Started working on the ceiling Monday, 02-Aug-21 22:05:40 CEST

The gypsum plate swap Monday, 16-Aug-21 21:42:31 CEST

Sunday, 08-Aug-21 21:18:43 CEST

Worked on the ceiling

This week we worked on the ceiling in the living room and gypsum plates on the first floor.

Monday 2 August

It is already August; the time is flying. I wish I had enjoyed the summer a bit more than I am doing right now. Almost every evening at the new house, I say, “it would be so nice if we already lived here.” But we are not. This evening we worked on the ceiling in the living room again. I am making the beams straight by adding spacers. My wife was working on preparing for the seam of the beams in the kitchen.

When we were done with the ceiling for today, we went out in the garden to see how things are doing. It is perhaps necessary to move the sheep into the next area in a couple of days.

 

Tuesday 3 August

While I worked from our old home in the morning, the electrician called and told me that he had installed the missing outlet in the hall on the first floor. This feels great! It is not a pleasant feeling working towards blocking constraints because of other people. It is reality, and I can live with it, but it could have been avoided.

Now the blockage on the first floor is resolved. We can put up gypsum plates on the first floor lying ready on the top of the stack. When we put up the final plates on the first floor, we can hoist the rest down for use on the ground floor. When the stack of gypsum plates in the hobby room on the first floor is gone, we have full access to the floor in the hobby room, and we can drive around with a scaffold in that room.

Right now, the building activities are a little like a three by three slide puzzle with one piece missing. You can move the hole around to solve the puzzle. There is progress. Let us cling to that feeling.

In the evening we went to the new house to see the missing outlet. Well… The cable was there. I had asked for an additional cable for the Internet, but that was not honored. I have to figure out if I am okay with that. Perhaps it is easier to just go with the flow and accept fate this time. Perhaps I will drag the extra cable for the Internet myself. I will look into that tomorrow.

For the rest of the evening, we continued on the ceiling in the living room and kitchen. We will finish that work, then move back to the first floor and continue on the gypsum plates. I straightened beams in the living room, and my wife put up beams for the seams in the kitchen ceiling.

While we worked on the ceiling, we noticed a delivery van from a supermarket that came with groceries for our neighbors. Our sheep came running to greet him, and he thought this was very funny and made pictures of our ladies. When the crates were delivered, he stopped and had a chat with them, but they had lost interest in him.

I discovered another issue with the beams in the living room along the walls. Most construction beams of the floor are running in from east to west. There are perpendicular shorter beams along the wall, and we were under the impression that they would be in line with the east to west beams, but that is not the case. There is a 5-millimeter height deviation. Currently, the result is that the gypsum will break along the wall if we were to fasten the gypsum on the beam running along the wall. I think we will need to compensate for this height difference so that the gypsum will not break. I will look into this also tomorrow.

Wednesday 4 August

When we arrived at the new house, after lunch, I looked into whether I could create a line for Internet in the hall. I found pipes among the things of our electrician. Then I drilled a hole for the pipe and dragged it myself as I wanted it to be. It took less than 20 minutes. Now obviously, the pipe needs to be filled with the cable, but I think I can manage even that. With the hurdle resolved of the missing outlet on the first floor, we went back and finished the ceiling beams.

I discovered yesterday that the beams along the wall were not in line with the beams running across. I had some time to think about a solution. I decided to put blocks of the beams running across the room so that the beam running along the wall could rest on the blocks. It was not so complicated, and it worked! The beam along the wall came down 5 millimeters. Now the gypsum will not break when we are screwing it onto the beams.

With the leveling fixes, I must say that the first euphoria over that it is so fun and straightforward to put up beams in the ceiling is healed. We got back to reality and can conclude this was a little more complicated than first anticipated. Oh well, we learned this as well, and the end result will be good.

With this done, we relocated to the first floor again to work on the gypsum project on the first floor. We mounted three plates. These plates have two long sides with indention for putty. The top and bottom of the plates do not need that indention. We made a hole in the first plate for the outlet with the electricity and the Internet cables. I know there is something like WIFI, but I have mixed feelings bout WIFI in general. I think we will be able to run a gigabit network in the cables. There will be speeds in the cables that WIFI will never match. Secondly, I think there are security issues with WIFI. Not so that you got any problems with WIFI right now, but there can come a time when you for professional use should avoid using WIFI. I am just anticipating that future. This corner might be a temporary work spot, so I would like to have Internet via cable here.

It was great to advance the gypsum project. With the detailed plan for handling the first-floor ceiling, we know how many plates will be used and where. 25 plates still need to be moved up to the first floor.

When we were done with the gypsum today, we went outside and pottered around in the garden. I had a look at our helophyte filter. The filter was installed on 16 December 2020. We got reed growing in the filter, and it is taking on. It is not going especially fast, but it is growing, and that is good. When the filter is fully established, the reed will be thick and tall. It will look nice.

We wanted to cover the black plastic edge, and we have seen examples of this with roof tiles. We got roof tiles on 12 June for this, but nothing happened to the tiles until today. I had the idea to create corner tiles by cutting two tiles at 45 degrees angle. I managed to cut the first tile on the first attempt! The second until the fourth tile also broke. Then I gave up for today. For this work, I used the angle grinder, but I only got disks for cutting metal. If I get disks for concrete, it will be much easier to cut the tiles. This story will be continued when I got the concrete disks.

Thursday 5 August

We start to get an idea about how much work we have until the end of October. It is not totally clear, though, how well it goes with the deadline. My wife and I are different in these things. She is more quantitative than I am. I am figuring out how things work and are constructed while she counts things. She said this morning that we got ten weekends left to work on the house before the floor deadline. I had not been counting on that. We have a lot of things to do before the floor can be installed. We can also have a plan B, namely, carrying out the remaining gypsum plates and putting them in the container so they are out of the way. That plan means we need need to have no plates left on the first floor. My wife agreed it was good with a proper plan B, so this means that finishing all plate work on the first floor got a higher priority from now on.

