Roselea

Category: Delivery

All the deliveries we get.

  • Fermacell and Plasterboards Arrives

    Yesterday and today, both at 9am, saw the delivery of another major supply of building material, this time, the finishing wall and ceiling surfaces for our house. The fermacell is a high quality sheet material, made of gypsum mixed with recycled newspapers. The paper is shredded into tiny strands and mixed with the gypsum and compressed into a very flat 10mm uniformly think board, measuring 2400mm by 1200mm. We ordered 430 sheets which we calculate should cover all our walls and ceilings for all the ground floor and first floor rooms. We also ordered 96 sheets of the more traditional plasterboards, because it is less than half the price of fermacell and we are wanting to use the plasterboard sheets to make a heavy sound-absorbing layer in the construction of the first floor flooring. We will lay two sheets on top of rubber underlay or perhaps thin glass wool that will get compressed down by the weight. The main benefit is to isolate the flooring surface from the ceiling joists so much of the contact and airborne sounds will not penetrate down into the ground floor space.
    The first morning saw the arrival of five pallets, all carried individually down the Loke on a neat little diesel powered fork-lift truck that came with the delivery lorry.

    Fermacell and Plasterboards Arrives

    Moffett-Forklift-in-action-delivering-Fermacell

    Then, we put one of our brand new tarpaulin sheets (we bought them ten years ago!), measuring 9metres by 14metres and folded it in half so we had 9metres by 7metres. This covered our first two stacks just nicely and we put on two wooden sheets over the top to protect the plastic tarpaulin from being clawed by wood pigeon and neighbour’s cats or even our resident fox. Everything was then strapped down to secure it against the wind.

    Fermacell and Plasterboards Arrives

    First-days-delivery-all-wrapped-up


    The second morning was a manic rush because the wonderful driver (Not!) arrived at the crack of dawn at 8am and we weren’t even dressed and one was in the toilet! O Boy!
    He came with our final four pallets of more Fermacell boards, each pallet having 60 sheets on board and the whole pallet weighing 2.1 tons ! To make it even more manic, we were having heavy rain showers frequently so we quickly dashed to get our second tarpaulin up and covering the second pile. We found two more 11mm OSB boards to weigh it down and protect the plastic, like before. We left it like that for a couple of days until it mostly stopped raining and we could go back to finally strap down the stack and it can survive long term.
    Fermacell and Plasterboards Arrives

    Second-delivery-of-fermacell


    Anyway, we have all the building material on hand now, to pretty much finish all the interior surfaces, on both the ground and first floor, which we hope to have done some time next year. We have avoided having to pay any future price increases, and amazingly, the fermacell sheets were at a very reasonable price of about £16 per sheet now, compared with £13 when we bought loads for the Garage ten years ago. Not bad!!

  • Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    We started at 8am today to get everything ready for the arrival of forty pallets of insulation foam boards that have been rejected by various factory or reclaimed from various building projects like a hospital having two more floors fitted so the old roof was ripped off and it had 200mm thick polystyrene foam boards. The lorry with its trailer arrived at 9am and parked up on the main road at the top of our Loke. The pallets were jammed on and needed our mini-digger with our fork-lift tongs fitted to the arm and hauled off each pallet. But, the pallets were too uneven and were not securely wrapped into a tight bundles, they only used cling-film material and only went horizontally around the layers of foam bits and pieces and didn’t wrap up and over to make sure they were secured into a square block. They measured approximately 4 feet square and about 4 feet tall and they were stacked two high on the lorry. But, some of the pallets had moved and shifted around during the journey, making them difficult to unload. We even had several pallets that has fallen sideways off in the extra trailer module so we had to reassemble a number of pallets and strapped them up with our own fabric fasteners.
    We had our wonderful middle neighbours coming out to help us, helping to load two pallets on our large flatbed trolley and transporting them down the Loke and dumping them all over our garden, driveway and at the bottom of the Loke as well, while Stephen unloaded every pallet off the lorry and putting them a little way down the Loke. It was 12:30pm before we had finished that first stage of this massive task. The Loke was well and truly covered in pallets!

    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Loke-blokced-with-insulation


    After lunch, we continued in moving two pallets at a time on our trolley and stacking the pallets around outside our house, in corners and all along the side of the Garage.
    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Its-quite-a-long-trek


    The Loke eventually became clear and open for vehicles again at around 4pm. We tidied up some of the bits and pieces, put back our mini-digger and restored our fencing again, and call it a day at around 5pm. It was a long day!!
    Then on the following day, we then moved the remaining fourteen pallets off the bottom of the Loke, with the marvellous assistance of our immediate neighbour, to break apart the pallets and move the individual pieces of foam boards and stacked them on top of our first row of pallets alongside the Garage and around the corner at the back of the house.
    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Insulation-all-pliled-up-1

    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Insulation-all-pliled-up-2

    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Insulation-all-pliled-up-3

    Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

    Insulation-all-pliled-up-4



    We tied down the great big long bundle of boards with a rope and also placed heavy concrete blocks on top, to make sure none will blow away if the wind gets up.
    The last five pallets that were dumped in front of our house, were moved around to the alcove section at the back of the house, but only after we had dismantled the wooden platforms we had there from when we were doing the Solar Panels and moved mum’s plants.

    It is now all tidied up and the Loke and front of the house is looking good again. We now finally have our source of foam boards to go up inside our roof rafters to complete the building shell of of super thick insulation. We will resume that particular task when we have finished construction and commissioning our battery storage and installed solar panels on the P Roof.

  • 85 Sheets of 11mm OSB and 50 Sheets of 18mm OSB boards

    We had a delivery of additional sheet materials to add to our store of 11mm and 18mm OSB (oriented Strand Boards). We could calculate what we have left to construct for both the remaining downstairs rooms and also upstairs plus the flooring. We counted what we already had and we estimated that we needed another 50 sheets of the 18mm thick boards and another 85 sheets of the 11mm thick boards. They came on two pallets and we unloaded them over three days and put them all in our sheet storage room a.k.a Bedroom Two!

    85 Sheets of 11mm OSB and 50 Sheets of 18mm OSB boards

    OSB-Delivery

    85 Sheets of 11mm OSB and 50 Sheets of 18mm OSB boards

    OSB-Moved-to-Bedroom-2



    Mind you, the builder merchant did forget 1 sheet of the 11mm board and they had damaged the bottom sheet of 18mm with their forklift truck (or someone did). We will send them a request for a credit to be added to our account.
    85 Sheets of 11mm OSB and 50 Sheets of 18mm OSB boards

    Damaged-OSB


    The prices has risen considerably in just 18 months, we paid £17 for each 18mm type board last time and now we had to pay £23 each!! A 30% rise!! A few years ago, we only paid £13! Crazy World We Live On Now!
    So we are going to order all our standard plasterboard (which is not going on the walls but under the floor!) and Fermacell (an engineered high performance plasterboard) in the next week or so and beat the next price rises that are due in September.

  • Flexible Twin Walled Plastic Conduits Arrives

    At last! The arrival of the twin-walled plastic conduits tubing has occurred today this morning! But not all of it! We ordered three different sizes: 100mm, 63mm and 40mm diameters but there seems to be a country wide shortage of the 40mm size and our supplier has been waiting to see if any would come in their own warehouses. But after we had made enquiries and explained to us the situation, they split the order up and sent us the two larger sizes with the smaller one pending, maybe in a week or so if they can source the conduit from Europe.
    So we now got two 25metre rolls of orange of the 63mm (internal size of 50mm) and one roll of 25metres purple 100mm (93mm internal) conduits, ready to construct our air circulation system, the 63mm one to help supply fresh air to all four walls in each room (under the flooring) and the 100mm tube to take away the old stale air inside the ceiling.

    Twin-wall-duct-arrives

    Twin-wall-duct-arrives

    Twin-wall-100mm

    Twin-wall-100mm

    Twin-wall-63mm

    Twin-wall-63mm



    The smallest size, the 40mm one, we would like to use to guide the electrical cables around the obstacles like windows and doors, connecting each sections of the Utility Channels running around the room, but if we cannot get this type, the twin-walled conduits, we will have to find an alternative design and perhaps one option is to find a supplier of vacuum tubing or maybe the cheaper end of water hoses.

  • Stair Lift Motor, Gearbox, Chain and Controller Arrives

    This Monday morning saw the arrival of the electric motor, the gearbox, chain, cog wheels and the electronic controller. All this equipment is going into the Stair Lift unit to drive a moving platform system for our stairs. This device will help people and objects climb to the first floor and back again. We always wanted a stair lift design that is built into the fabric of the house, rather than a ugly bolt-on solution that virtually everyone else has to have. So we went for a flat-bed platform design as oppose to a chair, thus enabling a person in a wheelchair to have independent freedom to go upstairs at their own convenience and also allow the transport of larger and heavier items to be lifted up (or down) to the first floor.
    To this aim, we designed and measured the power and torque needed to lift 250kg at a speed to give a journey time of 5 seconds. The weight has to include the mass of the platform and its support framework and wheels, we couldn’t design in the counter-balanced weights to cancel out the platform because there was not enough room to have another moving solid ballast hidden and safely out of the way of fingers etc. But the electric power to drive the combined load is only for an occasional use and the cost will be minimal in the long run.

