Carpentry: 1st fix - door linings

Who needs a van when you've got a Mazda? Room for 45 planks (46 if you include the driver).  

This was how we transported the door liners to the house. We never see police cars patrolling the roads in our area, so Alan couldn't believe it when he turned a corner in his 'mobile skip' to find two policemen parked right in front of him. Luckily, as he trundled past, all they did was sit there open-mouthed and confused about what they had just witnessed... 

To finish boarding the walls, we had to install all the door liners. These are available to buy off the shelf quite cheaply, as long as you are using standard sizes. Of course, using a non-standard system like Fermacell for boarding the walls, meant that door liners designed for plasterboard-covered-with-plaster were going to be too wide. Grr!

The most economical solution was to buy the standard size door liners and get them planed down to size at a local timber yard. They agreed to plane down all 45 planks to the exact sizes we needed for just £20. Hurrah!

After spending so long boarding the walls, we were hoping to speed the build up by hiring a carpenter to fit the door liners. But once again, finding decent tradesmen in our area who weren't booked up for months in advance or weren't quoting a king's ransom (or who could be bothered to even call us back) proved impossible, so we decided to take on the job ourselves.

Following much research, we got started. The first job was to assemble the door liners using glue and screws. Alan also cut the legs down to the right height for our doorway. 

It's crucial that the door liners are exactly the right size or the doors won't fit properly. Once we'd measured the frame and lined it up perfectly square, we screwed in battens to brace the liner and prevent it getting knocked out of alignment during fitting.

Since it was our first attempt at fitting a door lining we spent a long time making sure everything was exactly right. Lots of checking and re-checking using the laser and spirit levels until it was lined up correctly from every angle.

The door lining needs to support the weight of a heavy door swinging on hinges, so a lot of long screws are used to secure it in place. We used packers to make sure the wood didn't get twisted as the screws went in and also to take out any warps or twists in the liner itself.

Once it was all fixed in place, we could remove the battens we'd used for bracing. One down, 14 to go.

Before fitting each door liner, we beefed up the studwork with extra noggins to make sure everything would be absolutely rigid.

The site inspector arrived to make sure the new noggin work was up to scratch...

...and scrutinised the job from top...

...to bottom.

The door liner for the study/office going in. We used a laser (just visible glowing on the right) to set up the positioning initially. Once the packers were in, we found fine adjustments easier using a long spirit level; when the level sits perfectly flat against the liner with no visible gaps, then the liner has to be straight.

That's the study done. It will be much easier to board accurately around the doorway now the liner is in.

We had quite a lot of door liners to put together so started something of a production line in the kitchen. To make it easier, the door liners come with pre-cut slots that match two standard door sizes. Most of the doors in the house use the larger size, but we decided to use the narrower size for cupboard doors.

These are two of the smaller size liners assembled and ready to be fitted in the main bedroom.  

The larger-sized doors used everywhere else in the house are designed to allow wheelchair access, which makes them rather unsuitable for smaller rooms and cupboards because they take up quite a lot of space. So we decided to use the narrower doors for both the walk-in wardrobe and en-suite in the main bedroom.

Switching to the narrower door liners meant that we had to make changes to the studwork. That was a bit of a pain but having previously moved the toilet in the en-suite, we needed to make sure that the door would have enough space to swing clearly past the toilet pan.

The site inspector inspecting the new studwork and door liners. It's always a tense time waiting for his approval.

Nothing escapes the scrutiny of the site inspector. Once he was satisfied with the new door liners, he made an unexpected move to inspect... 

...me!

Once the door liners had been installed, we cut away any protruding packers using a multi-tool (these will only get in the way when we come to board around the area).

Completed door liners. Walk-in wardrobe on the left and en-suite on the right.

The landing cupboard upstairs had been an afterthought, added at the end of the corridor primarily to store the heating manifold, bathroom toilet cistern and ventilation pipework. As it had never been part of the house plans, there was no studwork for it, so we made up our own (out of leftover materials, of course).

Fitting the studwork around the back of the toilet cistern (on the left of the picture) proved a little awkward.

Such a small cupboard only needs a small door, so we decided to use even narrower doors for this and the larder downstairs. It would mean customising the door liners (which are only pre-cut for two sizes of doors) but it would still allow for a standard-sized door when we come to buy those.

Alan came up with an interesting way of securing the stud walls, using all manner of screws and bolts.

The toilet frame in the bathroom was bolted to the new stud wall to make sure it was absolutely rock solid. You don't want any movement in your wall-hanging toilets (snigger!)





Once the landing cupboard studwork was in, we could install the bathroom door liner. 

Ugh! More studwork to re-do. The cupboards in bedroom 2 and 3 were originally supplied with large apertures for sliding doors (not sure how that happened). Then Alan reduced the studwork to fit the large size doors we thought we'd be using. Now we needed to take it all apart again, in order to accommodate the narrower doors we'd decided to use for all our cupboards.

Having used good-quality screws rather than nails, it wasn't too hard to dismantle the studwork we'd already built.

A few longer noggins and it wasn't too long before the studwork was ready for the new smaller-sized door liner.

Done.

Exactly the same job had to be done in bedroom 2. 

Once the door liners had been fitted and the packers cut away, the last job was to foam all the gaps. This was a tip from one of the carpenters we spoke to and it worked very well; once the foam had dried the whole thing felt incredibly rigid and less hollow sounding. The doors should hopefully have a reassuringly solid 'thunk' when they close.

The load bearing walls in the ground floor presented more of a challenge. Firstly, they hadn't been installed perfectly square or indeed to the correct width by the timber frame company and secondly, being skinned in a layer of OSB meant it was impossible to change any of the studwork. Hmm. 

An electric planer helped deal with the studwork being too tight; having four studs nail-gunned together on either side of the door meant that was the only way to widen the opening anyway.

The next thing was to make sure all the doors in the hallway were the same height. We used the laser to set the level to match the previously-installed study door.

Same again for the kitchen door.

Spooky. Our cheapo laser worked better in the dark so we didn't mind working late.





The studwork around the utility room entrance also needed extensive surgery to get the door liners to fit. We weren't sure if the timber frame company had got it slightly wrong, or whether it had moved as the house settled (it had been up for a couple of years after all...)

We couldn't find any door liners pre-cut for narrower doors, but it wasn't much trouble to modify the ones we had. Alan marked out the size we would need...   

...then used a chisel to cut new slots.

Same process as before for assembling the two smaller door liners.

One of the extra-narrow door liners was for the larder. The kitchen island won't be too far from the larder, so a wide door would have just got in the way.

The other extra-narrow door liner fitted neatly into the new studwork for the landing cupboard.  

It's finally starting to look like a cupboard.

Because of the layout of the outside walls, the door liner for the main bedroom was a completely different size to all the others. There was no way to modify an off-the-shelf door liner, so Alan made up his own.

He bought some redwood planks and decided to try cutting out all the slots for the legs using a chopsaw rather than a chisel (hurrah for the internet).

After setting the depth of the cut using some scrap wood, it was just a matter of making several cuts very close together. 

A lot easier than using a chisel. And the wood was much better quality than the standard door liners we bought. Next time, we'll just make our own...

The custom chunky main bedroom liner. The last one to roll off the production line (thank goodness). 

And here it is after we fitted it. Yay!

Heating: Heat pump - mechanical installation

An early start for us to make sure everything was ready for the heating engineer. We call this picture 'Sunrise With Rubble'.

The heating company had given us a checklist of all their requirements; where the water supply should be located, what flow rate and pressure was needed, dimensions of concrete plinth, etc. Rather helpfully, they also phoned regularly and paid us a visit to check on progress, prior to the installation date so we were confident everything had been set up correctly.  

The heating engineer, Richard, about to drill holes through the walls for the heating pipes. We had visions of the render getting smashed to smithereens or the drill going straight through the wrong part of the wall...   

Phew! No problems with the render and a nice clean job.

Insulated flow and return pipes fit neatly into the holes. These will carry the heated water from the heat pump to the underfloor manifolds and hot water cylinder, via pipes (fitted ages ago) that run under the screed.  

The other side of the drilled wall, showing where the flow and return pipes enter the WC. We removed the toilet cistern and frame for access. It's a tight squeeze to fit everything in, but should result in a very tidy job once it's all boxed in. 

The flow and return pipes finished off, tested for leaks and insulated.

The flexible metal pipes attached to the heat pump outside the house are heavily insulated to minimise heat loss and make the unit as thermally efficient as possible.

Richard plumbing in the water cylinder and making all the connections to the underfloor heating manifolds that we installed. It's so nice to watch someone else working for a change.

We got Richard to install the two pressure vessels (the small grey and white cylinders) as low and as close to the water cylinder as he could, to allow as much room as possible for the stairs. 

The water cylinder plumbed in and pressure-tested. The pipework around the back of the cylinder meant that it couldn't be pushed as far into the corner as we'd hoped, which could cause us big problems when eventually fitting the stairs. (Oops. With hindsight, we should have had the stair plans drawn up before fitting the cylinder...)    

We used a laser to calculate exactly how high the stairs would be and crucially, whether they would clear the cylinder or not. It looked very, very tight...

We even tried making up a cardboard template to test whether we had enough room. Maybe, just...   

Richard was pleased that we'd left the utility room wall open, as it allowed him to make some changes to the pipework to ensure the installation was as neat as possible. Alan re-did the pushfit plumbing pipes that connect to the new water cylinder, while I insulated all the heating pipes. We also re-routed all the wiring which had just been shoved away from the pipework while it was being soldered.

While the utility room wall was open, Alan also ran a new pipe to the kitchen alcove so that the fridge/freezer will have its own water supply.

Plumbed.

Soundproofed.

Boarded.

The site inspector took a much-needed break from all the inspecting.

