Plastering is Complete

The plastering of the walls and ceiling under the house is now complete.

It took the plasterer 5-days to plaster the walls and ceiling instead of the usual 2 and a half to get it done because of all the rain that we have been getting. The plaster was taking a lot longer to dry than usual because of the really high humidity, so it really increased the amount of time they had to spend getting it done.

Our builder was planning to get the fitting out done before Easter, but since it’s already Good Friday and he hasn’t started, I can’t really see that happening.

Once the fitting out has been completed I’m planning to take a week off work to paint under the house. It’s not exactly how I would like to be spending one of my only four weeks of holidays this year, but it has to be done.

After the painting is finished we will be able to put the flooring in, finish the bathrooms and eventually put the stairs in. It sucks that the stairs will be the last things put in, as under the house won’t really be usable until that happens.

On a side note I’ve been working on a new web-site for Voice for the Voiceless Australia. Voice for the Voiceless attempts to bring awareness of gender based injustice issues. There is a Voice in the Dark Concert coming up here in Townsville on Saturday night which you can watch live on the site. You can also listen to some of the heart wrenching stories of gender injustice on the new web-site.

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Under the House is Finally Sheeted!

We finally got the plasterboard sheeting up on the walls under the house. Originally it should have been up in December, but because of some problems that we had with water leaking under the house it had to be postponed until the leaks were fixed.

Second Bedroom Sheeted

Looking Down the Hallway SheetingIt might not look like much to you, but for us getting the sheeting up is a huge step in getting our house to the point where we can actually live in the bottom half of it. We should have been in there by Christmas 2006, so it will nice to finally get there.

The plastering should be finished this week, if it stops raining. The high humidity slows down the drying process for the plaster, which adds a lot to the time required for the plasterer to complete the job.

Once the plastering is done then comes the time consuming job of painting the walls and ceilings under the house. At least it will be inside though, so if it’s raining or dark out I can still paint.

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Sheeting Due to Start Tomorrow

Well, this will hopefully be fourth time lucky.

Finally today the Gyprock sheeting arrived. The team doing the sheeting is due to start tomorrow, and I’m told that they will only take two days to do all of under the house!

The plasterer will come in after that (hopefully next week) to plaster up all the cornices and joins. He should take longer than the guys doing the sheeting, but not by much.

Delivery of the Gyprock plasterboard was delayed first by our leaking front veranda. Then the delivery got delayed because the Bruce Highway was cut off south of Townsville and the Australia Day long weekend was happening. And then I don’t really know why it was delayed, but the last delay was only for a day.

It will be exciting to see the walls finally go up. Even with the frames up it is hard to judge scale, so with the Gyprock sheeting finally going up it should look good.

I’ll need to make sure to post photos.

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Bathroom Walls

Bathroom Wall Completely RemovedWhen we had to rebuild our bathroom we actually had to pretty much rebuild all of the internal and external bathroom walls. Two of the walls had the frames rebuilt or reinforced, while the sheeting on one of the sides was left intact. The other two bathroom walls were completely removed and the frame and sheeting completely replaced.

New Exterior Load Bearing Bathroom WallIt was certainly interesting to watch them do this. The photo on the right is of the load bearing external bathroom wall (you can see it completely removed in the photo at the top of this post). You can also see the side external bathroom wall on the left side of the photo. The back wall they completely removed, but the side wall they rebuilt parts of the frame, while keeping the external cladding intact.

Bathroom Wall SheetedThe main internal bathroom wall was one of the walls that they managed to rebuild the frame, while keeping the sheeting intact in the dining room. There is now a bit of a bow to the wall in the dining room, but it is fairly minimum when compared to the the amount of reinforcing that they did to the bathroom wall frame. In this wall they actually installed four cyclone rods, but I will talk more about those in a future post.

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