    StairLift

    StairLift


    The motor is a 3-phase AC 240V 1.1kW type that bolts into a heavy duty 15 to 1 ratio gearbox, a worm drive design that has the built-in advantage of providing a brake to hold the platform when electricity is lost to the motor but we do also have other safety measures incorporated into our design too. The gearbox will drive a 25mm thick shaft that will go out to the two cog wheels which in turn will drive the 11metres 3/8inch chain which in turn is attached to the platform.
    Lift-motor-and-gearbox

    Lift-motor-and-gearbox

    Drive-cog-and-chain

    Drive-cog-and-chain

    Shaft-bearing-and-idler-cog

    Shaft-bearing-and-idler-cog


    The electronic controller, called a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD), which is a high voltage sine wave generator and produces three separate outputs to drive the motor, with a variable frequency range from 1Hz to 60Hz. This changes the rotation rate, whilst maintaining full torque.

    Variable-speed-motor-drive

    Variable-speed-motor-drive


    We did some electrical tests but we discovered that the electrical filter design in these VFDs has a bad side-effect to the regular domestic RCD safety switches we have and kept tripping them. After some research on the web, learning about this design philosophy which is all to do with suppressing electrical noises being generated by the inverter and the motor, so unfortunately these industrial class of equipment needs a direct connection to the mains electricity on their own circuit and fuse breakers. We don’t have one of those which means we need to hire an electrician to come and add another consumer unit to our mains switchboard before we can carry on testing the motor etc.

  • I-Beams Arrive!

    In the morning we prepared an area to store the beams next to the house.

    The lorry arrived at 1:25pm with the 66 special I-Beams on a open flatbed vehicle, in two packs covered in plastic. The driver thought he could reverse down our Loke and save a lot of effort but after attempting to come in both directions and failed to get enough room to straighten up. In fact, he couldn’t hear the shout to stop and unfortunately bumped into the garden wall of the house flanking the entrance to the Loke and knocked a section down. We excused the driver and we said that we would repair the wall ourselves (we confessed to the house owner who is a nice chap).
    So the lorry parked straight on the main road and we unloaded the I-Beams one by one off the back and placed them into the Loke to minimise the unloading time and then let the driver go off.
    It was 2:50pm at this point, so we had a half an hour rest plus to quench our thirst too!
    Resuming at 3:30pm, we got our trolley loaded up with 22 pieces and started down the Loke. But soon discovered that the dolly module was struggling to get over the little ramp and was creaking and wiggling alarmingly. We put on four more giant clamps to help stiffen up the load points and carefully got over the ramp.
    That was exactly a third of the total and it was clearly overloading things. So we reduced the quantity and put only 15 pieces for the next three trips. The ratchet straps were doing a good job of keeping everything tied down and stopping the load slipping.
    Once we got the load down to our place, we transferred it over to our temporary storage location just inside the fence (we released the wire mesh and rolled it up and pulled out two posts) and place each I-Beams into an ordered piles on two 2by6 planks supported by two concrete blocks.
    After unloading the final 15 I-Beams, we covered it all up with a fresh tarpaulin as the material they supplied was ripped rather badly during the unloading process.

    I-Beams Arrive!

    All-66-beams

    I-Beams Arrive!

    Beams-wrapped-up



    We finished everything at 7:30pm and we were knackered!!

  • Preparing for the Arrival of 66 Timber I-Beams

    Monday is the big day with the arrival of 66 special timber I-Beams, the last three days have been spent preparing for this happy day. So, we adapted our large flat bed trolley to help the job of transferring the very long I-Beams down the Loke from the main road. They come in a range of lengths, the majority being ten metres long but several are eleven metres, some 35feet and weighing up to 66kg each!
    The trolley had a single upright plank mounted on, with a small gap underneath to allow for a ratchet strap to lock down the jumble of I-Beams tight to the trolley when we haul it down the Loke. We estimate that it will take three separate trips to move all the 68 pieces, the total weight being over two tons so we decided to split it into three separate loads.

    Preparing for the Arrival of 66 Timber I-Beams

    Beam-transport-trolley


    Next, we made a little dolly module to help support the other end of the long beams. This module is using two solid castors bolted to another one of our old trusty two by six planks and an extension tower built upwards to bring the level to match the main trolley.
    Preparing for the Arrival of 66 Timber I-Beams

    Beam-transport-dolley


    Because we were on the main road, which is quite busy, we made two alert signs using a couple of our trestles and clamped on to the front face a shiny insulation board with yellow and black stripe tape around the border to divert the traffic away from our Loke entrance to allow us to swing in these massive lengthy objects, walking into the road itself when we take them off the lorry.
    Preparing for the Arrival of 66 Timber I-Beams

    Traffic-blocking-board


    Also during this last week, we constructed a new slicing machine, see Extra Large Sliding Saw and repaired one of the tyres on the large trolley that had developed a leaky valve and we replaced the inner tube. It was a quick leak and we wanted to ensure that the trolley stood up to giving us the proper quality of work without having to pump up the tyre every 10 minutes.

