Category: House

The Leak From Gutter in A-B Corner Repaired

While we had this lovely dry weather, we tackled a problem we had with our Gutters in the A-B corner of our house, above our Kitchen window and the Front Door section. We had a steady dribble whenever it rains, underneath the guttering and dripping off the fascia. It does not do this anywhere else so we had to get up there to inspect the rubber liner and interface to the downpipe module.
This involved us having to unscrew the thin oak batten that is clamping down the metal mesh and the edge of the rubber membrane. It was rather difficult because we filled the gap in among the holes in the mesh with silicone sealant and it has stuck itself rather well. After a careful teasing away the rubber material, we could finally bend back the metal mesh to give us access to inside the Gutters.
Here we discovered that the rubber liner has become unstuck off the glass fibre resin surface and therefore, allowed water to sneak backwards underneath the liner and eventually found a joint from one piece of oak to another, and dribbled out.
So, it is a case of re-sticking the rubber membrane back down again. but, will it? It is very dirty so we did a lot of cleaning and looked at the old glue on the back of the rubber, got some solvent which seems to be able to soften the old glue and start removing it.
At this point, we decided to pin back as much of the rubber material out of the Gutters, to allow the wood to dry out more thoroughly before we continued with the repair job.

Lifted the rubber in AB Corner Gutter

After a couple of days, while fortunately the rain held off completely, the Oak wood is looking much better now. We prepared the glass fibre surfaces by rubbing it down with sandpaper, some powerful solvent and also cleaned the rubber membrane as well. We then coated both surfaces with a good quality contact glue, where we then waited for those coated surfaces to dry, before we carefully rolled the rubber membrane back flat down along the whole gutter section and getting it nice and flat on the glued area. We then went to find some extra rubber membrane material and cut ourselves a piece measuring 100mm wide and about 300mm long. This went across the front edge of the downpipe channel so that the gushing water coming off the valley of the slates up on the roof, will be deflected away from the open edge of the fibre glass and the front Oak vertical cover.

AB Ruibber glued back down

We put in a little bit of mastic sealant in the edge of the rubber membrane that flattens across to the fibre glass, to make sure no water can creep into and underneath the rubber protector.

We then treated some of the timber with anti-fungal timber treatment solution, by dribbling some of the liquid down between the rubber membrane, to discourage any further fungal growth etc. before we pinned the rubber back down along the front vertical part of the guttering. We squirted a line of black sealant glue on top of the rubber strip, before bending the metal mesh, along with the wooden strip, back down and screw it all back down tight again.

And mesh back in place

Now we need lots of rain to test our work .. phew!

29 June 2024
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

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 (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 !!

24 June 2024
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

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

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

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

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

.. 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 (2)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (3)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (4)

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 (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

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

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 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 (2)

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.

22 June 2024
Floor Framework for Ensuite One and Two Constructed

While working on the Cloakroom and installing various utilities under the floor, we realised that the two Ensuites behind the Cloakroom needed to have their wooden floor framework built so that we could route the various pipes and air ducts across and use legs to tie them down.
So, starting with Ensuite One, we got out our laser level line generator and got the laser line aligned to the doorway plank of CLS timber that is already there with then allowed us to see the projected line on the back wall. We marked the wall posts 20mm further down and this will introduce a very slight slope downhill from the entrance way, ensuring any water to flow away from the bedroom and towards the drain. We then cut a piece of treated timber to do the two side rails, measuring 1724mm and 1690mm (one of them had a gap to fit in). They were glued and nailed with 90mm nails on all the wall posts they covered. And then the back wall got it horizontal rail, measuring 2070mm and that got also glued and nailed too. We decided to divide the room up so that there are three further horizontal pieces to complete the floor framework. They measured 1650mm each (plus or minus a few millimetres!) and we then put three legs underneath each one. We rotated the joist so it flat and taking up less room, to maximise our plumbing pipes, especially the waste pipe coming from the shower area, so that we can have a slight drop in the pipe to encourage the waste water to flow away but still have plenty of height to allow us to connect this waste water to our heat recovery module.
So, each of these horizontal rails had three legs so we needed to cut nine pieces of the green treated timber and dipped the ends in more preservative solution and then trimmed them just so that they fitted underneath the rails and give a solid support for the framework.

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (1)

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (2)

Then, we tackled Ensuite Two and did the same there too. There was a couple of differences, one being that because this room is right in the corner of the building, it had two outside walls, with the vapour barrier membrane plastic sheeting covering up the walls. This meant that there wasn’t any room for having niches and a control box for the shower itself. Therefore, we went out to buy five planks of 89mm wide by 38mm and 2.4metres long pieces, and drilled five clearance holes using our drill press, to make sure that the holes are going in nice and straight and not veer off at an angle. We are screwing these planks through their wide direction so we needed 150mm long screws, hence why we wanted to make sure that we were straight. We screwed these planks 250mm above the concrete floor slab, to allow the horizontal floor joist to be safely glued and screwed without being too near the ends of the timber. The other difference, is that the middle cross rail had to be set at an angle. We did this so we could avoid putting a leg almost in the middle of the accessible region underneath the doorway in Bedroom Two. We needed to maximise this gap so we could fit our heat recovery module in, which could be quite large. So we shifted the end towards the hot water pipe that are encapsulated in PU foam and get the leg quite close. We ended up cutting the end with a 5degree angle and then putting the usual three legs underneath.

Ensuite 2 Wall depth exspansion

Ensuite 2 floor framing (1)

Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

That concludes this little job on the side, to enable us to get the Cloakroom finished.

