Week 99-109 - Residential 2nd Fix

This has been a long stage of the build! I did expect it to be, but I’ll admit it has taken quite some time longer than I estimated and seeing as this is the first major part of the project that I actually have experience in, there isn’t really a good excuse for it… but you just sit back and watch me give them anyway!

Plastering finished we did our wash coat (water and emulsion 50/50 mix) in a brilliantly British magnolia and then started playing with some colours. 

Painting is one of my least favourite things to do. It’s just so dam boring! I always think: ‘this is will be an easy and relaxing day, no stress, just painting away’ then half an hour later: I’ve lost my will to live

So I used the biggest roller I could find

Next came brick work, or more accurately fake brick work: I know, I know! I could hear Kevin McClouds comments in my ear the entire time I was doing it – but here’s my justification.

I wanted the brickwork to give some ‘weight’ to the room, so it wasn’t just a plastered box. We have also only done it in places that ‘are’ actually brickwork behind the plaster. Which I know sounds redundant, but it needed to be insulated and the old bricks looked awful. 

Plus these technically aren’t fake bricks, they are just really thin! They are made in exactly the same way and from the same material as standard brick; they are just only 1cm thick. You stick them to the wall just like tiling and then point between them with mortar – just like real bricks!

Anyone convinced yet?

Then we laid the slate floor in the kitchen and hallways. I did it at 45 degrees like this for two reasons. First, I think it looks cool, second as this is an old building the large main living space isn’t actually that square, so running the tiles at this angle makes sure you are not drawing attention to this.

Now comes the wooden flooring for the main living area and one of the main reasons the timescale of this stage over ran. I, in hindsight, rather stupidly decided it would be a good idea if I made some fancy 3D effect parquet flooring.

I also justified it to be a brilliant idea based on the fact that in raw materials, it would actually be very cost effective, deliberately ignoring the time it would actually take me.

We started with 10 sheets of marine grade 12mm birch ply which was then cut up into narrow strips and divided into three piles. One pile was given 1 coat of a grey wood stain, 1 pile 2 coats and the last pile 3 coasts. 

Everyone keeping up so far?

These strips were then cut into 3 different shapes: two parallelograms (mirror images of each other) and a diamond. There are over 6 thousand small little bits of wood in the photo above. Each had to be cut and sanded – it was an ordeal

Then it was time to lay them, and as you can see, the 3 shapes put together are meant to create a 3D cube effect across the floor.

The edge pieces had to be cut in to the line of the wall and allowances for radiator pipes etc

Floor completely laid and getting a first coat of wax oil

Finished floor. I am very pleased with how it has turned out but am in no hurry to ever do it again. Yes it may have been cost effective in terms of material costs, but it took 2 and half weeks of endlessly repetitive tasks to do it. So not really cost effective at all!

Having not learnt my lesson at all, next was the doors, which I also over complicated. (These are my excuses for why this has taken so long by the way…. My own stupidity)

I decided we should have pocket doors - when the door slides back into the thickness of the wall, rather than swinging open on hinges. The good reasoning for doing this is because there are 3 doors right next to each other in the hall, going off into separate rooms and it could have got messy and cluttered with all the doors. The real reason I did it however – is because I thought it would be cool – and I was right

Photo above shows the doors being painted down in the workshop, you can also see all the oak architrave work in the painting rack ready to be oiled. Each door in the flat is a different colour (I mean… why not) corresponding to the accent/feature colour of the room it leads to.

The oak surrounding works around each door (architraves) were made more complex because these are fire doors. Put simply you have to fit a strip into the frame of the door that in an event of a fire will swell and stop smoke entering the room.

Problem is they work by swelling against the thin side edge of a door, but when you have sliding doors this would just push the door open. Which would be… you know… less than helpful. So I had to work out a system where we now have strips facing the inside and outside faces of the door instead, pushing against each other. It’s all very boring to be honest, but it took some time to achieve

Door in its fully open position fits flush with the frame filling the thickness of the wall. You then use a funky little rocker pull to get it out to reveal the handles

The 3 pocket doors all closed

Finished door in the bedroom

I have also made some semi-louvered doors for the large hallway cupboard that will house the washer and dryer (hence the airflow) and the teal door leads into the bathroom (this is a standard swung door)

Right, some overall shots:

Living room with finished floor and brickwork

Still in main living space looking over to where the kitchen will eventually be. Brickwork left short of floor as it will be covered by kitchen units

Looking across the main living space to the door out to the bedrooms and bathroom

(below) Main bedroom with velux windows and plug points spaced for bed underneath

(below) 2^nd bedroom with mezzanine level over the stars below. Here you can see how the door colours match the room

The lighting and electrics have also been all but finished in this area during this stage. I won’t bore you with pictures of switches and cables. But you may like to see the light around the big skylight in the living room. At plaster stage I fitted an aluminium track that was skimmed in flush with the ceiling. This then has LED fitted in it giving a halo effect around the window. I kind of love it to be honest and cant stop playing! You can change the colour and everything!

