The house wot Juffy built
I keep finding new ways to abuse this laser, it’s the BEST toy. I wanted to put a left-over piece of LVL into a wall to mount a sliding door to (if it’s like the rest of the things I build, it’s going to be a bloody heavy door…), but I wasn’t confident of getting it level if I did my usual technique of making up the piece of wall flat on the ground and then raising it. Next-best plan was to make up the…Continue Reading “Framing with lasers”
I’ve had a 20′ sea container full of my woodworking gear and timber collection gathering dust in a container yard for the last couple of years. With the interior of the shed done it was time to finally get it delivered and start filling the shed with fun stuff. Me: Hello, please can I have my container delivered to this address?Container People: Sure, here’s an invoice.*pays*CP, day before delivery: BTW, we actually asked our truck drivers and they said no we won’t deliver it. Your…Continue Reading “Container woes”
Trying my hand at cram-walling again – I really like the idea of having all the walls rendered, rather than a mix of render and conventional smooth gyprock. Armed with my sister and a big roll of chicken wire, got stuck into the wall between the master bedroom and the hallway/laundry. Quickly discovered an unexpected benefit of 450mm stud spacing – you can stretch chicken wire along the wall, then go along and drop single biscuits between the studs. A bit of massaging and it…Continue Reading “Cram walling”
A couple more sessions with R from down the road – he decided that weekends should be spent in his own garden (and fair enough too!), but he could drop past on his way home from work and render until dark. Tried it out to great effect one afternoon and got the other half of the front of the shed done – the only downside was that with me doing high stuff and R on the ground, my ladder always seemed to be bloody inconvenient….Continue Reading “Shed rendering, 2nd coat outside”
I’d had this problem rattling around in my head for a fair while – the baseplate at the bottom of the corner post, between the big windows, is much wider than the post itself. Since it sticks up about 30mm above the slab I needed some way to build the post out to be as fat as the baseplate, so the windows have something to fix into. Ended up with a combination of brackets welded to the column, a timber outer face and timber blocks…Continue Reading “Random extra window framing”
Onto the hard stuff – high rendering, final coat. Hard to do this any way other than solo, since I’ve only got one platform ladder tall enough to reach the top of the shed walls. J dropped around for a couple of hours as well, so I got him to finish the last of the low stuff, and then some higher stuff working off the smaller ladder, while I chugged along on the platform ladder. It’s very slow, as I expected, but maybe not as…Continue Reading “Shed rendering: final coat, day 3”
…it’s almost like I’m trying to get this finished. Madness. Had R (of strawbale-house-down-the-road) fame dropping in for an afternoon rendering session, so I spent the morning finishing the second coat inside the shed – I just had the horrible annoying bit above the main doors to finish off. Decided it’d be better to work on the front wall of the shed, since the final coat inside stuff is all up ladders and I couldn’t make use of R’s expertise. R rocked up just in…Continue Reading “More shed rendering!”
Managed to end up with a small render party for the day, with J & C joining dad and me thanks to a random confluence of holidays and days off. Carried on with our paired setup, with me slapping render on the wall and C following along behind smoothing, while J and dad worked on the window reveals. Steadily worked our way through 4-5 mixer loads, and got nearly the entire shed done to head height.
I’ve spent a couple of days experimenting with the final render coat on the inside of the shed – still working towards having it finished inside to get the old shed down. Started out in the wet area – if the shed is practice for the house, the shed’s wet area seems to be the practice for the shed. 🙂 I’ve never done final coat rendering before, so this was a very slow day working out what techniques worked. I’ve settled, for now, on getting…Continue Reading “Shed rendering: final coat”
Taking advantage of a rare fine day in July, I finished off most of the north wall of the living room: and the newly-emptied massive living/dining/kitchen room, with the last of the bales and my stack of framing timber moved down to the (now-sealed) bedrooms: