Plaster boarding (sheet rock to anyone in the US) has been started at last. We arrived on Saturday morning and were surprised to find our joiners there at the weekend working. They had completed the boiler room on the Friday to allow the installation of the hot water tank, ground source heat pump and other associated vessels - an there are a few!
The first room to be transformed from a area in the building into room was the guest bedroom - probably the most complex wall and ceiling geometry in the house - so it was only going to get easier for them after that.
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| Plaster boarded guest bedroom |
While doing this work we found that we could actually fit an extra down lighter in the ceiling at the entrance door to the room. This is a real bonus as we thought it was going to be difficult to effectively light this area but the ceiling geometry helped out out - and the sparkies had left enough wire to do this.
While the joiners were working upstairs Heidi & I were in the master wing downstairs working on getting all the holes drilled for routing the plumbing over to the master bathroom. This involved drilling 4 x 25mm holes through a big steel I beam which I had been very concerned about. Luckily the cutter I had found (from Starrett if anyone needs to do something similar) turned out to be just the ticket although it still took me several hours to grind my way through. Getting that done was a big weight of the mind. At the same time I also worked out a route for the pipe down the guest en suit walls to access the floor space. Routing pipe to the rooms has been challenging -one reason why I am doing this myself - without being able to be on site all the time trying to explain this all to a plumber would have been very challenging.
While I was working away drilling holes Heidi was busy installing insulation in the stud walls, checking socket locations, marking light positions and various other things on the punch list.
After getting as far as we could in the master wing we focused our attention on the lounge and dining rooms as these did not require too much work to get them ready - well that is how it appeared!. The wood burning stove in the lounge has a direct air feed into the back of it due to the air tightness of the building. I had the kit for installing this and had already decided that I was going to be the one who would cut the require 4" holes through the house structure - I have a major distrust of trades to seal things up properly after themselves!. Cutting the hole was the easy bit - big rental drills and core bits eat through aerated concrete blocks - getting the stove casing in and out proved to be the difficult part - well getting it back in to be more precise. After a lot of grunting, swearing and spilt sweat (despite it being -3 deg C that morning outside) the job was done.
The erst of the scope for the dining room and lounge entailed marking ceiling light positions, wall insulation installation and running waste pipes from bathrooms to soil pipes. This all went pretty well although it always seemed that a joist or dwang was exactly where we wanted to position a ceiling light!
While all this was going on I also had the ground source heat pump people working away in the boiler room, along with a sparking on Tuesday - it was cosy! - getting power to the boiler room for function testing equipment. The boiler room has 4 major items squeezed into it for the heating and hot water plus another 4 or so smaller expansion vessel and various pumps.
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| Hot water tank and expansion vessel (blue) |
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| GSHP & UFH buffer tank (white) |
To facilitate getting vessels filled and the UFH system hooked up I also worked away on the UFH manifolds, hooking them up to the supply and return pipe after getting plasterboard installed behind them.
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| UFH manifold in first floor cupboard |
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| UFH manifold in hall closet |
I also routed the UFH supply and return piping over to the buffer tank once its position was confirmed. In addition I hooked up the cold water supply to the hot water tank intake.
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| Incoming cold water and UFH manifold in utility room |
Along with the GSHP loops being filled with brine and connected to the GSHP gets us quite close to being able to power up the UFH system and get some heat into the house to help dry out the floor screeds (we currently have an industrial dehumidifier running on site)
While all the above was going on plaster board was going up in the boys bedrooms. Once its hung it really changes the character of a room - more light is reflected and lightens the room, the acoustics change and no wires or pipe anymore!
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| Ewan's room boarded |
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| Fraser's room in progress |
As you can probably tell it was a very busy week - thanks to mum and dad for entertaining the boys for almost 5 days for us - it made it possible to get as much done as we did. Oh - one other thing I had forgotten - we had the stairs people out to measure up for the stairs - phew no wonder we were tired by the time we got back to Copenhagen