Week 94-98 - Boarding out and Plastering

It’s finally time to start putting some plaster boarding up and get some plasters in to turn this place from building site into actual building. This is what I have been promised will happen by the experience builders out there anyway – and to be fair they were right.

[Boarding out the Gallery/Showroom area - 5 days work = 40 secs]

Our mill has changed in appearance a lot over the last 3 years as we have bullied and bashed it around. While you notice from the start to the end of each day what has changed (and get a good degree of enjoyment out of that fact) by the time you turn up for work the next day again, it’s kind of been a ‘well that’s what it looks like now, we’d better get on with some more!’ kind of approach. You could call this a ‘stop patting yourself on the back and get on with some work’ mentality, but this is different - since we finished boarding out, there has been a fair amount of back slapping.

[photo - Gallery/Showroom]

The change is huge, the mill has now definitely changed from our ‘giant shed’ to a proper building. It’s taken 5 weeks and nearly 200 very large sheets of plasterboard mind.

[photo - Gallery/Showroom]

The residential accommodation on the top floor is also skimmed out now so this area looks even more like real life rooms

Photo above is view of the living area of the flat, taken from where the sofas will be, looking into the kitchen area

Photo above looking from the kitchen back to seating area under the large skylight

The spare bedroom of the flat with its endless nooks and angles – the plasterers had ‘grumbles’ to make about this. Seeing as I had only recently been the one the board the room out, I understand why, but have little sympathy to give! They have done a fantastic job though, super smooth finish

Trimming in the boarding to the exposed slate walls

This is what happens to a normally black faced dog after 10 mins in a plaster dust ridden building – she seemed oddly proud of herself 

Greame finishing off the insulation before we start plaster boarding the flat

[Spare bedroom part boarded] 

[Living room part boarded]

[Gallery part boarded]

[Gallery part boarded] 

[Gallery part boarded] 

Week 92-93 - Finishing 1st Fix

Now all the walls are built its time to finish the electrical 1^st fix before we move onto plaster boarding out the building….

I won’t bore you too much with this, as you can see from the photo above, all it is really going to be is photo after photo of cables – which I think all but the most electrical nerds amounts us will agree, is rather dull.

I have also pre fitted some of the transformers and colour controllers for some exciting RBG (colour changing) LED lighting I am planning on using in the gallery and the flat.

These wire back to access panels in the walls future maintenance

We have also pre-wires for surround sound speakers in the TV room and gallery ceiling etc, as well as networked out the whole building in CAT6 cable

Before it gets covered up in the next stage of the build I thought I would also immortalise Sophie’s dirty hand prints she managed to put on one of the timber lintel mere hours after I had put it in – this is why we cant have anything nice!

Week 89-91 - Installing Central Heating

Let me start with a question: Who’s been enjoying the unseasonable warm spring weather we’ve been having the last week? Because our heating system was finished just before the mini heat wave - I think it’s obvious you all owe me a thank you for scoring this win from the gods of irony, especially as most of the actual work for installing was done with my long-johns on at only a few degrees. YOU’RE WELCOME!!!

 Anyway, we have our fancy new biomass heating system in and we’re double toasty. Let me quickly clarify, biomass boilers burn wood and other combustible plant based material to make heat, not poo! I only make this point as I have had to clarify this to a few people lately – honestly!

It works basically the same as any other central heating system – boiler heats up water which gets pumped around the radiators and to the hot tap on the sink etc. The only real differences here are the water is heated by burning wood rather than gas and we have a very large ‘buffer tank’ to store the hot water in case there is no fire in when you want heat.

My part of this job was to run all the pipework though the building to radiators and bathroom, kitchens etc. I’ll be honest here, I forgot to take any photos of this really apart from the one above. It basically meant taking the floors up and running the pipes though the joists etc and then putting the floor down again. Pretty straight forward and I had no leaks when it was tested – pretty chuffed! However there were 26 radiators to do, so it took time and quite a lot of pipe.

I also built a concrete plinth for the boiler to sit on

The professionals then turned up to install the boiler, tanks, flue etc. The boiler itself weighs nearly a ton so it took a little use of grey matter to get it off the trailer, into the building and up onto its plinth

My workshop then turned into a sea of copper and fittings for a week while it was all set up and flue commissioned etc.

