All the plasterboard, acoustic insulation and timber cladding have arrived so we’re ready to get cracking on the next phase of the building.
With a forklift onsite we stacked the palettes of plasterboard and timber … and rapidly covered them in plastic sheeting as the rain was pretty constant.
Waited around for half the day for the final delivery of insulation but it is all there now and ready to go.
Friday afternoon, the hardener has been applied to all the concrete floors and it is starting to take shape. The Concrete Concepts guys will be back to carry out the final polishing and finishing once the walls have been plaster boarded and plastered.
Next Monday is a big delivery day with the timber battens and larch cladding arriving on site, plasterboard and wall & ceiling insulation arrive too.
We’ve opted for a 100mm cladding board using Siberian larch and a shadow gap profile. Supplied by Corell Timber from Athlone. The larch has a fractionally shorter lifespan (40 years) when compared to cedar (60 years) but we’ll not worry about that now. We also like the paler colour of the larch and it will silver nicely over the next few years as it weathers.
With all the plaster board on site and the insulation for the internal partitions and ceilings we can begin boarding-out the house just before Christmas. Hopefully we will be starting the plastering in mid January.
The timber stairs also arrive next week but I don’t think we will fit them until January at this stage.
Between the completion of the first fix electrics & plumbing and the slabbing of the plasterboard, we’ve a week to copmplete the grind and first polish of the floors.
Concrete Concepts are back onsite and loaded with machinery for the grinding of the floors. These giant grinding machines scour the surface of the concrete, removing the top couple of millimetres of concrete and revealing the stones and aggregate that make up the surface of the floor. Our concrete mix uses a 100mm local limestone chip which has a blue-ish tinge to the grey stone look and smaller flecks of white, black & brown.
It’ll take a few days to grind all the floors, fill any of the small pits on the surface and apply the hardener but hopefully by the weekend we’ll have a good idea of what the floors are looking like.
Day 2 and grinding is completed in the kitchen/dining and utility & pantry rooms and filler applied to all areas. This filler is a mix of dust from the concrete itself and a special mix which fills all the tiny pits and hollows in the ground surface. A finer grind after the filler has set will produce a smooth surface ready to take the hardener which will be applied.
Day 3 and the grinding continues in the bedroom, bathroom and service room.
We have chosen to finish the exterior of the ground floor of our house with an Aquapanel Cement Board System. This is a type of special plasterboard with a high performance render applied.
You can see more on the Greenspan Aquapanel system here.
It is well suited to our Kingspan frame system as it is lighweight, weatherproof and easy to maintain.
The work is now underway with the first delivery of Aquapanel Boards, beading, basecoat and mesh strips. The entire ground floor has to be battened-out with 37mm vertical battens and all windows, doors have to be edged before the boards are fixed.
We plan to use a mineral render and finish which should give us a long-lasting & brilliant white finish that we can wash down every year with a power hose to keep it clean.
The week was very busy with the completion of the HRV system (a few final pipes and joints to be made) and the first fix plumbing.
We’ve had the services of Kieran Linnane for our plumbing and his group of lads turned up on Thursday and managed to fit most of the hot & cold water pipework and connections for the toilets in just one day!
The fun was getting the toilets, cisterns and sinks on site in advance so that the plumbers could get the correct positions for the sanitaryware. We managed to get most (but not quite all) of the bits and pieces in place and hopefully the rest will arrive in the next few days so that they can call back and finish off.
The plumbers will be back again once the walls have been plasterboarded and we are ready to fix the sinks, toilets and showers.
Thursday 22nd November and the installation of the Heat Recovery Ventilation System has commenced.
Windy City Comfort from Monaghan are the installation company for the MHRV system.
All the pipework for the ducting , connectors and the 2 units were delivered first thing on the 22nd and the slow process of mapping out the layout began.
There were a few hurdles to overcome with a couple of points in the layout drawings not working out on site. Beams and bracing in the wrong places but Aidan McCarra was able to find solutions and soon enough the pipework was taking shape.
It’s going to take about 4 days to complete and then we wait until the house is finished and plasterboarded etc. before the system is commissioned and tested.
Friday morning the window installation began. The first thing was to take the windows from the palette and work out where they go … and these triple glazed units are HEAVY!!
The living room windows and sliding door proved too much for the crew of three so it was decided to await reinforcements on Monday and to install the ground floor windows.
The windows we have chosen are the Perfectline 70mm triple glazed units finished in a dark grey anthracite colour. The smooth grey (RAL 7016) colour was also chosen for the Main Door & Back Door and will be used on the metal parapet capping around the roofs. The frames are all using VEKA profiles with Winkhaus tilt & turn mechanisms.
The tilt & turn mechanisms are handy as they can be opened slightly for ventilation or fully opened to clean or yodel!!
By end of Friday all the smaller windows on the ground floor and the back door were in place. Monday saw the complete installation of the 7 windows upstairs. The guys from Amberline are efficient & thoroughly good to deal with.
The windows arrived on Tuesday and are now stacked and ready for installation beginning tomorrow.
All the way from the factory in Poland to the site in Quin and wrapped in plastic we had to get a forklift to unload the pallets from the trailer. With lots of careful movements and inching slowly from the gate to the side of the house, the 2 pallets of windows were successfully deposited on the patio.
The crew arrive Friday to begin installation and should be completed early next week.
Our windows are en-route from Poland and should be ready to begin installation tomorrow Tuesday 13th November.
The windows are VEKA profiles from Amberline Ireland and feature a 70mm PVC profile and triple glazed units with tilt & turn WinkHaus hinges on all the opening windows.
Amberline Ireland are the suppliers of all our windows, sliding door and front door and were selected for their combination of cost, expertise and a number of client testimonials/ recommendations.
We are really looking forward to getting the windows installed so the house can dry out and we can begin the interior plumbing & electrical fit-out.
On a Bank Holiday Monday the team from Bautech Construction arrived bright and early to begin covering the roof.
The roofing system uses fibreglass as the waterproof covering. The timber deck is carefully covered with a series of fibreglass fillet pieces to round all the corners and provide a continuous surface.
The timber edges on the roof gulleys are sanded and rounded. Once it has been fully cleaned and any damp spots have been blowtorched to ensure a dry surface the covering begins. Strips of fibreglass sheet are fixed in the gulleys and parapet to form the edges and along any joints before the larger sheets are applied to the main rood surface. Special rollers ensure the sheets are fully embedded in the resin and there are no air pockets or bubbles.
Once cured and dry the translucent fibreglass is covered in a resin which offers fire-retardant features and a nice continuous colour finish .. the resin can be coloured but we were happy with the dark grey colour that it comes in by default.
With the malodorous weather this week, the BauTech guys have been challenged to keep the work areas weather-tight and dry so they can work. With some clever timber work and plastic sheeting they’ve managed to create tent structures over the sub-roof areas to enable them to work through the showers.
