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.

Technorati Tags: plaster, plastering, plaster board

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.

It 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.

Technorati Tags: plastering, gyprock, plasterboard, sheeting

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.

Technorati Tags: gyprock, plasterboard

When 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.

It 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.

The 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.

Technorati Tags: bathroom walls

Yesterday they managed completely remove the exterior load bearing bathroom wall and build a new one, all in one day.

The old external load bearing wall in the bathroom had been cut in half in places and was sitting on the crumbling old concrete floor. It really had to be replaced since it was expected to hold up the roof in that back half of the house.

They have not yet cladded the exterior of the load bearing bathroom wall, but the sisalation has been installed, as well as some ply to give it a bit extra rigidity.

The new wall looks a heck of a lot cleaner and stronger than the old one did. All of the wall studs go right from the top to the bottom of the load bearing wall, without being cut in half like the old wall was.

Technorati Tags: framing, load bearing, walls, bathroom

To be honest I am so emotionally tired right now that I don’t really feel like writing anything, but I am hoping that this will help me to process a bit…

On Friday last week, if you recall, we found out that we need to replace the floor in our bathroom. This means gutting the entire bathroom and starting from scratch with a new bathroom floor, walls and ceiling.

I got a phone call this morning from our builder asking when I would be home, and suggesting that I bring a camera with me when I come to take a photo of something.

So I get there and he shows me how after removing the wall sheeting he can lift up the roof just by pushing on it ! Here is a series of photos of the wall frames, the roof trusses and the ceiling frame, I’ll explain more about the problems after you see the photos.

The top two photos show the wall between the dining room and the bathroom. Although it is an internal wall, it is a load bearing wall. Being a load bearing wall it should be made of structural grade timber (it’s not), it should have a large, high strength continuous beam running the entire width of it (it doesn’t) and it should be tied down to the roof trusses (again it isn’t).

The third photo shows the external wall, which is also a structural / load bearing wall. This is where our builder was able to lift the roof just by pushing up on it. The external wall at least has the continuous beam running the full lenth, and some of it is structural timber, but a lot of the wall framing has been cut in half to put in the louvers and the concrete floor, and again the roof trusses are not tied down to the top beam on the wall , and some of the trusses have been installed upside down.

With the roof itself there is also not enough support for the tin that is there . There is supposed to be either 60 or 90 cm between the timber under the tin (I can’t remember which at the moment), but on our roof there is nearly a metre and a half gap in some places!

Our builder reckons that most of these problems continue into the office area of our house as well. So he will be pulling down the ceiling in the office, which is sagging in a lot of places, and having a look at it.

I won’t know until tomorrow what this all means, but what I do know for sure is that the renovation costs are now due to blow out even more. We have already needed to change our expectations to where we won’t be moving in under the house anytime soon, so I don’t know what all these additional problems with our roof and load bearing walls is going to mean…

Technorati Tags: roofing, walls, framing

Our current builder started building under our house to the lockup stage on Monday, July the 9th. He had his crew of three guys working every day of that first week, only taking Sunday off.

On Tuesday July the 17th we received the “Compliance Inspection Report” from the Townsville City Council building certifier. The report indicated that “The building work complies with the Development Permit”.

So after only a week and day on the job the framing has already been completed and certified. They have already begun putting the sisalation on the outside of the frame, putting the insulation in the frame cavities that will be sealed up, adding the flashing and waterproofing the front verandah. We are getting ready for the plumber and electrician to come in on the end of this week / beginning of next week.

The only thing that looks like it might hold us up a bit is waiting for the windows to come in. Other than that things are running almost right on schedule.

Really makes me wish I had found this guy 18-months ago. We would probably be living down there already.

The framing on the hallway is now complete.

The hallway will be 96cm wide. It’s a compromise between the 90cm that the builder suggested and the 102cm that the architect suggested. There is no actual council regulation for the hallway width, so we went with the compromise of a 96cm wide hallway.

Because it is quite a long hallway we want to make sure that the hallway width didn’t actually feel too narrow. The hall is about 8.5 metres long, so as you can see in the photo is quite a long one and can feel a bit “tunnel like” if the hallway width is too narrow.

We spent a good deal of time tonight trying to work out the lighting for the hallway. I hadn’t actually thought too much about the hallway lighting up till now, so I would be very interested to hear what other peoples thoughts were on what kind of lights to put into a hallway.

Technorati Tags: hallway, hall, framing, lighting, hallway lighting

Again I came from work today to see some pretty good progress happening on the house.

As you can see on the left the hallway framing is half completed and the kids bedrooms seem to be pretty much done, which you can see below.

Caleb again had fun walking through the frames figuring out which room was his, where the windows will be and where his wardrobe is.

In two of the smaller bedrooms (I have to stop calling them “kids” bedrooms, since we only have two kids and three small bedrooms, people might start getting ideas!) we have built in wardrobes. We had actually planned to have them in all three, but we will be getting a large non-built in robe for Jessica’s room upstairs soon, so we will be moving that one into the third small bedroom eventually.

We have also put a linen closet in the hallway, which I always appreciated having in my parent’s place. Well, more like I appreciate it now, not so much as a teenager.

They guys are still cruising through the job very quickly. Today they finished building what looks like all of the external frames for the house!

Most of the bracing ply looks to up as well, which is good. Some of the days this week the whole house was swaying because they had removed the temporary bracing struts to make way for the wall frames. With the new bracing ply on it should make the house feel much more solid.

The garage is really taking shape so that we can see the size of it, and where the laundry is going to fit. Today Tamara said that we had better not be getting a long car anytime soon, and she is right. There wouldn’t be room for a car over 6m in the garage if we want to still be able to use the laundry. I am still hoping that I have room down the side for some shelves and storage, but like many things right now, time will tell.

We had to go for a few hours without water today as they re-routed some of the temporary plumbing, but there has actually been very little disruption for us as they have been working under there. Well, besides the noise of course…

Technorati Tags: framing, garage, frames, building