Boarding: Walls - Ground floor

Boarding, boarding, boarding; we were getting very bored of boarding. Thanks to the problems with wonky and warped studwork, coupled with the sheer difficulty in cutting and moving heavy Fermacell sheets, boarding out upstairs had already taken us weeks... and we hadn't even finished. We couldn't do any more boarding upstairs until the door liners had been fitted, so we moved downstairs and started boarding out the ground floor.

We started in the lounge. The load-bearing walls (pictured on the left) are lined with OSB panels to reinforce the studwork so that it can help support the weight of the floor above.





Unlike plasterboard, Fermacell boards have great racking strength and are sometimes used instead of OSB for load-bearing walls. So in a way, by boarding over the top of OSB, we were double-strengthening the walls and making them even more rigid. Hopefully that should mean we don't get any pesky cracks appearing in future.

The back wall of the lounge completed. The top boxes will have audio sockets for surround sound speakers.

The boarding going up around the lounge door.

Cutting out all the back boxes that will sit behind the TV was going to be 'fun'. 

The Fermacell is really tough stuff so cutting out for sockets is best done with a multitool. Even then it takes quite a while to measure and cut out each slot, especially as the blades go blunt within a few minutes.

With so many cutouts so close together, we were worried that the board might crack during fitting but Fermacell really is very sturdy stuff and it all went up without a hitch.

The other load-bearing wall in the lounge. 

We used a string line and laser to try and ensure the boards were fitted as level as possible. As usual, the lack of door liners meant that we had to leave the boarding around the doorway until later.

The site inspector set up his temporary office in the kitchen so we continued boarding in there.

The stud walls often needed a lot of preparation before we could board. Here we've added an extra stud where the edge of the Fermacell boards will meet to give us a secure fixing.

We intend to hang a TV off the kitchen wall in future so Alan fitted a chunky wooden plank between the studs to help support any heavy weights. We also took measurements of the plank's position and photographed it as a reminder, so we can find it again once it's been boarded over.

Just the soundproofing to go in and we could start getting Fermacell onto the wall.

We carried on boarding around the kitchen. The dining area has lots of large windows to cut around which were fiddly.

The kitchen sink will be located under this window. We took extra care to mark the position of the pipes before boarding to avoid drilling or screwing into them accidentally. 

The study was next. It's going to be the central hub for the computer network, phone and electricity so there were quite a few wires to contend with.

As this room will be the entry-point for the new phone/broadband line, we thought it prudent to install some conduit while we still had the access. Phone engineers don't generally drill very neat holes through walls, nor worry too much where the cable is pushed through so it was better for us to do it ourselves.

After carefully working out the positions, we drilled a hole through both the block wall and timber frame. We used an offcut of underfloor heating pipe as a conduit, then sealed up all the gaps to make sure it was completely air and water-tight.





The conduit should allow BT to pass their new cables through the wall without any drilling and also ensures we end up with the cable entering the room exactly where we want it (i.e., in a cupboard). We will cut this pipe flush with the wall later & it will sit inside the phone cable box.

Soundproofing the back wall of the study.

We didn't board over all the electrical wiring in the corner, as we still hadn't decided exactly where we wanted our consumer unit to go.





Next up was the entrance hall.







Cracks usually develop in joins around windows and doors, so to avoid that we cut the windows out of one single sheet wherever possible. Measuring and cutting was pretty tricky though...





We found it worked better if we made the final cutout for the window, after the board was screwed in place. Once the board was lined up and secure, we just sawed off the 'tabs' in the corners and removed the cutout.

Same task for the window on the other side.

After several weeks of boarding, we were getting rather fed up with the daily routine of measuring walls, cutting shapes out of Fermacell and lugging those big, heavy sheets all around the house. Still, after so much practice we finally felt ready to start work on the dreaded stairwell...

We started boarding out down in the bottom corner. With no scaffold tower, we were going to have to come up with some creative ideas for how to support a 45 kilogram board high up on a wall long enough to screw it in place.

The solution we came up with... Alan made a grooved rail out of roofing battens which we fixed temporarily to the stud wall (see bottom right of the picture). The idea was to load a heavy Fermacell sheet from the relative safety of the landing floor, then simply slide it along the rail until it was directly above the sheet on the ground floor. After that, all we had to do was clamp the board in place, remove the grooved rail, add glue to the bottom and drop it down into place. What could possibly go wrong?  

Phew! The plan worked and the heavy sheet of Fermacell plopped neatly into position. With only a small clamp holding it in place, we needed to get it screwed permanently into the studs...

... so up the creaky ladder went Alan. It was at this point that we really wished we had bought a scaffold tower.

At last, the dreaded high stairwell board was in place. The rest of the boards should be easier...





The next board was a bit lower so we used the panel lifter to hoist it onto our guide rail, then as before, dropped it down into position after gluing.

Gluing the boards on two sides added extra difficulty as it meant that they needed to be perfectly square so that the next board would be correctly aligned.

The boards looked a lot neater after I'd scraped off the excess glue (usually the next day).     

Hoorah! The last of the hard-to-reach stairwell boards screwed into place.