27 May 2024
Installing Utilities underneath the Cloakroom and Beyond

We started putting in the Utility pipes and ducting underneath our downstairs toilet, which we are calling by its traditional name of a “Cloakroom”, which is a very odd name as there is no evidence of cloaks or hats or sticks at all!
We wanted to make progress on implementing an actual toilet, fully flushing and everything, including having a working hand basin as well. So to achieve this goal, we needed to make sure that we have installed all the necessary pipework, and air ducting, that goes under the floor, to the other Ensuites behind, including going upstairs too.
Our downstairs Hallway have various Utilities travelling down its length, the major Air Duct travelling down the middle of the house and both hot and cold water in the side branch. So this is where we need to “tap-off” several feeds to each of our surrounding smaller wet rooms, like the Ensuites, toilets and shower room upstairs.
So, we started by putting in two manifold “distributors” in a line, and connected to our pressurised cold water. Each of these manifold units comes with three 15mm side branches so we have six in all. Four of them will be heated up by the hot water and fed to the following destinations; the Shower Room upstairs, the Toilet’s basin upstairs, Work Room Three’s Sink upstairs and the Cloakroom’s basin.

We installed a length of 15mm plastic water pipe, insulated in 75mm thick tubular foam for our cloakroom downstairs and left it sticking out of the wall, ready to be fed through holes in the wall boards when we get that far. The other end will be connected to our hot water mixer / heat exchanger unit which is located in the hall, along with a motorised valve so the computer can control the flow of water going into the basin. Then we did a second hot water 15mm pipe wrapped in more of that 75mm foam insulation material, went up inside the wall space to the First Floor joist and then sideways to head to the back of the upstairs toilet and then turned upwards and be ready for plumbing into that basin. There are two more hot water connections, the shower and workroom sink, to be done later on as these don’t cross our Cloakroom.
The other two 15mm connections are straight direct cold water feeds to the cistern for the upstairs toilet and the cloakroom downstairs. They were threaded through the walls from under the floor and is now waiting for the equipment to be installed.
Then we put in a 32mm wide waste pipe that connects to our main waste stack, drilling out a side connector and inserting a rubber bung that has a 32mm hole to take the waste pipe coming from the basin. We terminated this pipe 6inches off the floor, sticking out of the wall that separate the cloakroom from the Linen cupboard. Again, we will have to drill a clearance hole through the wall boards when we come to fit them up.

Cloakroom Water supply

Now it is the turn of the air ducting.
The air ducts needs to travel all the way to the far Ensuite (number Two) and we decided that we needed to build the framework for both Ensuites flooring so we had legs to attach these tubes to. See
Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

The following air tubes to install, were the orange flexible 50mm diameter conduits. Another long one to take fresh warm air to Ensuite Two, to approximately half way on the back wall, ready to plug into a left, and right, distributor, one for the Vanity Unit, and the second one in the Shower area. These are much slower and are used to provide a constant room temperature gentle air flow to keep the room fresh and dry. Of course, this utility will slow right down, or even stop, when one is having a shower. Anyone would feel a draught when one’s body is wet all over, one would feel the chilly breeze!!
A similar air conduit is installed for Ensuite One, to swing around and terminate about half way in the middle of the back wall, opposite the entrance way.

The next orange conduit is for the Cloakroom and then the Linen Cupboard, needing only short lengths but this time, we connected a right angle bend on the ends and carefully positioned it so it points into the room. The Cloakroom will have this fresh air come underneath the Vanity unit, again slowing right down when the room is occupied. The Linen Cupboard had the 90degree bend pointing upwards near the back of the floor and this will provide lovely fresh warm air constantly inside the cupboard and keep our linen dry and fresh.

Air supply for linen cupboard

The final orange one is being another 50mm flexible conduit to supply fresh air to the upstairs toilet, so it has to travel across the Cloakroom and then bend up inside the wall body (the wall that separate the Cloakroom from the Ensuite One) and then travel sideways inside the First Floor Joist space, to reach beyond the boundary of the Toilet, at which point, it will turn upwards and plug into another right angle bend, to poke out just underneath the Vanity unit like this cloakroom.

Air supply for upstairs WC

The final piece of air ducting to do, is another rigid 68mm brown pipe, for another high-speed hot blast, going to Ensuite One, just the other side of the dividing wall from the Cloakroom. This will also turn up inside the wall space and pop out around chest height too.

Air ducts under cloakroom

All these air ducts will be connected to our main Air Duct, using specially design “collectors” that draws a controlled amount of fresh air out of the air stream, concentrates it down to a smaller diameter, passes through either a water based radiator, or an electrical heater, plus also an air flow rate sensor and a temperature sensor too and then further reduce in diameter to fit either these 68mm pipes, or the 50mm diameter conduits.

This concludes this piece of work, putting everything we need underneath the flooring, in the Cloakroom, and we can now glue and screw down the floorboards at long last. We then can start building up the walls!

27 May 2024

Constructed Finishing Surfaces for the Walls in Great Room

We spent the last one-and-a-half weeks doing the work of building up the double layers of finishing surfaces for all the walls. Now that the floor is done, we can construct the various layers of the wall surfaces. We tackled doing the first base layer of 18mm OSB boards for this stage of the work in the Great Room.But, we need to make sure that we have put in the required conduits from the Utility Channels, going up to the lighting channel running around the top of the walls, going to the upstairs Gallery and so on. This included checking the hearing loop wiring that we had already fixed up above the doors and windows. It is a standard network cable, made up of four super-twisted pairs of thin wires and we wanted to make sure that a loop amplifier could generate a good strong signal, using this choice of cable. Normally, a induction loop that is fitted to a room is usually a single solid copper core wire but instead of having to buy this wire, we had loads of CAT5 network cable so we used that instead, plus also, this allowed us to experiment because, an electro-magnetic field is generated by two main variables, one is being the amount of current you can shove down the wire, or, increase the number of turns you have in the complete loop, or both, to strengthen the power of the magnetic field, hence making it louder for hearing aids users. So, we pulled out our existing hearing loop amplifier we had in one of our temporary bedrooms, and connected it up to our new network cable in the Great Room. Just by connecting the four twisted pairs together, so that it formed a single “wire”, worked just a treat. We even quickly tested the next configuration by joining up two twisted pairs together and then got it to go around the room twice before the signal ends back to the amplifier. That works nicely and it possibly sounded louder too. At this point, we accepted that the wiring was working just fine and we could continue with building up the wall surfaces, and bury and hide this network cable inside the wall. We won’t be able to replace it etc. It was a compromise between installing 35metres of black plastic 20mm conduits like we have done for the other rooms, or install the wire directly inside the wall and have the two ends dangling in our control box.

