Slabbing Out

This week's main job was to start the 'slabbing out' of the upstairs rooms. All the house's exterior walls except one will be lined inside with thermal insulated panels. These come in varying thicknesses for use in different situations but all (put simply) comprise a layer of dense hard foam stuck to a sheet of plaster board. There are other layers of membrane and metal foil but you get the picture - you stick them to the wall plaster-side out and skim-plaster them like you would any other wall. Your room is then up to 4 inches smaller in every direction but a whole lot warmer. We are using 4 inch thick on our outer (stone) walls, and then 3, 2 and 1 on various other bits.

Obviously these sheet bury the walls, so the walls have to be sorted out and made good first, and any cabling and water pipe run round (first fix) before you fit them. The walls are sorted out with cement if need be, or with PVA stabilizer (e.g. Unibond) if they are crumby-dusty. Next the walls get a slap of a pale blue gritty glue called Thistle Bond. Thistle Bond is a bit like Copydex in that it sticks to everything and everything sticks to it. It gives a good grip to the wall. You then mix up 'bonding agent', white powder and water, whisking it with a big whisk on an electric drill in a bucket till it is the consistency of whipped cream. You need to "splap" this onto the wall every 18 inches or so leaving a meringue-peak sticking out from the wall. Your insulated panel, cut to size and bevelled or mitred at the edges, then gets pushed, whacked and bullied down against the lumps of bonding till it is glued tight against the wall.

The bonding sets like plaster after a few hours. There are also special big headed 'nails' called anchors or mushrooms to help hold it in place if you need to. You do all your big flat walls first - the sheets are 4 foot by 8 foot, then you fill in all the gaps and do all the messing about round window reveals. Our walls are 50 cm thick so the reveals are nice and deep. Some people would just line these with wood or plaster board, but we are using thinner insulated panels. The panels are all copies of sheets invented and marketed as "King-Span", but these are made locally and branded Quinn-therm or Bally-therm. They are quite expensive. The 4 inch thick sheets for example, are €40 each, but the theory is they save their value in heat energy over the years.

Deefs

Preparing Floors

Some pictures of the various stages of preparing the floors for the final concrete. They are in no particular order. First is Dad using the whacker plate to whack down the 2nd 4 inches of 804. Another shows Sparks finding a level in the 804 using his laser level and a piece of hi-tech string. There is actually a gentle fall of about 2 inches front door to back wall. We have kept this rather than introduce a silly 2 inch step out of the kitchen. There are a couple too of the 6 inch thick insulated sheets which sit on a level of blinding sand on top of the 804, with the damp proof course in between. The DPC is also 'radon proof' as they all get a bit excited about radon gas leaking through your floors and giving you cancer. If it's coming out of the ground, we can't see why it isn't also in the garden and will get us where there's no DPC, but hey, when in Rome.

Deefs

Taking Deliveries

Thursday should have been a relatively easy day. Had the delivery company taken note of Sparks's warning about narrow lanes, sharp turn into the driveway etc, they might have showed up in sensible lorries. As it was we took delivery of most of the building materials for the project in 2 hits, one on a full size 40 foot artic which assumed we'd have a forklift, the other on a 28 foot Hyab (flatbed lorry with crane), neither of which could make the turn.

This meant that both deliveries were going to be made to the country lane and we'd have to wrangle stuff up to the house. Add to that, some of the stuff was to be the modern composite wall insulation boards, plaster board bonded to thick foam sheets. Plaster board in any form hates to get wet (goes soft, sags and forms bellies in your ceiling which do not go away even if it dries out, as anyone knows who has had a plumbing leak above a ceiling). It was threatening rain and kept delivering heavy squalls which had us racing to cover any exposed stacks before running for shelter ourselves.

Luckily, just along the road from us is one of those magnificent 'Celtic Tiger' big houses which never got occupied (more than one visitor has asked why we didn't buy THAT one!) but which has a hard lay-by out front big enough for a 40 foot artic and a van alongside on the roof-rack of which to tip sheeting from the lorry floor, with still room for cars to pass. But is was another arduous day (not as bad as clay-shovelling, but close!) taking sheets off the lorry 10 at a time and shipping them to the house on the roof rack of Sparks's van.

The 40 footer was emptied by 1pm and we had a 20 minute break before the Hyab arrived, laden with our one ton bags of gravel and sand, the joists, floorboards, door frames, wood for stud walling, bags of cement and plaster, rolls of bitumen sheet for the extension roof, sheets of plywood for same, lead for flashing etc. At least this guy had the crane, so was able to drop piles in and around the entrance or over the hedge. The boys then had to wrangle it up the drive in the van or on the 2CV with trailer in between the showers. Knackered again by about 5pm they left some sheeted till the morning and one of the one ton bags right in the middle of the drive.

This is all a bit physical for Mum so she heads for Dublin to take a belated chance to visit family and friends who we have not been to see since moving over. Questions were starting to be asked! Luckily, Mum's wee Fiat can slip out between the sand bag and the gate post.

Friday is then, of course, filled with squaring away the remaining building materials, left the previous day. It had rained all night but, as seems to be the way of these things, by morning it was clear and sunny and plaster board could be unsheeted and moved at will. We have to move all the stuff from the entrance up to safe places; the timber, the plaster board and the plywood roof sheets for the extension roof. None of it is particularly heavy - plasterboard sheets are 25kgs, so they are mainly awkward and need two men to carry them. They all get carried upstairs one by one and stacked flat. We have now and embarrassment of building materials, meaning the build is turning into a bit of a game of solitaire. We need to move this to get to that, but we can't start that because these are in the way. Sparks is scratching his head trying to plan a sequence of moves and tasks which will work. The wall sheets alone take up the entire living room floor to ceiling.