After the excitement of the airtightness test was over, I switched back to focus on the next major stage of the build: preparing for plasterboard.
Getting to this point involved building the remaining partition walls. I watched the obligatory youtube videos showing me how to do it, talked to my brother a bit and then spent a morning with local carpenter, Scott McKenzie. Scott built the first wall, and then in Generation Game spirit, I was left to build my own by myself. They haven’t turned out too bad – a couple of small annoyances (there’s always one screw that you can’t get out!), and major education that no timber frame walls are totally perfect. This fact came from my expert builder/engineer brother, when I called him up feeling totally exasperated having measured and measured again, used my big set square, and I just couldn’t get things to add up. Big smile on my brother’s face as he told me that I would have to settle for less than perfection!
The inside is virtually ready for the plasterboard to go up – that’s the task for Steve’s two week ‘break’ from work in August. Who needs a beach holiday?!
In the meantime, the quartz chippings finally arrived, 20 tonnes of them. So I had a fairly strenuous two days filling up about 220 barrows worth of gravel and redistributing around the house. I was extremely grateful for the help of my two neighbours, Pete and Sam, who individually arrived exactly the right moment on each of the two days to help with a bit of gravel shovelling, and keep me motivated. And if anyone is planning on doing this sort of task: definitely count your barrow loads!