But first we nailed up a complete loop of 63mm CLS timber pieces near ground level that we deliberately left for construction later on, to make it easier to lay down the floorboards. The rail sits the top of the Air Channel which is 150mm high.

The next task, we noticed that our existing sixteen air distributors needed to be more secured so we went around anchoring them into place so they did not protrude beyond the CLS rails, avoiding being squashed when we put up the OSB boards, or fall backward into the wall cavity. We used little stainless steel screws to lock each plastic unit into place.

The next job is to put in the Air Channel backing strips, to guide the air around the room and float gently outwards. We use our stock of 6mm MDF strips to go around the entire room but we discovered that we were short so we went out to buy another sheet of MDF material and sliced it up into more 150mm wide strips.

We sealed both the MDF strips along the top and bottom edges and also the Air Distributors themselves so all the air will get sent out into and along the Air Channels and into our Great Room.

Great room air outlets

We also painted the lower 50mm black so no one will be able to sneak a look along the carpets and perhaps notice something pale lurking inside the wall!

We put up the top rail precisely so that our lighting channel is one aluminium strip gap under the slope of each roof. We had to do four sections of the roof, the “A” section which has a 32degree angle slope, then coming around the corner, is the “P” roof which is a 40degree angle inclination, which reaches the “O” section that is even steeper at 45degrees and finally, a short “N” section which is back to a 40degrees angle. We wanted to be able to slide in our lighting modules which will be housed in an aluminium extruded U-channel shape. It is quite thick walls so it can spread the heat from all the individual LEDs but these long units needs to be able to slide in and out for servicing, hence why we needed to make sure that the top CLS horizontal rail are positioned so that the metal U channel will slide in and rest on this CLS timber, after we have put on the wall boards.

We then went around putting in a layer of glass wool horizontally, between the wooden rails so it fills the gap that would exist behind the OSB board and reduce the hollow sounds of wooden walls. This glass wool is supposed to be 100mm thick, but it is never is. We believe that the manufacturers are not careful enough when they squash the output of their factory productions into those rolls, ready to be transported. The gap that we are filling is only 38mm deep and so we staple up these so-called 100mm thick wool strips and they swell out only about 30mm or 40mm beyond the horizontal rails. This is sufficient for our purposes and the wall boards will squash this wool down and provide some degree of sound adsorbing filler, to make the overall resonance sound of the wall more solid.

We then measured the two “control” boxes, one is the electrical junction box for all the cabling coming into the Great Room, as well as having a computer sitting there, looking after the various components that lives in this room, like lighting, sockets and speakers etc. The second cavity is over the doorway and that space will have the sliding door mechanisms and controls. Both of these boxes needs to have access panels and we will cut and remove the OSB sheet material later on after we have glued and screwed all the OSB boards up on the walls. Hence why we needed to measure the exact location and size of each box and its access hatch.

Great room Control panel location

Great room Door panel location 1

Great room Door panel location 2

One of the task we had to do before we got into putting up wall boards, was to re calibrate our two router machines that has tongue and groove cutters in them. We wanted to move the cutters further out of the machines so that they could cut thicker materials we may need to do in the future. But we needed to make sure that we set them exactly the same position so that the tongues and grooves came out in the same place as before as the walls coming down from the Gallery and the gable wall coming around each side of the Gallery, has already a groove cut into the bottom edge of the boards, ready to receive the new sheet materials later on. So, we readjusted the two routers so the cutters are now sticking out by 25mm, each tongue (and groove) are 8mm across at the widest point so in 25mm, there will be three tongues (or grooves). We have two machines because we discovered that these sheet materials, especially the OSB boards, are very slightly varying in overall thickness so you cannot just simply flip the board over and run the cutter on the other edges because that produces a very slight misalignment and does not bring the two surfaces to a smooth finish. So, years ago, we invested in two machines, one to do the tongues and the other one to do the grooves, without having to flip the board over at all. It produces a very very good joint that is very smooth indeed, and incidentally, makes a very strong joint as well, especially using PU glue too!

Here, at this point, we started putting up the first layer of wall boards, using 18mm thick OSB sheets. We started on the wall that divides the Great Room from the rest of the house and the two nearest rooms, namely the Kitchen and Bedroom One. It goes under the Gallery, but we needed to connect to the existing wall that is already fixed to the upper half of the Gallery. It was a bit fiddly but we made it, on both side of the Gallery and concluding in the far corner where we got our 4foot wide window. Next, we tackled the two short ends, also cutting the top edge of the OSB board with the appropriate angle, to match the slope of the ceiling as mentioned earlier about the aluminium lighting modules.

All our walls that goes up to the sloping ceiling are extra tall, measuring 2780mm or a bit over 9feet tall. That is just the wooden material itself, there is another 40mm gap at the bottom, and approximately 60mm gap at the top which makes the total height from floor to ceiling of 2880mm, or 9feet and 5inches!!
And to just finish this little point, the middle of the room stretches up, and up, and up to our mobile lighting unit, hanging at the apex of the vaulted ceiling, is very nearly 4800mm tall. We know this because we could almost get a standard length of CLS timber to stand upright in the middle! That is nearly 16feet!!

