Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 10)

The first fix electrics completed yesterday – 3 days late.  The plasterers started today. 

The first job is to boarded out all of the walls, ceilings and partitions.  Once this is done, the walls and ceilings will be plastered.

Upstairs insulated plasterboards (50mm insulation on a 12.5 plasterboard) is used on the ceilings.  This is on top of the 50mm insulation that has already been installed between the rafters.  The boards are cut to exactly fit the purlins leaving them exposed in the room below.  This is a very time-consuming job and these ceilings alone are going to take the best part of a week to complete.

The partition to the bathroom has been boarded. The inside of the partition is packed with isolation (for soundproofing) before the other side is boarded.

The rafters are going to be covered but the purlins will still be largely expose through the plasterboard. Since the purlins are odd shapes (some odder than others), all of the boards have to be cut individually.

The exterior wall is still to be boarded with insulated plasterboard, but we should get this done tomorrow.

The builders took a couple of hours this morning and coursed out all of the stone that was delivered yesterday.  “Coursing out” means sorting the stones into groups that are all the same height, i.e. stones that can be used to build a single course.

For each stone, you identify the front face and then measure it’s height with a tape measure.  For some reason, this is all done in inches.

This makes building with this sort of stone much quicker as the labourers aren’t hunting around searching for the right size stone.  It also means that you might not start a course of a particular size, if you can see that you don’t have enough stones.  You can get the stone yards to supply the stones already sorted and bagged according to their size.  However, many builders prefer to do it themselves.

It took the builders a couple of hours to course out all the stone that was delvered yesterday. It is sorted into piles according to the height of the stone (with it’s front face forward).

All the stones in these rows have a height of 7.5 inches. There is a clue on the brick in the background.

With the plasterers starting tomorrow, the materials arrived today ready for them to start. There are 120 boards on the right. This is about 80% of what will be needed – we will order the remainder once we know exactly how much more we need.

The insulated plasterboard is for the inside of the exterior walls (remember these are solid walls with no cavity) and for the first floor ceiling. The insulation in the yellow bags is for the inside of the partitions (for soundproofing) and in the ceiling on the ground floor (to ensure that the heat rises from the underfloor heating).

There are 50 bags of plaster here. With rain forecast for tomorrow, we can’t leave it outside overnight.

The plasterers are due to start tomorrow and much of the materials that we have ordered for them turned up today.

Unloading them from the lorries wasn’t too much of a pain (it was all on palets), however, it had to be manhandled into the house – with 150 sheets of plasterboard and 50 bags of plaster, this takes time!

Still it is all indoors now ready for tomorrow.

We are using a concrete pump to get the concrete to where it needs to be.  The pump is much bigger than I thought and I can only imagine what the neighbours think!

It will take around 20 cubic meters of concrete. This equates to 3 concrete mixers full of concrete.

The concrete is pumped from the concrete mixer and using a large boom arm is deposited in the correct place.

The concrete is pumped into each of the rooms. One by one. It is levelled then by hand.

The concrete pump puts the concrete in roughly the right place, but will still rely on old fashioned manpower to get to exactly the right level.

Each of the rooms is filled to the top of the concrete blocks and a steel paddle is used to flatten and level the concrete.

We are going to lay the concrete slab tomorrow and are getting everything ready.  The damproof course has been laid down and the steel mesh has been laid on top.

The concrete mixer and the concrete pump is all booked for the morning.

The damproof course (VisQueen) and steel mesh has been installed ready for the concrete tomorrow.

All looks a bit of a mess, but once the concrete is laid, it will look a lot tidier.

It seems strange to get excited about a flushing toilet, but when you have had to put up with a plastic toilet for the last three months, it makes all the difference.

We have connected up an inexpensive toilet pan and cistern to the newly installed drains.  This means we now have a flushing toilet on site and we are starting to re-use the septic tank.

This drain is going to be the last manhole before we get to the septic tank. The blue pipe is the repaired water supply.

There is going to be a parapet wall between Jo’s study and the stairwell.  This will be stud work that is plastered with an oak handrail.  There will be an oak upright post in the middle connected to the king post truss above.  The stud work was installed this weekend.

There is going to be a small parapet wall in Jo’s office. There is an oak handrail to go on the top, but for now we have installed it for health and safety reasons.

The view from the stairwell. The gap in the middle of the parapet wall is to accomodate an oak post that will connect with the king post truss above.

The base of the hole that we have dug for the ground loops needs to be fairly flat and free of any large stones.  This is achieved by what is called “tracking in”.  This means using the metal tracks on the 14 tonne excavator to crush the stones by driving up and down.  In our case, the sandstone underneath is fairly soft and seems to respond well to be “tracked in”.

After the bottom has been tracked in, around 100mm of sand is spread across the bottom of the hole.  This prevents the pipework laying directly onto any large stones potentially damaging the pipes.  Once the pipes are installed, another 100mm of sand will be put on top of the pipes before the subsoil is reinstated.

The hole at the moment is around 1m deep and covers around 750 sq m.  This is only 2/3 of the area that we require for the ground loops.  Once this hole has been covered over, we will dig underneath where the spoil piles are currently located.  This will be approximately another 400 sq m.  If I have got my maths right!

Even so, with a 750 sq m hole, it took around 40 tonnes of sand to cover the bottom.  At the moment, it is starting to looking like a beach (and there aren’t too many of those in West Yorkshire!).

The ground in the foreground has still to be “tracked in”. This means using the metal tracks on the excavator to crush the stones in the bottom of the hole so that they don’t damage the ground loops when installed.

The base of the hole that we have dug for the ground loops is pretty rocky. The way to deal with this is to drive a 14 tonne excavator up and down. It’s metal tracks crush the stone underneath it.

Just a case of going up and down in a 14 tonne excavator until all the stones are crushed.

The ground loops will be put on top of the sand. More sand will be laid on top of the pipework before the subsoil is reinstated. This prevents the pipes from getting damaged.

We have used around 40 tonnes of sand in a hole around 750 sq m to get a depth of (roughly) 100mm. It is a lot of sand!

Before the new concrete floor slab can be laid, the plastic drains need to be inserted into the foundations. There appears to be a lot of them!

We were hoping that the new concrete slab for the extension would go down this weekend.  However, the excavations for the ground loops has distracted us (big time!).

The view from the spoil heap of the new drains going in.