Quick update: Floor down, skirting board cut, lights and power on – cheers dad for tech support on the phone telling me how to wire the light in!

Today was all about painting, fitting coving, laying the laminate floor and Shaun making me laugh with tales of South Africa.

Spent the first half of today sanding down the plasterboard joins and getting everything ready for paint:

I also put down the loft flooring  – i had a few packs left over and bought a couple more, these have really strengthened the floor, the 2 layers of 11mm OSB had too much flex.

and that’s how its looking with it’s first full coat of paint on.

Last week we also got the door on the storage area and managed to fill it full of crap in less than an hour.

Dad did an awesome job with the wiring, you can see the fuse box on the wall at the back, that all runs outside, along the fence and into the cabinet on the side of the house.

OK folks, after a bit of a break from the shed, we have muchos progress` -

I got the internal roofing and insulation in – because the roof slopes I added beams that run the width of the room to attached the OSB to:

Building up the patio door frame:

Patio door frame in:

Doors in, cladding on and external lights fitted

Plasterboard screwed to the roof and starting on the walls – dad cut holes in the OSB with a jig he made for his router, then used a keyhole saw to cut through the drywall once it was on . I’m using tapered plasterboard so i dont have to get a plasterer in.

board on and plastered

Hopefully more updates tomorrow.

Spent the weekend insulating and lining the inner walls with OSB, all pretty straightforward.

I’m using 90mm Rockwool Flexi slabs which were really easy to work with and 11mm OSB on the walls.

A few pics below:

Quick update, I managed to get a few hours tonight and glued the roof down and fitted the trim, all looks a lot neater now.

Disappointed with the quality of the corner trims I got from rubba-seal – they are poorly manufactured and should be labelled as seconds. That being said they are up high so it wont be seen and I didnt go back to the supplier so maybe they would have swapped them, however there is a lot of competition out there so it may be worth checking out other suppliers.

A few pics:

Boom, we have a nail gun! This weekend we fitted the fascia boards, the roof, laid down the EPDM, wrapped the whole building in Tyvek, fitted the battons, 90% of the cladding and did the first fit of the wiring.

The roof went on really well, I used 22mm OSB as we will be needing to walk on it to fit the rubber roof (I used 11mm on the floor and there was a lot of bounce)

You can see below the fascia boards being fitted, we used a length of 45x95mm CLS screwed to the beam, then fitted a piece of 45x170mm to that, this means we get a gap of 45mm which the cladding will tuck up under when we fit it (25mm battens + 19mm cladding leaves a nice 6mm gap)  It was an expensive decision to use the 45x170mm for the fascia but it gives it the real chunky look I want.

Heres how the cladding tucks under:

We got the rubber up on the roof but it was late in the day and we didn’t want to rush this part of the job so we laid out some packs of the cladding on the roof to hold it down – the weather over the weekend didn’t allow us to get back up there so hopefully ill get an opportunity in the week to get it done.

Wrapping the building in Tyvek:

Battens and cladding starting to go on :

A couple of workers joined us for a bit:

More cladding on:

Whilst I was nailing on the cladding, Dad did the first fit on the electrics, ethernet and speaker cables. This is all voodoo to me, I nod knowingly but really don’t understand.

Enjoy the TT Dad, thanks for all your help

After a great day yesterday we started today by working out how the roof would work. This week I have gone through so many thoughts and different ideas on how to do this and after chatting it through with dad we decided the original idea was best. It has a small slope to help with run off, and will be covered in EPDM

To get the slope we added a piece of 95x 45mm to the front wall

As this sits on the outer wall, the back end of the beam is cut at an angle so it sits on the wall and can be screwed down.

I cut the first one with a hand saw… then got the rip out for the second…

I didn’t get  a pic, but the beams that don’t sit on the outer walls are notched at the back – I’ll update with a better picture later in the week

And here it easy, the frame all up and looking tip top.

Today started with more of how we finished last week – we had 3 more walls to build so we cracked on with them – help as always from my legend of a dad and France’s own Tim the toolman Taylor,  Laurent le Faf. This week I drew up a new cutting list so dad got busy on the chop saw and me and Lol framed up the walls…

Side Wall (with space for door)

Back wall

Not much room left in my garden so we stacked the walls down the lane…

Front wall done ( the big space is for the 2400 x 2100  patio door)

Walls up…

We also got the front wall up, jumped in the shower and went for a birthday beer with Jim

Day 3 started with fitting the 3 risers we cut yesterday, they went in lovely and the base now sits perfectly.

The 11mm OSB was a bit flexible on the top so we decided to fit another layer which firmed it up a bit, this with a decent wooden floor from the Recycling project should be nice and stable.

We then cracked on with building the first wall, using the same technique as the base (frame, verticals at 600mm centers and noggins)

We wont fix these in place until we have all the walls ready. By the end of Sunday we had 1 sidewall, and the dividing wall that will separate the office from the store room.

Not a bad start for the first weekend of the build.

Things i would have done differently:

Used a thicker board on the top level for the flooring so it had less flex.
Laid a concrete base on top of the existing one that was level
bought better disposable BBQ’s

Day 2 starts with needing to move the base into its position and get it sitting level, but before this could happen we spent a couple of hours fixing the fence so we could easily remove it and put it back in place.

Next up was to create the risers to keep it off the floor to prevent rot – A few weeks prior to this, my brother from another mother Dave, had taken the levels of the ground for me and at its lowest point the ground is -175mm down so we cut 4 risers at their respective height and gave them a lick of Crecote.

Now, 2 men moving this heavy base into position required some Egyptian Methodology (broom handles), a couple of car jacks, a pick and a crowbar.

We tied string to the broom handles so we could easily retrieve them, slid them under the base and used the pick and crowbar to lever it into position:

once we had it far enough back, we pulled out the handles and repeated the process to shift it sideways.

Next, using the jacks we raised up the base and inserted the risers we made earlier, everything looked tidy and we got a spot on level base:

next up we cut 3 more risers that ran the width of the base to support it in the middle – we did this by measuring each side and cutting the appropriate angle, coated these in creocote and left them overnight.

we finished off Saturday by cutting some of the wood to start building the walls in the morning (thought we would give the neighbors a break from the sound of the chop on Sunday morning )

So here it is, Day 1 of the build…

Wood delivered at 9am, 210 Meters of 100x50mm PSE  and 35 sheets of 11mm OSB.

Old office desk set up and screwed to the fence post, all ready for the chop saw.

Gazebo set up over the chop (£17.00 from B&Q and well worth it)

First job was to set out the frame:

The size is 3m x 4.5

we screwed this up then marked out 600mm marks along the edge to fit the beams

Beams fitted:

Next up we nailed down the OSB sheets – the sheets are 1220×2440 so fitting the beams with 600mm centers means the sheets drop on nicely.

Then using a ripsaw we trimmed the edges:

Next job was to flip the floor over so we could fit the noggins (we should have done this at the same time as building the frame) and stuff it with insulation and then fit OSB sheets on the other side.

Insulation in (I’m using rock wool as the builders had left a load in the loft when we moved in)

then the final layer of OSB:

we then pulled the tarp over for the night and got everyone round for a BBQ (the gazebo and saw bench came in useful for this too)