Anyway, we continued putting up the wall boards, having completed the two short ends, the “O” and “A” sections, and then we tackled the last long section that goes pass the Patio and Conservatory. We started at the doorway for the Conservatory and then worked back towards the “O” completed wall. It is much easier to put in the last piece of OSB board, cut down to exactly the correct size (and sometimes angle) and slide it into place by using the completed wall surface to slide along and force the joint nice and tight.

The other thing we needed to do special along this section, is the Dormer where we got our exposed rafters and gable triangle section of wall that defines the start of the Conservatory. We are wanting to mount our lighting modules, the same aluminium U channels, to slide in but this time, to sit vertically so the light output will shine upwards into the Dormer section. This meant that the top edge of the OSB board is shaped differently and also it is slightly lower as well. The aluminium channel will sit on this cut edge, providing a small gap underneath, approximately 15mm, to allow for our electrical cables to run pass and continue the circuits. We tested this arrangement by screwing up a small piece of OSB in various positions and holding up a piece of our fermacell plasterboard and tried to slide in the aluminium channel. We discovered that the vertical layers of fermacell plasterboard that we had fixed up a couple of weeks ago, and painted white, was very slightly causing the metal U channel to jam. So, we scraped the bottom edge of this vertical fermacell material, to increase the gap, and angle, to allow the metal channel to slide in. We used our trusty little surform “razor” tools to go along the entire length of this Dormer section. We have exposed the grey interior of the plasterboard again so we will have to paint that little bit again!

Great Room OSB Finished

Great Room OSB Finished 2

Great Room OSB Finished 3

This pretty much finishes the first stage of constructing the wall surface, the basic “rough” structural walls and they are now ready for the next stage, when we are ready, of putting up the fermacell plasterboard, shaping them nice and neat and painting them to the required colours, whatever that may be!!
But, for now, we are going to have a change of scenery and go back upstairs to carry on getting the First Floor rooms mapped out and some of the wall’s framework built so we can build things like the water header tanks and ventilation ducting etc. We wanted a change! But, We promised ourselves that we will get back to the Great Room and finish it off during the Summer and present a completed “show room!”

27 March 2024

The Floor Is Completely Filled and Reassembled Permanently

We spent the last two weeks in getting the flooring in our Great Room permanently fixed down at long last. We had originally laid the floorboards down a couple of years ago, but we weren’t ready to glue and fixed them down, because we needed to get the insulation put into the roof rafters and any rubbish pieces left-over, needed to be shredded and ready to put under the floorboards in the Great Room. The shredded pieces was used to insulate the room against the cold concrete foundation, but also to insulate against the heat that will be rising off the buried Energy Module we had under the concrete slab. It could reach 90°C and we didn’t want that kind of heat to flow into our Great Room, so we knew that we could put all the final rubbish and trimmings, under the floorboards and also protect ourselves from the very hot Energy Module.
The first thing to do was to empty the entire room of all the items we had stored in various corners and move everything into our Kitchen, so we could lift the floorboards up.

We started at the right hand end of the room, standing at the hallway door but it was locked into place by the tongue and groove system. Therefore, we had to move all the floorboard pieces towards the left end, by about twelve inches and keep each row of boards unconnected so we could move each row more easily. Another thing we did during this process, was to label all the individual piece with a row “letter” and “number” for each piece as the whole floor have been measured and laid down to fit the two doorways etc. We didn’t want to mix any up and run into trouble later on. So we pulled up three complete rows at the beginning, under the “O” window, looking out to our swimming lane at the back, and started filling in the huge pile of insulation boards pieces we had prepared from our time of doing the roof rafters last year. They are stored upstairs so we started chucking them off our Gallery, bit by bit!
We also had six “ton” bags of random odd sizes and pieces of PU foam rubbish as well and we dragged each one down the stairs and along the hallways to the Great Room.
And not forgetting a room full of “fluffy” stuff we had previously generated, being stored in our Entertainment Room downstairs!

The Floor Is Completely Filled and Reassembled Permanently

It is a slow job of laying down sheets of the insulation boards, skipping around air ducting, conduits, water pipes and so on. Building up the layers until we reach underneath the cross rails that is 63mm from the top. That is about 320mm to 330mm of cavity to fill up, depending on how thick the original concrete slab was. We first tried to fill the remaining space with fluffy fragments but we discovered that it is so light and “fluffy” (Of Course!!), that it would not keep still. We wanted to glue the floorboards down tight on the wooden framework and this fluffy stuff kept going everywhere!!

Starting to fill Greatroom floor

So, we switched over to Plan B, and laid down 100mm layer of glass wool over the fluffy stuff. This helped greatly to contain the fluffy stuff and made it much easier to vacuum the rails clean and get the glue down without any problems.

We used our spray gun foam to squirt a line of PU Glue Grade foam and then lay a floorboard on top. Next, we put in a collection of 50mm screws in each cross rail, to make sure that the 22mm thick chipboard boards will squash tight down onto the glue etc. For our first row, it started off at the left hand end, with a small piece, to bridge over the smaller spacing off the framework enough and the next board goes into the tongue and groove joint, getting knocked sideways to make sure the joint is nice and tight. This joint is also glued with more of our PU foam and this board is screwed down too. The final piece, is another larger piece, to finish the row. Each row always has three pieces but the first and last piece changes in size by approximately 600mm, to make sure that all rows do not have any joints aligning up consecutively, to improve the structure and strength of our floorboard generally.
We then carry on doing each row in turn, making sure that we knock each row tight into the previous row, by using a small piece of the same chipboard material that has a groove on it, plus a piece of CLS timber glued on to the back edge so we can thump it hard using a club hammer, to provide a reinforced tool, that slots into the tongue on the board and that will not damage it, while we are knocking each piece into place.

