We were still waiting for some dry weather so we can paint the windows and doors. As you can guess, the weather was wet so we were covering the block wall in the left hand upstairs room with the waterproof fabric and then…
…returned to putting the battening over the insulation already in place…
…so we had got to the situation where all the insulation is in place, but some battening is missing… because we had used all of our supplies! So it was time for a change…
…and we moved to the right hand suite, downstairs, and found we needed to move a lot of things around to clear a space to work in -which is about par for the course for Mike and I!
To be honest, most if the insulation is now piled up behind the camera, but ahead you can see the space where some stud walls need to go…
…but before we can attach the stud walls to the block walls, I need to remove the last of the old plaster. I took the easy bits off about 18 months ago, and so you may notice the concentration on my face as I try to shift the stubborn bits ready for later.
When we felt ready, we pulled out the plans to work out where the walls need to go, only to find to our horror that the drain point (which we put in years ago, using our first designer’s drawings) would have been in the hallway if we built the walls as specified by our new designer – so we cut some pieces of wood to size and shuffled them about on the floor until we came up with a pattern (as below) that allowed the drain to be in the bathroom, but also leaving a wide enough hallway that a wheelchair can go through it. And yes, that was quite a stressful few hours whilst we worked this out!
After photographing our layout and getting approval from our designer, we started screwing the floorplates to the concrete floor using some extremely whizzy screws…
…and once that was done, we attached a second layer of floorplate (we will explain why in a few months time) and then started adding the studs…
…so that you can begin to see how this floor will work. Beyond the 3 studs will be the bedroom; the enclosed arear in front of the 3 studs will be the wet room; there will be hallway to the left of the single stud at the front; and Lola is sitting in the kitchen area.
Below you can see the view from the bedroom, through the wetroom, and Lola, remarkably, is still sitting where the L-shaped kitchen will go. Mike is standing in what will become the living area.
And such is our forward planning that, at this point, we took delivery of more battening, but ran out of ‘4 be 2 be’ so had to stop building the walls.
We had guests in this weekend, but today – unusually – we left all the hospitality work on hold because no rain was forecast, so we have finally finished painting the outside of all our windows, and all but one door. And, let’s be honest, we are both feeling pretty smug tonight, which feels pretty good!