Not quite sure how it’s got to 3 months since I last posted, and I’ve been trying to remember what I’ve been doing since then. Mostly quite a few jobs that don’t look that impressive in photos!
Garage cladding finally finished
This has been a bit of a slow burn, given we started it in August (or perhaps even July). But finally this trip up (23rd February) the last cladding board went on to the north side of the garage (the top image is when the final board was put up – it’s a rule that always should be totally dark when you finish these things). A few parts still need a second coat of paint once the weather warms up, but great to get it done. I got pretty efficient towards the end…. Still need to get the guttering on, but moving on with inside has priority for now.
Plasterboarding
It feels a long time since we did the plasterboarding in the house. Definitely wasn’t my favourite job. I’d hoped to avoid it in the garage, but it’s part of building (fire) regs that have to protect the garage from the living space with 2 layers of plasterboard on the ceiling and dividing wall. Fortunately our neighbours were able to lend us their plasterboard lifter, and it was the one job I thought we could do at Christmas, when Steve and I were up for a couple of weeks. Of course, there were the usual multiple things that needed to be done before we could actually do the boarding: not least putting in a lot of battens, both to support the edges of the boards on the floor above, and also to hold the edges of the ceiling plasterboards. There was then all the wool insulation to install between the rafters. And just at the last minute I realised that we also needed to feed wires through for the overhead lights that would eventually get installed in the garage. As the electrician was understandably not responding to emails between Christmas and New Year, I just had to make a best guess what we needed. Worst case, I can just pull it out!
Finally everything was prepped so we could do the plaster-boarding itself. Didn’t take us long to remember that we really are the slowest plaster-boarders in the world! It wasn’t helped by the fact that the garage is fairly rammed full of stuff, so every time we moved to a different part of the ceiling we had to moved things around so that we could get the lifter in place. One of the motivations for doing the plaster-boarding at this time was to free up the significant floor space that the pile of stacked boards took up in the corner of the garage – whilst there are still a lot of things to do before get to constructing the internal stud wall, with the boards stacked up, this would be impossible.
Taking far longer than we thought possible to put not that many boards on the first layer, we then moved to the second layer. We thought we’d get away with 45mm screws for this, but turned out they just weren’t quite long enough. Given it was by then New Years Eve, and we travelled back south on the 2nd January, there was no opportunity to buy longer ones, so we couldn’t finish it. I wasn’t quite sure if I’d be able to do it by myself on my next trip up in January. But turned out (after quite a lot of slightly weird dreams about ways to lift plasterboards by myself onto a lifter) it actually wasn’t too difficult after all, and so I managed to get the job finished on day 2 of my January trip.
And on to the top room
The main garage space was fairly rammed with stuff, but the upstairs room had also been used for the past few months as useful storage for all sorts of things. Not least, we’d put the 2 fairly substantial stacks of Scots pine floor boards up there, the 20+ large bales of cosy wool insulation, a couple of piles of leftover Steico fibre boards that were going to be used for additional insulation on the West gable, some additional very heavy blue boards (conveniently located underneath the stacks of floor boards…), plus all the green Smartply propassiv boards that would be used to board out the sloped roof section. Like every building task, the first step was to move and re-stack a whole load of materials (and then move them somewhere else again approximately every half an hour on a repeat pattern….)
Once I’d cleared just about enough space to be able to work in one area, the first job was boarding out the rest of the floor – the awkward triangular areas beyond the vertical sections of the roof trusses. Tight spaces to work in, angles, heavy boards, working out exactly how to get the boards in place through relatively restricted gaps – and the fact that there were 22 of these areas that needed to be filled – made for a pretty tedious few days! It was eventually done, and I slowly worked my way through the rest of the boarding out of the room.
All this work was made much easier with the purchase of my latest new tool: a Makita track saw. Brilliant piece of kit for me, perfect for this job.