First row down

One of the jobs we had to do while the floorboards were up, was to seal the ventilation ducting to our wall distributor modules. The orange flexible 50mm conduit comes from a four way splitter and each duct goes off to various locations around the wall. Each end needed sealing up with aluminium sticky tape.
We got to the spiral staircase position, row number “G” and “H” and one of the thing to do was to reinforce the flooring, to make sure that this zone is strong enough to support the entire stair case, in one single small spot. We are going to have a pillar going up the middle of the spiral stairs and it measures 200mm across, which will be the main load bearing element. So, we built up the framework structure, putting in a zone of 400mm by 600mm of solid layer of CLS timber pieces, all glued together into a single block. This is then supported underneath by a couple of sturdy cross pieces using a wider 89mm CLS pieces and then finally, underneath those two pieces, we put in four legs down to the concrete floor slab, two legs under each cross piece. Everything glued and clamped together.
The final top surface was planed smooth, to remove excess glue and excess timber and made it level across neighbouring floor joists.

Reinforcing floor for spiral staircase

Staircase Reinforcement smoothed

We built this reinforced spot near a couple of existing legs so we have six legs in total in the immediate zone but there are a further two legs only 300mm away and also the floorboard itself will help spread the load right across all the framework and in turn, down to the concrete slab.One of the things we tried to do, is to run our shredding machine and get the output to go straight down into the cavity space under the floorboards but it proved rather awkward to generate a constant flow of shredded bits coming out of the machine. The machine itself couldn’t shred the foam and let the pieces fall naturally downwards underneath the machine, it was “fluffing” up all over the place! So, we tried to combined the large vacuum machine we had used before, but instead of filling up domestic bin liners of foam bits, we tried to connect a plastic conduit to the bottom of the plastic bin liner so that the shredded bits would fly down the tube and into the floor cavity. But, as soon as the bits started building up in the bottom of the black liner, it would block the output tube and no more fluffy bits would fly along the tube!! We abandoned that method and just took each lump of foam and fitted them in a collection of random positioning, mixed with fluffy shredded bits we already had done months ago. We also took many of these lumps and arranged them into larger blocks before putting more fluffy stuff in on top.
It was a bit fiddly but we got there!

We got the middle section where our Utility services runs across the room, heading at a diagonal for half the distance and then straight to the Conservatory doorway point. We will have air, electricity, compressed air, and hot and cold water coming in and out of this zone, so we needed to seal off the rest of the floor on either side, to stop an avalanche of fluffy bits falling into this section. So, we cut pieces of 25mm thick foam sheets and glued them vertically into place. The 100mm “purple” air pipes, four of them in total, were supported with lumps of foams and then held into place through these vertical barriers. All the other utility like water pipes was already fixed in a neat line coming through a sheet 12mm board of plywood.

Now, we tackled the last furlong of the race of filling the floor and gluing and screwing down the floorboards, to the left of the Utility service channel, by removing all the floorboards and heaping them up over on the finished side, stacked in the correct order.
We went around the edge of the room, nearer to the outside world, and put in a solid arrangement of narrow strips of foam boards so that we maximise the heat retention for the house against any temperature differences in the outside world.
This left the middle area of the space to be filled up so we spread out all our remaining chunks of foam rubbish, and poured in all the last of our fluffy bits. And finally, topped the whole lot with two or three layers of 100mm glass wool, depending on how much there was to finish off.

Starting on second half 1

Starting on second half 2

Second half nearly filled

Second half ready for floor boards

We then could get on with laying down the final rows of the floorboards, getting them glued and screwed down, all the way to under the window looking out to the Loke. The rows that went over the Utility Services, we had to mark very carefully to exactly where the floor support framework is located because we needed to know precisely the positions of the “hatches” that we will cut out after the floorboards have been glued together using our construction PU glue instead of the PU spray glue. We also put a layer of parcel sticking tape on the surface of the framework so any excess glue that may leak through the joints, won’t permanently stick the floorboards down to our wooden framework!!
The final job was to get our track circular saw and slice down 22mm (and a bit), to cut our floorboards to those hatch markings. It was a nervous moment because we couldn’t undo any of these cuts!! But, It Turned Out OK!!

Central Service area Hatches made

That concludes permanently building the Great Room flooring, at long last! We can get on in building the walls next!

9 March 2024

Dismantling Of Temporary Flooring

We spent the last couple of days dismantling our very lovely and useful temporary flooring, the false floor that allowed us full and safe access to our sloping ceilings in our Great Room, plus also the Dormer section with its exposed rafters as well, plus also access to our Skylight too.
The first job before we unscrewed anything, was to give the surface a thorough clean by sanding the OSB boards using our 9inch rotating sanding machine with a 40grit paper loaded on the head. It cleaned away plaster blobs, paint blobs, PU glue blobs and allsorts! It did a very good job!

Next, we removed the 18mm thick OSB boards, unscrewing each one at a time and carefully removing the sheet back to the Gallery and brought through the doorway and stacked up to one side, to be reused later on when we build the First Floor rooms. We had to blast each the screw heads to clear out any rubbish. We worked our way from the furthest boards around the Gallery, taking up the last few sheets right next to the Gallery.
Then, downstairs, we tackled the job of dismantling the forest of wooden legs using ladders, and then unscrewing the long horizontal wooden beams as well, including the horizontal rails we mounted on the walls too.
We put back these CLS planks back into our stock pile, ready to be reuse for construction of the framework of the First Floor rooms.

