.

    Next, we filled in all the staple holes, rubbed down the occasional joins, and filled in the five inside corners and smoothed down by using a 32mm diameter pipe, to produce a gentle rounded contour. We did the same with the floor to skirting board edges but this time used a 50mm diameter pipe so the fibre glass and resin covering will smoothly curved around up the edges, to make it nice and easy to wash the floor. We went around putting a little bit more on the vertical contoured corners, to help fill in small gaps etc. and then rubbed down using a piece of sandpaper stuck to a short length of the 32mm wide pipe so that we could end up all nice and smooth.

    We also have been testing various combinations of fibre glass and resin on test samples of the chipboard flooring material, to see how well it sticks down etc. We also painted fermacell pieces too. Then, we coated some of them with the finishing “top-coat” to see how slippery it could be to walk on. The test revealed that it is very well stuck down and the white top-coat is not that slippery when it is dry.

    So with that in mind, we proceeded to prepare the fibre glass matting for the floor, tearing pieces off the roll, to put down three layers in total all over, with one layer going up the skirting boards around the edges. We needed to achieve this task of painting the resin into the glass fibre, in such a way, that we can reach over to apply the resin without stepping on to any “wet” parts. This meant that the pieces of matting had to be arranged so that each portion of the Cloakroom was completed fully, before moving along to the next section. We decided to do the area under the toilet first, then do the vanity basin section next, and then the middle section and finally the doorway area to finish off. These jigsaw pieces were bundled up and put into a line, ready for the actual application of the polyester resin. The doorway had an strip of 12mm plywood covered up in parcel tape, to make it non-stick and screwed down so the edge of the fibre glass can be terminated neatly to approximately where the sliding door will hang. This 12mm thick plywood strip is a guide to control how much glass fibre we should put down and we are aiming for a gentle slope going up when exiting the room. This will provide a double useful feature; one for keeping in any water spills and secondly, to make the transition from the hard, and much thinner floor covering, to the much thicker carpet and underlay that will be put down in the Hall. So, we had a pile of torn off pieces of the fibre glass matting, getting narrower and narrower, as we get closer and closer to the “barrier” defined by the 12mm plywood strip. This task took several hours to get right!
    So after lunch, we got on with the job of mixing up the resin, we put in red colouring dye, to give it some interesting shade of colour and mixing batches, one for each section. We had five mixing pots so we started with 1.2kg of resin, put in 12ml of hardener and got on with the three matting pieces next to the toilet wall. We discovered that we needed to mix a further 500grams to finish off this section. Them, we proceeded with a 1.6kg of resin, to do the section under the Vanity unit and then moving across to the middle section with another 1.6kg of mixture. The last section of the floor had a 1.5kg of resin and then finally, an additional 600grams to build up the slope in the doorway. This took about three hours to complete this task, making sure that all the layers were pressed down, using the metal ribbed roller, to get rid of air bubbles and make sure the resin is well mixed with the glass fibre. All the skirting boards had plenty of resin brushed on them as well, as we were doing each area.

    Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (1)

    Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (1)

    Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (2)

    Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (2)



    We did come along and lay down another heap of glass fibre strips across the doorway, to build up the gentle slope, to raise up the surface so that it meets the carpet and underlay out in the Hall.
    Cloakroom Raising the threshold

    Cloakroom Raising the threshold

    This is the basic floor covering, which we will double check for bumps, sand the surface to make it smooth and then apply a finishing coats, perhaps two coats, to provide the waterproofing seal to the whole room and 100mm up the walls. This final “top-coat” will be done later on when we have finished routing various conduits going over the Cloakroom before we install the ceiling fermacell boards and complete the whole room, including painting it and the walls with our colour scheme. Once that is all done, we then will do the final coat of resin on our floor!!

    So talking about conduits, we did that task of putting any conduits up inside the ceiling space, see Installation of a Variety of Conduits from Tech Cupboard for details.

    Next, we installed some lighting conduits up inside the ceiling, short 40mm flexible conduits that goes from one lamp position to the next one, and then another short length to connect to the outside world in the Hall, to join up with the controller board out there.

    The final job to do up there, is to build an air ventilation module that will allow a circular “pretty” vent to be installed in the middle of the ceiling and then a 100mm diameter flexible pipe to come out the side of this module and goes through several joists, heading towards the main ventilation ducting that runs right around the whole house, up on the First Floor, inside the triangular void space. We constructed the module using pieces of left-over floorboards and glued and screwed it together to form a box. We then slid inside a piece of flexible plastic sheet, it is only 2mm thick and we cut it down so it fitted inside the box, but push it into a curve to help guide the air flow more gently around the bends. We also put in two little side wings as well, to guide the air towards the output pipe connector, which is actually a sweep right angle bend, with a socket sticking in the correct direction, to take our purple flexible pipe that will go through the joist as mentioned above.

