Updates

As we enter the 3rd week of January the plasterboarding is close to completion.  Brian OSullivan & the lads have done an excellent job in fixing the plasterboard throughout the house.

All the rooms apart from the downstairs bathroom are now boarded and it is the window & door openings that need to be finished.  There are also a few small areas which were left open to check for leaks, fit showers etc which have to be finished also.

Hopefully the plastering will start next week and we’ll be skim coated before the end of the month and ready to start the final fixes, plumbing and flooring.

Finally, just before Christmas the somewhat elusive Shane McMahon made it onsite and began fitting the battens to the upper level of the house.  He only managed to get a days work done before the holidays but now that 2013 is here, the weather is dry and the days are getting longer (slightly) we are back on track.

The battens have been fixed to the exterior.  All the windows and areas where the timber will overlap the plasterboard have been flashed with a waterproof membrane and the window sills are installed.

Tuesday 8th January was a gorgeous, bright and dry day and the first side of the building, the south elevation over the kitchen was clad in the larch boards.

The siberian larch boards have a tongue and groove profile with a 12mm shadow gap and.  They were sourced from Corell Timber in Athlone and are fixed to 2×2 treated battens using a special decking screw from SPAX in stainless steel.

With the start of 2013 the plasterboarding of the house is now well underway.  Upstairs in the house the ceilings & walls are now largely complete.

We have to leave a few areas of the ceiling and walls exposed as there are some persistent leaks.  These are coming in through the walls of the house from the parapet and upper level of the house which is still uncovered.  Hopefully the timber cladding & parapet will seal the exterior and the leaks will stop and the timber can dry-out.

Until then the guys are working away on the stairwell and moving downstairs to do the interior walls.

Just before Christmas we managed to get all the plasterboard stacked inside the house. Scaffolding was erected in the living room to allow access to the walls and ceiling in the double-height space.

A number of internal walls had to be adjusted by adding extra timber battens to fit pipework and toilet cisterns. Brian and the guys managed to get most of the battens fitted before the Christmas holidays which left a few smaller jobs for us to do over the holidays.

All the steel columns in the living room had to be cleaned, holes filled, welds grinded down and then sanded & primed.
A frame to hold the bath and some studwork in the ensuite bathroom around the sink and mirror also needed to be made.
Over the holidays we also did a cleanup around the house and site.

All the plasterboard, acoustic insulation and timber cladding have arrived so we’re ready to get cracking on the next phase of the building.

With a forklift onsite we stacked the palettes of plasterboard and timber … and rapidly covered them in plastic sheeting as the rain was pretty constant.

Waited around for half the day for the final delivery of insulation but it is all there now and ready to go.

 

Friday afternoon, the hardener has been applied to all the concrete floors and it is starting to take shape. The Concrete Concepts guys will be back to carry out the final polishing and finishing once the walls have been plaster boarded and plastered.

Next Monday is a big delivery day with the timber battens and larch cladding arriving on site, plasterboard and wall & ceiling insulation arrive too.

We’ve opted for a 100mm cladding board using Siberian larch and a shadow gap profile. Supplied by Corell Timber from Athlone. The larch has a fractionally shorter lifespan (40 years) when compared to cedar (60 years) but we’ll not worry about that now. We also like the paler colour of the larch and it will silver nicely over the next few years as it weathers.

With all the plaster board on site and the insulation for the internal partitions and ceilings we can begin boarding-out the house just before Christmas. Hopefully we will be starting the plastering in mid January.

The timber stairs also arrive next week but I don’t think we will fit them until January at this stage.

Between the completion of the first fix electrics & plumbing and the slabbing of the plasterboard, we’ve a week to copmplete the grind and first polish of the floors.

Concrete Concepts are back onsite and loaded with machinery for the grinding of the floors.  These giant grinding machines scour the surface of the concrete, removing the top couple of millimetres of concrete and revealing the stones and aggregate that make up the surface of the floor.  Our concrete mix uses a 100mm local limestone chip which has a blue-ish tinge to the grey stone look and smaller flecks of white, black & brown.

It’ll take a few days to grind all the floors, fill any of the small pits on the surface and apply the hardener but hopefully by the weekend we’ll have a good idea of what the floors are looking like.

Day 2 and grinding is completed in the kitchen/dining and utility & pantry rooms and filler applied to all areas. This filler is a mix of dust from the concrete itself and a special mix which fills all the tiny pits and hollows in the ground surface. A finer grind after the filler has set will produce a smooth surface ready to take the hardener which will be applied.

Day 3 and the grinding continues in the bedroom, bathroom and service room.

We have chosen to finish the exterior of the ground floor of our house with an Aquapanel Cement Board System.  This is a type of special plasterboard with a high performance render applied.

You can see more on the Greenspan Aquapanel system here.

It is well suited to our Kingspan frame system as it is lighweight, weatherproof and easy to maintain.

The work is now underway with the first delivery of Aquapanel Boards, beading, basecoat and mesh strips.  The entire ground floor has to be battened-out with 37mm vertical battens and all windows, doors have to be edged before the boards are fixed.

We plan to use a mineral render and finish which should give us a long-lasting & brilliant white finish that we can wash down every year with a power hose to keep it clean.

The week was very busy with the completion of the HRV system  (a few final pipes and joints to be made) and the first fix plumbing.

We’ve had the services of Kieran Linnane for our plumbing and his group of lads turned up on Thursday and managed to fit most of the hot & cold water pipework and connections for the toilets in just one day!

The fun was getting the toilets, cisterns and sinks on site in advance so that the plumbers could get the correct positions for the sanitaryware.   We managed to get most (but not quite all) of the bits and pieces in place and hopefully the rest will arrive in the next few days so that they can call back and finish off.

The plumbers will be back again once the walls have been plasterboarded and we are ready to fix the sinks, toilets and showers.

Thursday 22nd November and the installation of the Heat Recovery Ventilation System has commenced.

Windy City Comfort from Monaghan are the installation company for the MHRV system.

All the pipework for the ducting , connectors and the 2 units were delivered first thing on the 22nd and the slow process of mapping out the layout began.

There were a few hurdles to overcome with a couple of points in the layout drawings not working out on site.  Beams and bracing in the wrong places but Aidan McCarra was able to find solutions and soon enough the  pipework was taking shape.

It’s going to take about 4 days to complete and then we wait until the house is finished and plasterboarded etc. before the system is commissioned and tested.