A little bit of catch up to do with this posting
Back at the beginning of May I was back for another work weekend. The screed floors had cured enough to allow foot traffic and I needed to prepare a few things ahead of the joiners coming in to erect the ground floor partitioan walls and strap in the SIP walls.
With solid floors in the house again it was nice to be able to walk around without the worry of walking on insulation or UFH pipes. It was also great to see the floor almost to its final level. It makes things look a lot different
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| Kitchen, dining room and hall |
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| Hall looking from the dining room |
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| Family bathroom |
First order of work was to trim up all the edge insulation and excess DPM from around the walls to allow the strapping to be taken down to the screed level. As usual I under estimated the amount of time this would take but manage to finish by the end of the first day on site. During the day I also had a good meeting with the GSHP supplier and spend several hours discussing and agreeing the layout of the boileer room. Its going to be a busy room but we will get everything in there. We also took the oppertunity to move the hot water tank into the room before the partition walls went in.
Day 2 was spent taping the joints of the SIP roof panels. Knowing that some of the joints hadn't been foamed due to the difficulty of doing this when installing the large roof panels I thought this was a good precaution. What I hadn't realised was how many joints were leaking air, not only the roof paneels but a lot of the first floor wall panels as well. The strong northerly wind was timely as it aided leak detection hugely. Needless to say I wasn't a very happy camper finding all these leaks given the fact that one of the SIP selling points is a air tight structure compared to traditional timber frame constrcution methods! I thus spent all day either up an ladder or going up or down one. Taping the 7m ceilings over the entrance hall involved a lot of scaffold erection and adjustment.
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| Guest bedroom taped |
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| Fraser's bedroom taped |
Day 3 was a frustating one. I had hoped to get started on installing the ceiling insulation between the ground and first floor but the flexible insulation wasn't so flexible and wasn't wanting to stay in place well. With taping to finish and a lot of other small jobs to do the day was still filled but not doing what I had expected.
The week after I left the joiner came back onto site again and commenced installing the ground floor partition walls and strapping in the SIP walls.
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| Master bedroom partition walls |
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| A strapped in wall |
The strapping acheives a couple of things: it provides a service void to run wires and piping down walls and it evens out any irregularities in the SIP panels ( I find myself questioning why I went with SIP panels at times!). Good progress was made and the ground floor is now complete and work has commenced on the first floor which should be finished this coming week.
I am back again next week end to tackle the ceiling insulation with a new way of holding it in place!