Plumbing: More 1st fix and more boarding

Still boarding... (sigh)

We had to finish all the plumbing before we could board the utility room & WC on the ground floor. Although most of the pipework had been fitted months ago, there were some changes we needed to make to the plumbing before finally burying it in the wall.

Boarding the WC was relatively straightforward, although as usual we did have to take apart the doorway in order to fit sheets of Fermacell into the room.





There was no point boarding around the toilet cistern yet, as we would have to remove it in order to fit the heat pump pipework, but we were able to board around the toilet window.

After what seemed like an eternity boarding with Fermacell, we became very well practised at cutting out windows.





All that untidy silver-foil around the windows will eventually be covered up with Fermacell (oh goody, more boarding) but we decided to put off doing all the window reveals until last. We are pretty tight on materials so rather than cut into any full sheets of Fermacell, we have been saving up all the off-cuts for boarding these small areas. Also, we really haven't figured out how on earth we are going to fix boards neatly around those twisted metal straps that hold the windows in place yet! Sadly there doesn't appear to be a guidebook for building houses so we often have to come up with solutions to problems on our own...

Before boarding the utility room, we needed to address the issues with the pipework. The main supply from the borehole (the blue pipe pictured on the right) had been installed temporarily to a standpipe so that we could get fresh drinking water, but this would now have to be removed so that we could connect to the main network of pipes in the house. Alan had never been happy with the main supply pipes originally installed by the plumber (the grey pipes) so yet again he decided to rip them all out and do them himself.

Alan's new main supply pipe taking shape; it goes around the room and through the wall to where the water cylinder will be sited. With the heat pump and water cylinder now scheduled for installation, we needed to make sure that the water supply was 'live'. That also meant we had to remove the temporary tap and install a stopcock in its place, but since we get all our drinking water from that standpipe we would need to find a new location for a tap...

... and here's the perfect location. Rather than install another temporary tap indoors, we decided to fit an outside tap. We wanted to install a permanent tap for the garden and this way, we could still have access to clean drinking water. On the downside, we'd still have to fill bottles of water every day, in all weather, until the house is habitable.

Alan drilled a hole through the wall and lined it with a section of plastic pipe to use as a conduit.

Next he fitted the pipework inside the conduit and a brass collar to the wall.

And lastly the tap itself. The site inspector was on hand to supervise proceedings but seemed distinctly underwhelmed.

To complicate matters slightly, the section of pipe that would feed the outside tap would not be live until the water cylinder was fitted, so Alan decided to put in a temporary pipe 'bypass' that we could easily replace with a drain valve later.

After shutting off the water supply from the borehole, Alan fitted a new stopcock. With the pipework complete, we could finally get on with the boarding.

The main stopcock needs to be accessible so this section of pipework is outside of the boarding and will eventually sit within a kitchen cupboard. From there, we'll also be able to isolate the outside tap (to prevent it freezing in winter). Alan also fitted a non-return valve to stop any dirt or bugs from the garden finding their way back into our main water supply.

The temporary pipe 'bypass' sitting alongside the pipe to which it will eventually be permanently connected.

Boarding the rest of the utility room wasn't too bad. As long as we didn't accidentally drive any screws straight through any of the pipes that lurked below (we didn't).

More pipes, more back boxes, more cutting out.

We decided not to board this section of the utility wall until the heating engineer had finished, just in case he needed to change any of the pipes (he did...)

Here's the other side of the same wall that will eventually make up the cupboard under the stairs. This is where the water cylinder is going to be fitted, so we needed to get the whole area ready before the rapidly-approaching installation date.  

The first job was to make up a stud wall that would act as the back of the cupboard. 

As usual, we didn't have any plans to work from so it took a bit of time to work out exactly where everything was going to be sited and how it would all fit together.

The other side of the wall is going to be an alcove for the kitchen fridge-freezer.

Once the boarding was up it started looking more like a cupboard.

The finished boarding for the cupboard under the stairs. We didn't fancy trying to paint around the heating cylinder and pipework after it had been fitted, so decided to completely finish and paint the cupboard walls before the installation date.

Having to get the area prepared for a deadline proved very useful as it allowed us to practice the finishing processes required for Fermacell board in a cupboard (where no-one will see any of our mistakes!)

Filling the joints between the boards and screwholes with the Fermacell jointing compound took little a bit of practice, but Alan's plastering course helped with that.

Once the joints were dry, we sanded them down and the walls were ready for the Fermacell FST (Fine Surface Treatment). This is a smooth filler that you spread over the walls with a trowel, then scrape off to leave an ultra-thin layer that acts as a skim coat. It took several attempts (and much swearing) to work out exactly how much we should be troweling on and scraping off, but eventually we found a method that seemed to work.

The picture below shows the wall after we had covered it with FST. We were quite amazed to see that all the joints were completely concealed, especially as the light from that window right against the wall would show up any imperfections.

The last job was to add a couple of coats of paint.

The 'cupboard under the stairs' painted and ready for the water cylinder.