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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.