Category: Phase 4

Today, under another glorious and hot sun, we finished off the final Door vertical framework (the Utility Room Back Door), which came out as 1041 mm to 1042 mm wide, in various places from top to bottom, this door will be a single extra wide style to allow better access for bigger items to get into our house.

We then carried on with the next job of putting the Lintels over all the Windows and Doors. We measured and cut to size each opening, the two layers of 89mm CLS timber, glued and nailed together and also nailed down onto the vertical legs. There were 15 openings all to together, and we made sure that all of them were within 1mm to 2mm of being horizontal, putting in solid wooden spacers where necessary to make adjustments.

Door-sub-Frame-completed-with-Lintels

Window-sub-Frame-completed-with-Lintels

Tomorrow, we will first measure the long diagonal rafters that forms the valleys, hips and ridges of our roof, so we can double check against our drawings to know exactly what we need to order from the specialised timber manufacturer, the man-made laminated veneer lumber called LVL. This material is basically lots of thin layers of wood, just like plywood but 200mm thick and can come up to 12metres long – wow! After that piece of survey work, we then carry on with putting in all the vertical short studs that connects the lintels to the Top-Plate, and once this is done, with one or two other little jobs, we then can continue putting up the second line of cement boards!!

On this lovely warm Monday, we carried on adjusting, gluing and fixing into place the remaining six window subframes going around the Great Room, the Kitchen and lastly the Entertainment Room. We had our framing template which is exactly 1708 mm wide so that all our 6 foot width windows will be the same. We then did the two 4 foot windows (the side of the Great Room and the Utility Room) making them both 1098 mm wide and finally, we did our only 2 foot window in the side of the Front Door extension and that measured 480 mm wide.

Last-window-framed

The next job was to cut and frame the three doorways. They would need a height such that the top of the doors is the same as the windows so the calculations for this resulted in pieces of the timber to be 2252 mm long. We pulled out 3 lengths of our treated 89mm CLS timber and chopped them down to that size, but we noticed one of the timber being rather warped so we fetch’d another length from the pallet! We drilled 4 fixing clearance holes in each of the timber pieces, a clearance 8mm hole for the 100mm concrete screw and 3 x 5 mm holes for the ordinary 80 mm wood screws.

Taking the 6 pieces out, along with the SDS drill, spirit level, screwdrivers and glue etc. We started with the Great Room-Conservatory French style doorway and fixed and fiddled the two vertical timber pieces into place. It took quite a while for doing all of it, like drilling the concrete holes, getting the spacers in and out and finally getting both sides vertical. We then measured the gap or width of the doorway which turned out to be 1491 mm to 1493 mm in various levels from bottom to top.

We moved over to the Front Door and repeated everything again and the measurement this time came out at 1495 mm to 1496 mm wide. We were not concerned with this slight difference because these two doors are different styles and both are unique.

Comservatory-Door-framed

Tomorrow, we will finish off the third and final door, the Back Door, and move on to the next job of putting in lintels over all the openings, both windows and doors, all 15 of them!

Today, after our lost day caused by the wet weather yesterday, we resumed our work of putting in the two vertical posts that forms part of the Window frame. We continued on around the building doing each window in turn, putting in spacers to align each post to be as straight and vertical as possible.

Then just before lunch, we went around measuring all 12 windows and recorded the width at the bottom and at the top. We wanted to know what was the smallest  width and whether we had managed to get the framework vertical too.

The results are:

• The smallest width is 1709 mm
• The largest width is 1718 mm
• Some windows are not as vertical as we wanted

So after lunch, we designed and made a template frame that represents the exact width and height of a window. This template was made using 100mm wide strips of the 11mm plywood sheet, all screwed together with diagonal bracing and horizontal ones too, to make a very square and rigid template that is exactly 1708 mm wide between the two parallel vertical edges.

Window-framing-jig

We will use this template, which is now our master reference for our 6 foot windows, to go around each of the 6 foot windows and adjust them so the vertical posts are truly correct and also exactly the same width. This operation is the Real Thing this time around, meaning that we now applied the construction glue to the cement board and the timber to set it in place permanently. We managed to do three windows (Bedroom 3, Bedroom 2 and Bedroom 1) before we stopped for the day and weekend.

