the stairwell

As you can imagine, the hardest part to board is the stairwell. Here it is before:



The window is frosted and looks over the gloomy leylandii, so we have to make sure there are plenty of downlighters. That means Keith has to cut holes in the boards that go on the ceiling - and cut them very accurately.
The 2 back bedrooms are still the only ones with natural light, so one is our office and the other the workroom.
This week we dismantled the boards put across the stairwell for safety, boarded the walls up from the ground floor, then put in fresh batons and temporary boards to make a stable platform for us to work on, including lifting the boards to the ceiling.
We did take time to eat at our local - only 100 yards from our new home. New landlords Sam & Dan have gone into partnership with an excellent chef and long may it continue!
That was on Thursday when it rained a lot, so we were delighted to see our new guttering was working very well (the downpipe isn't in yet!)



Most of the week was lovely, and a number of people had taken the opportunity to canoe down the brook at the bottom of our garden, and there were a lot of narrow boats navigating the Nene as well.

Bricklaying is no further forward, as we waited most of this week for the scaffolding to be altered.

A further note on gloves: Axminster where we buy a lot of the tools we need, do gloves in a size 8 - 2 sizes too big for me, but still a much better fit than the standard size 10s!

Noggins

In general building terms, noggins are the things that go between the beams & uprights of a timber framed house to fill it in. In Bedfordshire - and other parts of the country this used to be brick and you can still see some lovely houses built this way.
For us these days, it means hundreds of pieces of timber that we put between the beams & uprights. Some of them are to enable pipes or cables to be run through them (1,680 metres of cabling so far & still counting) some will be to take the weight of things like cupboards.
At the moment we are concerned with the ones that we hang the Fermacell boards from.

Most of them are cut to the exact size to fit between the uprights, but some have to be cut especially which is my job (see "carpenter's apprentice"). They then have to have holes drilled in them to take screws - also my job, this is one in the jig ready for drilling:

And here are some that Keith has put on the ceiling:

Now the Fermacell board is lifted up to the ceiling:

And Keith uses his auto feed screwdriver to fix the board into position:

The boards have to have adhesive between them, so my next job is to scrape off the adhesive, check the screws. ensure the join is smooth and then use filler in all the screw indents.

3 rooms done so far: next week's job is to board the stairwell before the stairs arrive.

I would also like to add a note that none of the tools fit into a woman's hand easily. Makita just e-mailed me about their hand-held power drill that they have coloured pink for breast cancer awareness month. Good for them for donating £5 to breast cancer charities for every one sold, but I would be so impressed if they brought out a drill that I could hold in one hand.
One of the local stores is astonished at the number of "gardening" gloves I am buying - that is because all the builders' gloves are too big!

boards & bricks

This has been a busy week.

Outside, John & his team have been laying bricks.
Inside, we have been putting up Fermacell board.

Our first bricks:


John lays the first quoin ( corner decoration)

And Ali continues down the side:


Here is our hoist to get the boards upstairs (£4 on Amazon for the pulley & £10 at B&Q for the cord). Keith's rather piratical look is about keeping the dust out of his hair (although he keeps calling it a "do-rag" having read too many American thrillers)



Here is our first boarded room, although we have yet to "finish" it.



Thanks again to Sheffield Insulation (James & Tracey) for their prompt delivery of acoustic insulation for the internal walls & ceilings.

The swans continue promading serenely:

The carpenter's apprentice

Fermacell

As I have written before, this is a recycled board that takes a heavier hanging load than conventional plasterboard and is easier to finish.

Chris came to give us a tutorial on putting it up, and here he and Keith are cutting it and putting up the first one - many thanks Chris for your help. 6 down, 534 to go!


We were interested to hear that it has been used in the Olympic Village and in the basketball stadium. We have tickets for the basketball, so may be seen inspecting the walls as well as watching the game!

indispensables

The heron isn't indispensable, but I thought you would like a picture! Not a good one, but at least recognisable.
We continue with the cabling, but today I thought I would write about the necessities of a build that I have to carry everywhere:

The site diary is A4, with a waterproof cover (yes, I have left it out in the rain) and we write everything in there - and then have to try to decipher the handwriting several weeks later.

The handbag: this gets little mention in the books & magazines, but is an absolute necessity.
Made in sturdy canvas, and bought on a Spanish market, it has lot of pockets for the following:
The collection of delivery notes & invoices that I gather as the week goes by.
Small metre measure on a key-ring (useful to check sizes in shops)
Pens, and markers of all colours, for marking positions of appliances, cables etc.
Mobile phone, with our whole lives programmed into it.
Camera (so you can all see the nice pictures!)
Baby wipes, very big ones.
Hand cream (good stuff, to use after leaving the site in an attempt to ward off “builders’ hands”)
Lip gloss because standards must not slip below a certain level.
Discount or reward cards for all the major DIY stores
Looped on the handle is my trusty Buff rainbow headband, to keep my hair out of my eyes.

The builder's apron:
Based on those macho toolbelts, this was run up in an hour out of some spare denim, also with many pockets for:
Scissors
Stanley knife
Pencils & markers
Tape

The box:
tea, coffee, biscuits & apples!

another big green bogey

Many of you will remember our family camping trips. Our van, or later, MPV was loaded up with all our equipment, and there was always a big bundle on the roof, covered with a green tarpaulin. Our kids, with their usual delicacy, used to call this "the big green bogey".
Here's another one, these tarpaulins cover 7 pallets of Fermacell boards.






Each of these boards weighs 20kg. and they come in pallets of 60. On Friday we moved 2 pallets into the house, by putting 6 onto a trolley, then unloading them in piles (yes, that's a total of 2,400kg!)

The nice people at Fermacell are going to give us a tutorial on putting them on the walls & ceiling. We have chosen them because they are made of recycled material, take a heavier hanging load then plasterboard, and do not need plastering in the usual way.