    Cloakroom Air collector

    Cloakroom Air collector


    The last piece to put in is a small bracing wooden bar across the box so that the “pretty” air vent cover can be fixed up against the ceiling surface later on after everything have been painted.

    Now that we got our air vent module built, we push it up into the correct location, approximately centred in the middle of the room and marked off where the air socket is facing the webbing of the joist. After taking it out again, we proceeded to saw a series of 114mm diameter holes through five consecutive joist. We wanted the flexible purple conduit to poke up just before our main Air Duct which runs around inside our triangular void space upstairs. We drilled two overlapping large holes through the floorboard so it produces an elongated “oval” hole for the purple pipe to slide through at an angle and reasonably pointing towards the future Air Duct.

    Cloakroom Air collection in place

    Cloakroom Air collection in place

    Cloakroom air goes through joist and upstairs

    Cloakroom air goes through joist and upstairs



    We slid back the air vent module and screwed it in so it is all flushed with the bottoms of the joist and then pushed the purple pipe into the side socket and sealed it up with aluminium tape.

    That concludes all the conduits and pipes that lives up in the ceiling space, so we could start the process of installing the fermacell sheets up there to cover up the joists .. at last! But, one of the first tasks to do, is to glue a strip of “2 by 1” batten around the edge of the walls so that we had a something to enable us to screw up the ceiling boards. Sometimes, the walls are positioned in between joists and there is nothing up there to secure the edge of the fermacell.
    Next, is cutting smaller pieces of the fermacell material to build up the jigsaw pieces to slide horizontally into each section. It was quite an effort to work out the precise order. We took advantage of the joists running across the room, to act as a wide battens to allow us to butt together the two edges of the fermacell and have it nice and tight and flat, without having to do any major sanding. We got it organised so that we had only one tongue and groove joint to do, connecting the piece above the Vanity Unit and the two pieces over the door entrance. We ended up with four pieces.

    The next task is to drill various holes for the three lamps and a giant hole for the air vent. We didn’t want to have to cut these holes upside-down so we did it while we had the pieces loose.

    Now, it is time to glue and screw them up! We used our construction PU glue because it has a much longer working time, to allow us to slide the pieces around, to get them joined together and hooked into place, before we screwed any of the four pieces. We even pre-started the screws while each piece was lying on the floor so we didn’t have to used two hands to hold up a screw and drive it in. It helped enormously, so much so, that we are considering buying another piece of equipment to automatically drive screws in, by just using one hand – the screws are held in a long strip which automatically feeds into the screw driver!!

    We put up the piece over the Vanity Unit first, then the Toilet piece next, then the middle piece and finally the fourth piece over the door entrance way. We put plenty of glue on all the joists and battens, plus also the fermacell joints as well.

    Next, we went around filling in the edges at the top of the walls, to form a gentle contour between the wall and the ceiling, at the same time, filling in the little gap that we had at the top as well. We used a 32mm diameter plastic pipe to shape the tile adhesive mixture, because we got loads of it, but also, it is very easy to rub it smooth afterwards.

    We also put up our white concentric ventilation cover, in the new large hole, screwing it into place, plus also, we put in three flush fitting LED lamps too.

    The next job is to rub down all these fillings and apply additional treatment to areas that didn’t quite “do the job” first time around. While these are drying, we carried on making the heat exchanger module for our Hot Tank.

    Now reaching this point in our Cloakroom, we proceeded to spray the walls and ceiling, with the first coat of white emulsion paint. Our very useful sprayer machine is a powerful machine and did a quick work of covering all the walls and ceiling. We took down the air ventilation grill and put little plastic bags over the three LED lamps and sealed them up. They still glow brightly so they are still helping us!
    After the first coat, we went around and gently rubbed all the surfaces and discovered several missing holes which didn’t get filled in. We also spotted some of the joints between fermacell pieces that also needed more attentive work done to them too.

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (1)

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (1)

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (2)

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (2)

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (3)

    Cloakroom first coat of paint (3)


    The second coat is now on and we are nearly there. The surfaces is much smoother now, but, we still spotted unfilled holes !! So, we carried on and filled in those little holes and rubbed the surfaces down again smooth.

    It is now ready for the final coat of paint and doing the wallpapering. Our next job is to clean and oil the exterior cladding and oak frames.