Temporary floor removed (1)

Temporary floor removed (2)

Temporary floor removed (3)

Temporary floor removed (4)

That concludes the massive and complicated job of getting the upper half of the Great Room finished including putting in the foam insulation, vapour barrier, plasterboards, painting, veneer on rafters and building of our lighting gantry plus up inside the Skylight too!!

27 February 2024

Exposed Rafters Covered in Veneer in Dormer Section Over Conservatory

These last few days had us covering our rafters we have exposed, seven of them, situated over the section where we have our Conservatory, like a Dormer sticking out of the roof and will eventually join to a glass structure that will be our Conservatory.
We never intended to have exposed rafters in our original design but the idea came along when we were building up the ceiling in the Great Room and we wondered how to “fill” in that Dormer section and it came to us that we could leave it open and have exposed rafters, to make it a talking point for the room, especially if we also installed discrete lighting to light up inside the Dormer as well.

This means that we need to cover up the exposed rafters, which were never designed to be visible and rather ugly to look at. We found some natural looking wood effect veneers and bought three sheets, each measuring 3000mm long by 1300mm wide, and only 0.7mm thick.
They are resin coated paper, just like the original Formica products are.
The rafters are 400mm wide, plus 11mm for a strip of OSB strip that has been fixed to the front to cover up a rough edge, which might have made it difficult to stick our veneer to.
This means that we can get three strips off a sheet, measuring 433mm wide. One of the sheets came damaged on both edges (we got a 50% discount on the price and that is a bargain as we can easily use the major middle portion and only lose about 5%!).
We then found an old roll of backing wallpaper we had loads of, in our garden shed and this provided a stiff thick pieces of paper to place on each rafter and fold the ends at where the rafters disappears into the surrounding plasterwork. Our first attempt didn’t work out too well but we were able to reuse the cut veneer on another rafter, after trimming it down so the angles became closer together against the wall and ceiling.
We joined all our track saw segments together to form a single 3.5metre long track and that allowed us to cut the sheet into the 433mm strips. We also changed the circular saw blade to a fine tooth one, having lots of tungsten carbide teeth on it, to minimise the force on the cutting process.
Another aspect of our first attempt that we forgot to recognise, is that the paper template needed to be put on backwards because we are cutting the veneer strips with the face side downwards, to also minimise any chipping on the cut edges as the rotating saw blade always comes around and cuts upwards.
We had measured rafter number 3, on the right hand side of it and therefore our first attempt was able to go over to rafter number 5 but on the left hand side instead .. phew!
Our second attempt, we thought that we were being careful enough but we discovered that one of the ends didn’t align very well, and unfortunately this time, we could not use it on the other rafter because it turned out to be too small as well. This meant that we needed to slice up our third sheet for another 433mm wide strip. Oh Dear! But Thank Goodness that we bought a spare third sheet!!
We change the method of placing the thick paper up on the rafters and this time, we used the straight edge to align it along the bottom edge of the rafter, stapled it on to the rafter, making sure it was nice and flat. Then, we bent the two ends carefully one at a time. This time, it was much more successful – Phew!

Paper used fror templates

As you can see, we now have a large pile of backing wallpaper in a heap!
We now have a collection of veneer pieces, ready to go on the seven rafters, ranging in size from two tiny little exposed bits of a rafter, right up to the longest single rafter in the middle of the Dormer.
Next, is to glue them into place. We are using a brown universal “stick-all” glue that has proven to be very good at sticking many types of materials together. So using a fine tooth notch trowel, we coated the sides of the rafter with a complete covering of the brown glue, pressing the glue hard into the wooden surface, which we had blasted with our compressed air to get rid of as much dust as possible. We carefully placed the veneer piece into place and then pressed hard to work the glue into the veneer as well. Each piece still got it protective plastic film stuck on so we could press hard with our fingers and occasionally leave behind little blobs of brown glue. Mind you, we had to be very careful not to touch the surrounding “beautiful” white surfaces and alas, we have accidentally did leave tiny blobs there too, which we dealt with later on.
We made sure that the veneer pieces were big enough to overlap the bottom edge of each rafter because we had noticed that some of them were not completely straight. This meant that we wanted to trim the veneer so that is follows the ever slight bend of the rafter as closely as possible. We also ran a bead of the brown glue behind each edge of the veneer and used a small scraper to carefully fill in and smooth the surface.
We bought a trimming router bit that is a solid tungsten carbide blade that has been grounded into a sharp spiral shape, so it actually will slice the thin veneer some what like a pair of scissors would do, making sure that it cuts downwards into the veneer.

It went very well indeed using our smallest router machine and finished off the trimming with our wiggle saw that has a very fine teeth blade and also the blade is designed so it is flat against the surface you wished to slice to. We then sanded the front facing surface to remove any excess glue and ever so slightly wavey edge.

Rafter sides laminated

The final task was to cut narrow strips to go up on the front of each rafter. The rafters are approximately 63mm wide, but just in case they varied, we sliced 75mm wide strips off our remaining 3metre piece and covered the seven exposed rafters, the two smallest ones on the outside, measuring 500mm on the front, then the next two inwards measuring 1200mm, then the middle pair measuring 1750mm and finally the single central strip measuring 2400mm. Then, we had a small left-over piece where we used a pair of heavy duty scissors to cut the top end at the correct angle, making slight adjustments until it fitted nice, and transferred this little template to the strip being fitted to that particular rafter. Then carefully, measured the exact length, added 10mm and cut the bottom end. The extra 10mm then allowed us to slide the front covering strip sideways so that it overlapped both sides and ready to be trimmed later on. We proceeded to do the other six strips and the last one, the centre one, had a more complex shape for the top end to cut, but we managed it.
And finally, we cleaned their back sides with methylated spirits, put a thin layer of the brown glue all over it and then rolled each strip onto the rafters, to dry and cure overnight.

The final step was to trim them using our router again with that fancy cutting bit and very carefully cut the tops and bottoms where router couldn’t reach, using the wiggle saw. Then, using a metal file and a fresh fine sanding paper stuck to a length of CLS timber, we rubbed the edges to take off a tiny bit of excess material and make it all smooth. We pulled off the protective cling film and doubly made sure that the edge was nice and neat.
The final job was to scrape off blobs of the brown glue that we had managed to get on our beautiful white wall by using a razor blade and then paint over any remaining colourations.

Dormer rafters complete 1

Dormer rafters complete 2

This complete the coverage of the three visible sides of all seven rafters and turn them into “look-alike” solid wooden plank of timber.
This concludes the work on getting the upper half of the Great Room completed and now we can dismantle the working temporary platform and start work on the lower half of the Great Room!!

20 February 2024

Great Room Ceiling, Lighting Gantry and Gallery Wall All Prepared and Painted

Since our Christmas break, these last few weeks, we have been working on the upper half of the Great Room, including getting the Gallery’s wall constructed with all its gaps (ready for shelves and cupboards), above and below the Utility Channel plus the doorway too.
Since we had finished the Skylight and didn’t need the use of the mobile platform anymore, we constructed the remaining wall framework in the middle of the Gallery, between the metal legs that are holding up the Skylight. We put in two more “gaps” for 600mm wide shelving units and cupboards, alongside a standard 800mm wide doorway that gives access to the First Floor room beyond. The wall surface was built up to match the rest of the wall that goes past the Gallery and down to the Great Room, forming an internal gable divider to the rest of the house.

In the meantime, the fermacell boards that got put up before Christmas, had all their joints thoroughly sanded using our trusty old belt sander with a base plate fitted that allowed us to remove any slight ridges formed between sheets. We decided that because we had a solid OSB backing layer all over the ceiling, we didn’t have to “Tongue and Groove” the thin 10mm thick edges of the fermacell boards, only relying on the PU construction glue in the joints to hold everything tight together. This meant that there were a very slight variations in how flat we managed to staple up each sheet and the joints had a tiny steps in them. So, we came along with our belt sander and using a 40grit belt, went around “ironing” these steps and smoothed out the whole surface.
The Dorma section was similarly done but had to be done by hand as the machine was too large to fit inside among the rafters!
As that was happening, the staple holes and the now smooth joints were filled with good quality decorators filler. The initial wall, the “A” section, was done using a standard spatula tool but then had the idea of using a piping bag so we raided mum’s baking supplies for those disposable plastic bags and nozzles! It was a very good idea as we could squirt in the filler into the staple holes, after we had blasted them out using our compressed air, and leave a little sausage of filler proud on top, to allow shrinkage. On the first section we were doing, using the spatula, discovered that the fermacell plasterboards were so absorbent that they sucked the water content out of the filler hence shrinking it down in the holes, causing us to repeat the filling again. But, using the piping bags, it was much much better, in both time and efficient use of the filler.

A roof of blobs

P Roof filler dots

The intersection angle between two roof surfaces were trimmed and also smoothed with heavy use of the sander and manually using a surform shaving tool. We did the “M” and “N” long sloping junction, as well as the Dorma section over the Conservatory, showing off the exposed rafters. These were also filled in with filler especially around the exposed rafters so it comes out all in a straight line in both surfaces as they meet together.

Then came the messy job of rubbing down all the filler! Fortunately, our orbital sander had a vacuum port, to suck up 99% of the dust. We had another lovely tool to help us with this task, a 9inch rotating disc sanding machine attached to a long handle grip, with the vacuum tube running up the handle. This made quick work on sanding down all the surfaces and only needed hand sanding around the edges and corners.
Oh yes, we filled in the three corners between the sloping rooves, by using a piece of 110mm diameter drain pipe as a shaped spatula, to create a smooth curved surface to smoothly sweep around from one surface to the next.

Initial sanding A

Initial sanding O&P

The Gallery section also had all the staple holes and joints filled in, including rounding the corner on the three edges around the doorway, and then all smoothed down too.
The next task was to drill large holes for our lighting units we are going to have in the two wings of our Skylight, the flat strips that are coming perpendicular out from the Gallery wall and joins to the Skylight. We bought a sharp tungsten carbide teeth circular cutter measuring 95mm in diameter and proceeded to drill a set of eight holes staggered across the surface on each wing.

Gallery Wall Built

We also lowered our mobile Lighting Gantry unit and turned it upside down on four trestle tables so we could finish with that as well. We first installed the aluminium U-channel bars, which will contain strips of LEDs to shine down the slopes of the ceiling, all the way around the edge of the lighting module. Then we surform the fermacell edges that overlapped the U-channels so that both came together with a smooth graceful line. While we remembered, we stuck down a line of masking tape inside the aluminium channels, at the base so that we had still a bare strip of metal after we had painted them white, for the LEDs to have a good thermal conductivity to aid keeping them cool and long lasting. Most LEDs products these days are over driven and have very poor thermal cooling, and unfortunately, these lamps have short lives. We do not wish to suffer this fate so our LEDs will be under driven, well cooled and hopefully long lasting- fingers crossed!
Anyway, back to the gantry module, we then sanded the flat surface to make sure the joins are smooth and any screw points that pushed a little hump out, is all cleared away and left flat and smooth. Then, we drilled a further twenty-four holes, equally spaced out all the way along the module, only having to adjust very slightly their position twice to avoid internal metal framework. We now have plenty of downlighters to help illuminate our Great Room!