On Monday, we will continue around the Great Room, then the Kitchen and the final 6 foot window on the Entertainment Room. Then we will do the 4 foot windows (2 of them) and finally the single 2 foot window.

We had more rain overnight so we decided to leave off doing the last 2 sections of External Wall until the afternoon session. So instead, we started on doing the Window Framework for our 12 windows around the house. Each Window has two vertical posts measuring 1790mm high which will then have a horizontal lintel (made of two layers of 89mm CLS timber) sitting on top of these side posts and two further shorter vertical posts to bridge the gap up to the Top-Plate that is running around the whole wall.

We first went around to double check the absolute level of each window sill using our spirit level and most were quite flat and level with only some having a 1mm per metre angle error. That is very good!

So we fetched in 10 more lengths of the treated 89mm CLS timber from our pallet and then chopped them down into the required length in our workshop.

We started on the Utility Room’s window and using plastic spacers, combined in different layers to provide the necessary adjustment to ensure that both posts were as vertical as possible. These plastic spacers comes in 3 different thicknesses: 1mm, 3mm and 5mm. You can then combine any of these to make any thickness from 1mm upwards.

We then carried on and did Bedroom 3’s window, around the corner and did Bedroom 2’s window to finish before lunch.

Window-side-frame

Spacers-in-window-frame

After lunch, we had the delivery of our new sump pump to replace the worn out old pump. So we  spent the next couple of hours installing the new one, including replacing the drain hose pipe with the new 32mm (inch and a quarter diameter) flexible pipe, connected from the pump itself and travels across the concrete and out Bedroom 1 window to then connect to some rigid plastic pipe to go to our rain soakaway downpipe. We will bury this rigid pipework into the sandy soil to keep it out of the way of our building work.

We had about 15mm of rainwater from the rain showers we had yesterday and the new pump quietly did the job of shifting about 3500 litres of rainwater in about an hour flat! So much better than the old one!!

The only problem we discovered was that the water would drain backwards once the pump stops so it would fill up the sump hole and switch the pump back on which of course would empty it and .. repeat the cycle again! We didn’t realise that the new pump come without a non-return valve that the old pump had. We couldn’t use the old one because it was designed to fit 38mm connectors (inch and a half) and the new pump takes 32mm (inch and a quarter) connectors, so we had to order on the web a smaller non-return valve.

The-new-sump-pump

New-pump-in-the-sump

Finally, we got to finish off the first line of the cement board on wall “D” and wall “E”. It took only another three sheets to complete the full circuit of the External Wall.

Walls-D-E-Lower-boards-

Tomorrow, we will carry on doing the Window framework and making additional adjustments to the width of the grouped sized windows, for example, we have 9 nominal 6 foot wide windows, 2 x 4 foot wide ones and 1 x 2 foot wide window. We want to make sure that all these three common sizes are all the same so we can order the same sized double glazing  units and not worry about each window having to be a unique size.

We had an interrupted morning with the rain coming in, quite a consistent downfall, averaging about four millimetres per hour, for four hours, making a lake of water collected inside our house. Having discovered that our automatic water pump had started making odd groaning and mechanical noises, it seems that it is already worn out only after a few months of operation. So we decided to buy a much better quality pump and a larger bore water pipe to transport the water over to the rain soakaway inlet.

So We put aside the morning to allow the wood to dry off as much as possible before we started work after lunch.

We resumed on along the front of the building with wall “A” (the Great Room and Kitchen), did the little sticking out piece of the extension which is wall “B” and then along wall “C” (the front door and Entertainment Room).

Walls-A-B-Lower-boards

Wall-C-Lower-boards

Tomorrow, we hope to get the final two wall sections done (wall “D” and “E”) and we will be back to where we started. After that, we will do the framework for the doors and windows, putting in the lintels etc. before we put on the second layer of the cement boards.

Today, we resumed our task of nailing up the 10mm thick cement boards onto our External Wall framework.

After bringing all the tools out for this operation, namely, compressed air work tank, nail gun, glue gun, battery circular saw, cold chisel, two routers, electric cable, ruler, spirit level and several other bits and pieces, plus a heap of nails and a clutter of glue tubes too! We went off to load 10 more sheets on our large trolley and wheeled the stack around to the space between the Garage, Swimming Lane and the corner of the house. here we put another one of our portable table to keep the tools handy nearby for the cutting the tongue and grooves edges.