  • Glass Wool for External Walls Delivered

    Our Glass Wool insulation we ordered last week has arrived today. The delivery truck parked in our local Tesco Express (after asking the staff inside the shop for permissions) and came down to confirm that we were expecting this order. There were three pallets plus two loose packets. But fortunately, he had his own diesel powered fork-lift truck onboard so all we needed to do was to bring our medium trolley to collect the two odd packets.

    So in our delivery, we received ..

    • 24 rolls of 200mm thick
    • 12 rolls of 150mm thick
    • 8 rolls of 100mm thick

    The driver placed the three pallets on our driveway and then we dismantled the pallets to move the packets (they had four rolls in a packet) into our house and parked them in our hall way where our planned stairs will be one day.

    Glass Wool for External Walls Delivered

    Delivery-of-Glasswool-for-the-walls


    This material is to be used in finish filling up the external wall cavity to both provide some extra sound absorbing effect and fire protection for our Polyurethane foam boards already in the walls. The different thicknesses were available because the amount of volume varies, with a range of 150mm to 200mm space in the upper section and 100mm gap on the lower half of the walls.

  • 63mm CLS Timber Ordered and Arrived

    We also been enquiring about prices for CLS timber, the 63mm by 38mm size, again to cash in before the prices goes up. We were lucky to find two of our local suppliers capable of offering a price of £1 per metre against £1.30 (on average) by other builders merchants. We snapped up all they had in stock (from Norwich and Great Yarmouth) and on Saturday and Tuesday, we had two deliveries, we now have another 630 4.8metre planks. The previous price we paid six months ago was 97p per metre so that is very good, especially in this climate of popular demands!

    63mm CLS Timber Ordered and Arrived

    Lots-of-CLS-delivered


    We have got the two pallets sitting alongside the Loke at the moment, in front of the house but it won’t be too long before we will need them all. In fact, that quantity will do the majority of all the internal structure of the ground and upper walls and floors. We may need a little bit more later on if we had generated more waste than we expected. But we are almost using every bit of timber everywhere, whether it is just 500mm long, right up to the full 4.8metres. We are planning to tongue and groove several lengths together when we are doing the horizontal framework which will allow us to use many of the cut-offs.
    It is all about minimising waste, even if it costs more time. That is our philosophy…

  • Arrival of Eleven Pallets of Timber Sheet Materials

    On a few days from Friday 5th March to Thursday 11th March, we had the delivery of a load of sheet wood material of various types. All the material is earmarked for our internal structure of our house, doing walls and floors and a little bit of ceiling as well. We ordered it all now because there is several price increases coming because the world of timber is becoming too popular in building houses and high rises using wood instead of bricks and mortar? couldn’t they wait another year for us to get ours done first?? Phew!
    So we ordered the following sheet materials ..

    • 280 sheets of 18mm OSB 3 boards
    •  30 sheets of 11mm OSB 3 boards
    • 170 sheets of 22mm thick flooring grade ‘Tongue and Groove’ chipboards
    • 150 sheets of 19mm thick flooring grade ‘Tongue and Groove’ chipboard

    That is about 15 tons of wood stuff!
    We organised the bottom of our site to store these eleven pallets into four main stacks, each one is covered over with tarpaulin. We had already several tarpaulin sheets but these were lightweight ones and we decided to invest in much heavier duty alternatives, deliberately paying out a premium ‘insurance’ price, to protect our money and our building material while we get on with the other structural jobs that needs to be done first before we can use these sheet materials.
    Approximately, the chipboards will be used first, specifically the 19mm thick ones, to cover the first floor joists when we have finished building the framework on the ground floor and installed the first floor joists. Then once we got all the utility conduits mapped out and inserted, we can nail up the 18mm thick OSB boards to form the walls in all our rooms. Finally, the other thicker chipboards will be used to construct the suspended floors downstairs. The odd 11mm OSB will be used to cover up the roof rafters around in the storage triangular voids up on the first floor to hide away the insulation and rafters to make a neat finish.

    Arrival of Eleven Pallets of Timber Sheet Materials

    Lots-of-sheet-wood

    Arrival of Eleven Pallets of Timber Sheet Materials

    A-wall-of-OSB-6-Tons



    We estimate that we will save about £1000 on the future price increases and we spent about £150 on the better quality tarpaulin for long-term weather protection thus a win-win for us!