Finished ‘heating plant’ equipment: Green box on the right is the boiler (or furnace if you prefer). The white tank is the hot water cylinder – actually not that small, 120ltrs, about the size of the tank most people have in their houses. Then the grey tank is the 1500ltr buffer – with its insulation jacket on it kind of looks inflatable right? Trust me its not, weighs a ton! 

All our reclaimed cast iron radiators we are going to use around the building also went off to be sand blasted to get the old paint off the last few weeks, which was a hernia inducing endeavour.

I have also put in 2 hot air blowers for heating in my workshop. This are basically a very fine radiator (a bit like a car radiator) that you pump hot water though. It then has a fan behind that blows air though.

This is a small fire in the furnace, it gets hot! I feel like I could start smelting iron in there…

Week 86-88 - Internal Walls and Studwork

Its finally time to build the internal walls in the rest of the building and physically see the spaces we will have instead of just in the world of drawings and imagination…

Straight away the building is back to its favourite trick of munching its way through meter after meter of timber like the stuff grows on trees….                 

wait…..

so whys its so damn expensive!

There aren’t actually that many internal walls other than in the residential part of the building, most of the 1k+ meters I’ve used over the past few weeks has been on counter battening and framework to hold plasterboard and box in steels (which I think probably, makes it worse – never mind!)

Up on the top floor (residential) we do at least have walls to get excited about. I am very relieved and pleased that the dividing up of the space into separate rooms has worked out very well. The space seems to of subconsciously grown rather than shrink as ive divided it up. 

The spaces seem well proportioned and everything should fit where I imagined it would (who knew scale drawings worked so well!) 

Rather hard to tell from just the stud-work but up here we now have hallway (main entrance), two bedrooms and an open plan living/kitchen area

We have gone for pocket doors into the bedrooms and living space – this is where the door slides into the thickness of the wall (pocket within the wall) rather than on hinges into the room. This requires the making of the pocket and fitting of the sliding track while making the walls, so I have done this at this stage

I decided it would be nice to box the ‘a-frame’ steel in at some nice angles to give it some interest up here. Lets all pretend this looks at least 4 times better than just square would have done – as it took 4 times as long to do!

The two side walls of the gallery are original (approx. 200 year old) stone walls. They have always had a thick lime render on them and are as far from straight and level as a politician from integrity, plus they need insulating, so most of it will be re-boarded. However we thought it would be nice to have at least some of it on show to go with the centre spine wall of the building.

To be honest this turned into a nightmare quickly – as soon as I stripped the render it was obvious this was a wall that was never intended to be an aesthetically pleasing/feature wall. But I had started now, and I couldn’t let the rest of the walls see this one be me! They might gang up and unionise and then where would I be!?

3 days of cleaning, rebuilding and repointing later I’m quite pleased with the results

Week 85 - Roof Window

 As you may have seen in the earlier blog entry we have already put in a few Velux roof windows, with the original plan to do this last one at the same time. Unfortunately we ran out of time and cash at the time to do it. However as we are due to move on to internal dry fit out work within the building soon, so it’s become a now or never situation to start cutting new holes in the roof

This isn’t a Velux window but a custom made, none opening large (2m x 1.6m) skylight right in the middle of the main living space in the residential apartment.

It turned out to be a fair amount of work to figure out, make and install but I am extremely happy with it. The amount of light it lets into the building on even an overcast day is really quite surprising – to the point where the temporary strip lights we have up in there have no effect on the light level at all when the sun is out.

I made the frame out of the same European Oak as the rest of the windows and the same hardware as on the roof windows facing the park for the glass (capex)

Gluing up the frame in the workshop

Aperture cut ready for the frame install

Me ‘tweaking’ the roof joists a little so the frame fits better – my tape measure was obviously having a bad day when I originally measured up! Whats 5mm between friends ay….

We also webbed out the balcony steels with timbers this week, as you can see with the ropes in the picture below, it required rigging up some pulleys etc. to help get them into place (the river was in the way again!) and this is far easier with the building the way it currently is – plenty of exposed timberwork to wrap ropes around.

Ill level with you….

The first one of these timbers we tried to put in fell straight in the river!

And when I say ‘fell’ what I really mean is we dropped it….

And when I say ‘we’ I really just mean me!

This resulted in what I am now claiming as the first game of ‘Extreme Pooh Sticks’ ever played – where instead of dropping you twigs off one side of a bridge and seeing which comes out the other first, you just chase a very large 4meter long plank down the river for a half mile or so!! Much to everyone in the parks amusement.

I haven’t quite figured out all the rules as yet, but I think the victory of the first game has to go to Graeme as he took the rather bold move of going into the river up to his knees, on a very cold winter’s day to grab it. I mean credit where credits due – I was willing to just let the thing float off into the sunset and get a repayment from the timber yard.