Preparation: Tuesday 17 May – I have seven working days before plasterer Jef expects to make a start and there’s quite a bit of preparation to do. Holes need to be filled, all external angles need angle bead, some edges need stop bead and window sills would be a good idea… Beading gives the plasterer a crisp edge to work too and makes the plastered corner more resistant to knocks. It is usually tacked or screwed in place but in my house the best solution seems to be gluing it and I’m where needed using temporary pins until the glue is set.
Sills: After finishing the exterior larch cladding there were four long, especially wide boards left over and I’d hung them from the ceiling joists, safe, dry and out of the way. I didn’t know what I’d use them for and since plasterboarding the ceiling they’ve been leaning in the corner of the double height space. Three were twenty two millimetres thick, intended for window reveals and one was forty millimetres thick, sent as spare timber for outdoor sills, though with sap wood here and there on both faces and several deep longitudinal splits or ‘shakes’ it was particularly unsuited to being an outdoor sill.
I quite expected that when cut into shorter lengths it would fall apart, where the splits, or ‘shakes’ turned out to be full depth, and although off-cuts broke up the whole sills seemed sound enough. So far.
Jef suggests I should fit the (indoor) window sills, before plastering (though I guess I’ll have to mask them well with tape first), so yesterday I cut the spare long boards slightly over-length and after work took them to Andrew’s barn where we planed the wide faces of all the boards by a couple of millimetres using his thicknesser, a heavy free-standing plane. He adjusted the machine and fed the boards in. I stood on the other side, pulling them through and handing them back for the next pass. They are now a bit less than twenty millimetres thick and this morning I sorted them into pairs and choosing the best face for the top of the sill, glued, screwed and clamped them together with their growth rings mirroring each other.
I hope this mirroring will counter the tendency of the sill to warp.
Tomorrow I’ll start cutting all these new sills to their exact sizes, length and width, and sanding them smooth.
The thicker board was initially too wide to go through Andrew’s machine so on his bench saw we ripped it down to the approximate size I needed. I think the remaining off-cuts might make the seat of a good solid bench.
Swallow: when I close the workshop door a swallow invariably leaves it nest, swooping out of the porch to return once I’m safely in the house. This morning I noted the departure and immediately returned with the step ladder to take a quick photo of the nest. One large pale grey feather had appeared and for several days waved above the nest’s mud wall like a curtain. From ground level it was no longer visible…
Other stuff: Last Saturday afternoon I started building Loo-with-a-view Mark II. The original was blown over one stormy night and I’ve started again from scratch, with pallets I didn’t have first time around. Until we have a working toilet in the house this second facility is, occasionally, invaluable…
Back in the house: as well as making and fitting sills and and beading I need to cut the niches in the wall by the stairs. I have photos of the positions we’d decided on, where the wall is skinned with cardboard but the measured sketches elude me.
Ideally this cutting and construction would have been done before I put OSB on the other side and then plasterboard on both sides, but without the stairs for reference it was hard to get an idea of how to position the cutouts. The niches will be lit and the cables are waiting in the wall – I just hope I can avoid damaging them when I cut he holes. The niches are for displaying that great pebble you found yesterday or the bird skull David gave us… The detailed construction of these inset boxes is a future puzzle but the holes need to be neatly cut and edged with stop-bead so the plasterer can do his job.
I spent a morning fiddling with the niches then got back to the sills. The back corners of each sill needed various individual rebates to fit around the airtight tape, window brackets and other minor obstructions. When planing I’d overlooked the thick plank set aside for the entrance hall window sill and one of the planed sills was still two millimetres too thick, so last night I went back to Andrew’s barn, thankful he’s so accommodating. Today all the sills are shaped and sanded and loosely slotted into place.
To do: Despite four long dusty days, where I began at eight o’clock and finished between seven and eight, I have still to complete the preparation of any rooms. I want to have at least two ready for Jef’s arrival and hope then that as he works I can finish preparing successive rooms.
On Monday I’ll be in Glasgow collecting tiles and ordering the kitchen units – so, only four working days to go…
A sustainable house for unsustainable times... 