Tools-for-doing-boards

We proceeded to finish off the last section on wall “H”, turning the corner to run along wall “I”, “J” ..

Walls-H-I-Lower-boards

Walls-J-K-Lower-boards

And then along wall “K” which is a longer stretch going past Bedroom 2 and running parallel with the swimming lane and finally turning to do wall “L”.

Walls-K-L-Lower-boards

You may have noticed that each of the corners has overlapping sticking out boards and this is deliberate as we will trim off the overlap later and make a neat sharp corner.

On Monday, we will continue on wall “M” (Bedroom 1), around onto wall “N”, wall “O” and wall “P” which are all part of the Great Room. But first, we must adjust the verticality of wall “N” and “O” before we nail up the cement boards, or we will be in trouble – smile!

 Today sees the start of the cement board skin being mounted on our External Wall framework. But first, we did some measurements of all the corners and also transferred the ground height reference point to inside the house .

New-height-reference-point

As the photo shows, we first duplicated the Ground Reference point that we have on the Garage wall and put another one on our Steel Legs (specifically Leg number 5. we nearly forgot to do this task before we completely blocked the laser beam by having our new External Wall assembled with its skin! So this morning, we cut two pieces of 11mm plywood to exactly 160mm tall and 130mm wide and positioned the pair on the Steel Leg so they are on either side of the leg and the top edges are exactly at the Ground Reference mark – 1 metre above Ground Zero and or the level of our floor inside the house and all the footpath and doorways etc. We glued the plywood pieces in place and clamped on while it dries.

Then, we went around measuring the height between the bottom-plate to the top-plate at all 14 corners and wrote down on our plans so we will be ready to cut and slide into place those complex composite Corner Legs. We also went around and seeing where we needed extra posts to support the cement boards and only 2 extra ones were cut to size and glued into place on wall “E” and wall “H”.

After that, we double checked the spacing between the Wall Legs at places where the Top-Plate has joints in it and making sure the spacing was 612mm between centres of the two legs either side of the joint. We adjusted several of these around the perimeter.

Finally before lunch, we wanted to see how vertical  the wall we are going to start putting the cement boards on, so using the spirit level, we looked at all the legs along wall “H” (the one nearest the Garage) and the wall only needed a slight amount of pull to straighten it up. We did this by employing our canvas strap ratchet device and anchored one end at the end of our swimming lane where we have some sticking up steel re-bars and the other end tied on to the top of the nearest Leg. This wall only needed an adjustment of about 10mm pulled towards the swimming lane.

After lunch, it was the long preparation job of setting up the two router machines, one with the Tongue cutter and the 2nd machine set up with the Groove cutter. We discovered that it makes it so much, much better joints if we had two machines and we cut the boards on the same side with the two machines, to produce either the tongue or the groove. It  is expected that many of the manufactured building material have some variations in the thickness as we indeed discovered  with our cement boards today!

So starting at the beginning of wall “H” at the corner with wall “E” (near the Loke and Driveway), we started the whole process of mounting the 10mm thick cement boards to form the skin, by first cutting a tongue along one of the long edges, and then slicing off specific lengths to go from the corner to the first window, then covering the small gap between that window and the back door (all part of the Utility Room). we left a good overlap of 75mm on both the windows and doors so we can assemble the window and door inner framework later on and glue and nail them on the back of the sticking out cement boards. All our cement boards are being glued and nailed (the nails are hot-dipped zinc galvanised, ring-shanked (has serrations on it) and coated in wood glue for maximum long life proof against rust and good stable grip in the wood)

We managed to get as far as the 2nd window along wall “H” (belonging to Bedroom 3) before it was “knock off” time! There was a lot of experiment and learning what and how to do the various steps (the routing of the edges on the cement boards, gluing, nailing etc.)

The-first-few-cement-boards-in-place

But we are learning quickly and will be able to speed up over the next day or so.

Tomorrow, we will continue to mount the 1st line of the 4foot high cement boards right around the building, before we do the 2nd line and then finally the tiny 3rd line right at the top of the External Wall!