Boarding: Walls - finishing (almost)

With all the door liners installed, we could finally finish boarding the walls around the doorways.

In the hallway, we were originally going to put a standard wall light in the space between the kitchen and living room doors, but then had the idea to build a small alcove in the space instead.





Alan built a sturdy wooden frame to support the boards.

We re-routed the electrical wiring and also drilled a hole in the timber that would allow a mini-LED spotlight to be installed at a later date.

Next we lined the inside of the alcove with Fermacell.

We weren't sure whether to install a downlighter or an uplighter in the alcove, so decided to test it out once it got dark using a wander lead.  

Once we'd decided to go for the uplighter, we made sure all the wiring was left accessible in the bottom of the alcove so we could reach it later when fitting the spotlight. 

The board that frames the alcove and fits between the two doors needed to be very accurate. Measuring it and cutting it out using a circular (plunge) saw was a time-consuming business (as usual).  

Hurrah! It fits. Boarding around the rest of the door frame would be much more straightforward.

The fully-boarded alcove. It looks a bit more interesting than the plain wall we were going to have and should look even better, once we have installed a light inside it. 

Next was the kitchen and we began by boarding around the larder door. Another tricky job as it required the board edges to be bevelled at the correct angle to ensure a really neat fit. 

Looking up at the freshly-installed boards inside the larder.  

One advantage of using Fermacell over conventional plasterboard is that no angle beads are needed on outside corners; the edges of the board are held solidly in place using adhesive.  

With the boards fitted inside and out, the larder is finally beginning to take shape. 

Next we started boarding around the door that leads to the utility room. 

Before we could complete the boarding around the doors, we needed to make up a bit of extra studwork to form a cupboard for the fridge.

The studwork is not structural so we could use up some more wood off-cuts from the scrap pile. 

As ever, we used a laser line to make sure everything was perfectly level and square.

After so long spent boarding day after day, it's a relief to finally see the rooms coming together. 

The site inspector dropped by to conduct a stock check.

Another tricky job that we left until last... sorting out the huge mess of wiring that will terminate at the consumer unit (or fusebox as they used to be called) in the office. 

There are official guidelines for where a consumer unit should be positioned in a new house (i.e., not too high or low on the wall). We tidied up all the cabling inside the wall, but didn't trim any excess wiring on the outside just in case the electricians needed to move anything around.

As with all the doorways in the house, the office also required boarding inside and out. 

Soundproofing on the inside of the office. 

Light switches and thermostats are usually located right by the door so boarding those walls usually meant lots of extra cutouts. Quick to do with plasterboard, but much slower using Fermacell which required the use of a multitool.

Ground floor WC.

The living room was awkward because the OSB that had been fitted during the timber frame construction was not quite level. Not a problem if you're employing a plasterer as they can level it out when they skim the walls, but our Fermacell boards are pretty much the finished wall surface, so needed to be fitted as perfectly as possible.

We used a laser to mark a line where the board needed to sit if it was level...





... and used packers (different colours represent different thicknesses) to make sure the board will follow that line once it is screwed in.





Another late night messing around with these pesky boards. The Fermacell sheets do give very good results, but if we'd known it was going to be this much time and trouble to fit them, then we'd have just stuck with conventional plasterboard covered with plaster.





Boarding began to feel like a never-ending story and no matter how much we did, there always seemed to be more areas waiting to be done... Upstairs we decided to tackle the big bedroom wall.

Once again, we needed to mess around with dozens of packers to level out a wall that hadn't been built straight enough.

We worked out the arrangement of the boards carefully using a staggered pattern to reduce the possibility of any cracks developing in future.

With no proper platform to work on, we also made sure that the top panel wasn't going to be too large. A smaller shape would be much lighter and hopefully allow us to lift it into place using two ladders.

Alan made a template of the top panel to ensure it would fit perfectly (though he does look a bit confused about the part he's just cut out!)

Once the big wall was complete, we lined the inside of the walk-in wardrobe.

We tried to use up all the leftover offcuts of Fermacell inside cupboards. 

A patchwork of offcuts glued together; it took a bit longer to do than using full sheets, but it was a good way to use up all the odd bits we had left over (especially as we were running low on materials). The joints will all be covered using special compound and as they are in a cupboard, any lines will be a lot less noticeable than if they were on the wall of one of the rooms. 

Upstairs landing.

The entrance to the main bedroom was another troublesome wall that needed our now-ubiquitous collection of packers to straighten it out.

Inside bedroom 2. Yep, more boarding.

The built-in cupboards in bedroom 2 and 3 both needed boarding... inside and out. Oh, goody.

We put acoustic insulation in the cupboards so that there were effectively two soundproofed walls between the two 'adjoining' bedrooms.

Another late night spent finishing the bedroom 2 cupboard...

... and up early the next day to do exactly the same again for bedroom 3. OH, GOODY!

Boards going up inside the cupboard...

... then acoustic insulation and sorting out the wiring...

... before finally boarding around the doorway.

The heating system can't be commissioned until the electrics are completed. But the electrics can't be completed until we finish the boarding... The pressure to get this job finished was really getting us down and to make matters worse, it was starting to get bloody cold in there too!





Cutting out holes for the bathroom light switch and thermostat.

The doorways to the bathroom and the landing cupboard.

The last doorway almost done. Sadly, that's not quite the last of the boarding...