Gantry Spot light holes drilled

The other thing we did to the lighting module, was to take one length of the aluminium U-channel and cut a very shallow groove inside the metal surface, near the front so we can slide in a short length of plastic diffuser in the section that will look over the Gallery under the Skylight. We didn’t want to have the LEDs fully visible, poking their bright pin prick light sources at you, and also to avoid being able to see the electronic control circuits as well.So we were getting closer to the actual painting at last. We double checked everywhere, put in any filler in missing holes and scrapes, installed a little conduit under the cupboards on the Gallery for future lighting options and then gave the whole area a good and thorough vacuum and sweep. Also washing with plain water all the painting surfaces with a floor mop to remove any dust, sanding a couple of missed “bumps” along the way!
We then covered up the naked exposed rafters with masking thin plastic sheets, to protect the wooden surfaces so they can have the “pretty” veneer stick nicely to them .Finally, we can actually proceed to the painting at last! We got out our paint sprayer and got our 10 litre of white emulsion paint. It was quite thick and the sprayer said that it should be diluted with water, to make it thinner. It recommended a minimum of 10% of water and that the paint dribbles off smoothly and doesn’t form “bumps” or “tracks” in the paint before settling down. We ended up diluting it to about 12.5% before it looked ok. We had two spray nozzles and the wider fan nozzle, doing 50degrees wide fans, seem to be making a slightly bumpy surface on a sheet of insulation board. We switched over to our second nozzle, which produces a finer and narrower 30degrees fan, seem to be better.
So we proceeded to spray the ceilings, starting on the “A” section and working around clockwise. We managed to cover almost all the ceiling surfaces before we ran out of paint. We were surprised that we couldn’t get the 10litres to last long enough to cover all the ceiling and walls. The instructions on the paint pot claims that it should cover about 130 square metres and we estimated that our Great Room ceiling and Gallery is about 70 square metres. It looks like that we had put it on too thickly. Then, we spotted that the paint pot also said that they recommend diluting their paint 25% if one was using a sprayer. Oh Dear!!

Paint spraying equipment

In the full daylight on the following day, we also noticed that we had missed sections. We were painting in the late afternoon and we hadn’t had enough lighting. We are learning!!

Another side-effect we have discovered, is that the fermacell plasterboards, which are made up of newspaper pulp mixed in with the gypsum, goes “hairy” when we do heavy sanding on the surface, like when we had to smooth out a joint. The paint has soaked into these hairy bits and produces a textured finish. But fortunately, we also discovered that by just simply sanding the surface with 240grit paper, it knocks off the hairy bits completely in one single swipe of the sanding paper. So, we went around the whole room with our large circular sanding machine, loaded with 240grit paper and got everything nice and smooth. This is good news and rather pleasing that it came out very nicely indeed.

The next discovery, was that we had missed several staple holes, staples that were not fully hammered below the surface and various gouges that revealed themselves by the high contrast colour of the white paint. We went around with more filler and touched up these spots.

Our new tubs of white emulsion, this time buying Dulux branded paint and discovered that their domestic grade paint is much thinner than the previous one we were using. We only needed to add 10% water to get it running and dripping quickly, as recommended by the sprayer people. We then used the first nozzle, the 50degrees fan and proceeded to finish those area we undone and we had to stop early to allow all that lot to dry and harden.

On the following day, we went around sanding smooth all the blobs of filler we had put on, gave the Gallery wall a gentle rub to nock off the hairs and even now, we keep coming across a missing staple hole once or twice. There was a case where we had accidentally put on a strip of the fermacell back to front and the manufactured grid pattern was visible. This was the narrow strip up inside the doorway on the Gallery, so we diluted our filler mixture and applied a thin layer all over its surface using a wide bladed scraper. And just to finish off our morning’s work, we proceeded to spray the second coat of “Pure Brilliant” white paint everywhere, using well over another 15 litres of paint. It seem that we cannot help putting on more paint than what the tin says. We just shrug our shoulders and it is not a great expense, considering the cost of the underlying material we had already invested in.
After lunch, we rubbed down that doorway surface, which came out extra smooth and gave that a coat of paint. While we were waiting for the second coat to dry, we remembered that we needed to cut two pieces of the aluminium U-channel, for the two Skylight Wings, to provide more lighting output to shine down the slopes of the ceiling. We took the metal channels and cut the grooves to hold the plastic diffuser strip and drilled a cable access port plus screw holes to fix the bars up and stuck down a strip of 19mm wide masking tape, like before, to maximise thermal transfer of heat being generated by the LED strips. Finally, we gave them a spray of paint as well.

On the morning, the surfaces were again very gently sanded, to get rid of more hairy patches and after lunch, use our finishing coat of white paint, this time using a brighter Absolute White colour, which claims that it will reflect 90% of the light back into the room. The colour of this Absolute White is definitely “whiter” than the previous paint which is called Pure Brilliant White and it says that it has a 80% reflectivity of light. This paint has a very very very slight yellow tinge to it, especially comparing against the new Absolute paint we had put on.

Upon the following day, the surfaces are looking much much better and we are definitely winning against any more hairy patches showing up. In the sunshine, we could see several patches of a slight difference in “Whiteness” so they got an extra squirt from the spray machine. And, after lunch, those patches have disappeared and it is looking very good indeed. We have decided that the job is finally done!

All painted (1)

All painted (2)

All painted (3)

There had been a great deal of learning involved during this particular task of building, preparing and finishing the final “plaster” layer for the ceiling and walls. We now know what to expect, what to do, when we repeat this kind of work again on other parts of the house, and it should be easier and quicker.
The next job to do, before we dismantle the temporary flooring, is to cut and shape our wood effect laminate sheets and cover the exposed rafters at the Dormer section over the Conservatory.

15 February 2024