Thursday 20 February 2014

More stuff to walk on

Last week I continued with the sub-flooring and cable tidying. Our bedroom and office is done, as is our son's bedroom. Quite pleased.

Main bedroom

Main bedroom through to office (need to build a wall!)

Second floor bedroom.

Having got all that done, it was finally time to chose the final places where light fittings will be on the first floor. So, big drill bit in place, the final decisopns were made. This means we can continue to floor the level above.
Took a while to decide on light placement in the hall.

Living room light will run on suspended cables.
This week I've been on the road, so nothing has happened since last Saturday, and now have an inflamed shoulder joint, so that's the end of working for a few days at least. Sometimes a rest is needed...

Sunday 2 February 2014

Of posts and beginning sub-floors

There's been good progress the past couple of weeks, though slow at times due to taking care of lots of small things, tidying cables and such. But here are the highlights.

The lath work on the cellar 4 ceiling was completed pretty fast, and it will now stay like this for quite some time, as upstairs is more important. But at last, after over a year, I again have a single place in the house to keep tools and supplies, instead of having to shift them around all the time to make room.


Using one of the beams we chainsawed out of the attic bathroom, we popped a post into cellar 4 to support a sagging beam. Some bright spark in the past built a wall on top of it (the wall between the bedroom and office above), rather than on top of the 25cm thick beam just beside it. It sagged a little over time, causing a crack in the wall above, so we raised it a bit and stuck this nice bit of solid oak under it.


Now that the wall above was stabilised, I could finally complete the floor under-construction, which of course ran over the beam we pushed up, and build the final two sides of the services shaft. This will continue up to the next floor, and had all the heating, water and waste pipes already in there for a long time. Makes a nice pattern with the styrofoam insulation filling the voids.


And as we'd bought 140 sheets of OSB last weekend, it was high time that we got some sort of flooring down, so we're not forever beam-hopping. The idea here is to use OSB as a sub-floor so we've something to walk on when doing the plastering and finishing work. The final floorboards will go over these, sometime this year, I hope. I got the office complete yesterday...



... and rearranged the spaghetti of the bedroom wall heating pipes. Had to do some excavating to get a suitable path down to the distribution manifold in the cellar, but once these are insulated and tied down, I can seal the floor of the bedroom.


I think we'll cover all the OSB with plastic sheets, as when we're putting new clay plaster on the ceiling, it's going to get messy!


And for a small bonus, I began the sub-floor at the back of the living room. I can't get too far here, as we have to sister a beam under this floor, and swap out part of a beam towards the front of the living room before that, but it's progress!


I must admit, I like doing the flooring. It's easy, fast, and you see a big difference. The mountain feels a little less steep this week.