Tonight we finished the south wall of the hall. When we were done, we did not really have a next project ready to start on. What should we do now? We decided to use one final plate from the stack on the first floor. It will be placed on the east wall of the hall, the top plate. After that, we don’t need any more of the plates in the stack. The rest needs to be moved down. I am not looking forward to that task. We can use more of the plates we already moved upstairs on 17 and 18 July. 14 of these plates are left. We will put them up on walls to have more space to lift more plates to the first floor.

As I said before, the project is right now a little bit like a 3 by 3 slide puzzle. It had been better if the builder had set a good stack of plates on each floor, but they did not do that. This part feels frustrating, but I also understand it. They have so many things to do, and we were just naive customers.

Under no circumstance could we had figured out beforehand that we got inconvenient stacks of plates lifted in with the crane before the roof was put on.

Perhaps hoisting plates down is more straightforward than hoisting them up. I don’t know.

The rest of the evening, we were pottering around in the garden. I placed a couple of bricks behind the roof tiles that I worked on yesterday to make the border of the helophyte filter look nicer. We weeded in our gardens. It was a delightful evening.

There was one thing we did not do tonight: Move the sheep. Our three ladies got enough to eat where they are right now. Our son came with us tonight if we had to move the sheep, but that was unnecessary. I do think Saturday we might need to move them. They are so sweet. I would instead not want to move them tomorrow evening because I am always rather tired on Friday evening. Of course, if that is what is required, we will do it anyway.

Friday 6 August

It is freaking Friday already! The time goes so quickly right now. It is like being in a time warp, snap with the fingers, and woosh, the week passed by. Our patient is getting better and better. She is not having so much pain anymore. The worst moment of the day is in the morning. That is a little bad because she occasionally had a morning mood. Well, not always, but it could happen.

Today we had a regular day working from home. I went to the office for a short while, but most of the day, I worked from home.

After work, we went to the new house. We had decided to do all the plates in the hobby room on the first floor that we could reach from the floor. There is more work to do higher up in the room, but we need the scaffold, but we still got a stack of gypsum there, so that needs to be removed before we can build the scaffold.

There is a metal bar sticking up along a beam in the east wall of the hobby room. We already removed all the nails and sunk them. We had to align the metal bar with the rest of the wall, but that succeeded.

Next up, we started preparing the gypsum plate for this section of the wall. We cut out paper at the back of the plate and took away gypsum to make it fit over the metal bar. The sun had set, and it quickly became too dark to work on this. At last, we could relax and celebrate Friday.

Saturday 7 August

It is Saturday! We were a bit slow this morning. At the new house, we decided to start working right away, with no time for deferring work with a cup of coffee.

The plate we had prepared the day before fit pretty well on the wall. Then we placed one plate after another. It was still morning when we had finished the plates along the east wall of the hobby room. Then we had our cup of coffee.

The sheep were calm this morning. They still had plenty of grass to eat, and that was perfect because otherwise, we had been moving their fence as well.

We started working on the opposite wall, the west wall of the hobby room. Also, here we placed the first row of plates along the floor.

While we worked on that, we got an unexpected visit from our electrician! He came and started working on the outlets in the workshop. Absolutely fantastic. He mounted the cables in the walls so that the walls were ready to be sealed with gypsum.

We continued working on the west wall, and it also got finished today. It started to become an all-time high of gypsum mounting. Although we don’t keep track of how many plates we mounted and when. But it was feeling like we had captured the flow today.

I feel that we were working really well together today. As I told you before, we both have our specialties; my wife is good at numbers. I got a well-developed sense of three-dimensional space. My wife is doing better than me by measuring and drawing what needs to be cut on a plate. That said, I am good at making a construction drawings with measurements. Then put up the plate. I am climbing the ladder and make sure the plate slid into the correct position. In between the main tasks, there are minute small things we need to do for each other. If I am going to saw something with a power tool, I first give my wife the hearing protection. I try to work with earplugs that work best for me. When we got the flow, it is feeling good. It is like you get new energy from working with the flow. There are many ways the flow can break down. One way to not get into a flow is to use new work procedures all the time. We try to figure out what is working for both of us and stick to that.

When cutting out the hole for an outlet, there is always a piece of gypsum left. We got electricity and an extra outlet for CAT6 data in some places in the house, such as the Internet. The electricity often comes in bundles of two, and then the CAT6 outlet is connected to the two first. We have cut out a number of these holes, and I saw the cutout and thought it looked funny, almost like a doll. Here she is, the outlet doll!

Did we stop there? Actually, we didn’t! Next to the hobby room on the first floor, we got a hall outside the bedroom. It was feeling perfectly suitable to put up gypsum on that little wall as well. Strictly speaking, we should have used a four-sided plate, but we skipped that and applied a scrap piece. It can be so that we will use much more energy on applying putty to these incorrect seams. It can also be so that we find a way to make even incorrect seams look nice, and much of the headache we have with gypsum could have been avoided. These are things we don’t know.

To all good things comes an end. I was absolutely smacked tired when we came to our old home. I had a short power nap. My wife made delicious fille courgettes that she had harvested in our new garden.

I hope we can have an efficient day tomorrow as well. That would be fantastic.

Sunday 8 August

This morning I had sore feet and hands. That is usually a sign that yesterday I worked hard. We came to the new house in a timely fashion. Today, we had a series of smaller tasks, and I already know it is not ideal for great flow. We wanted to finish applying gypsum to the ceiling and wall outside the bedroom and hobby room on the first floor. We did the triangles above the doors on either side of the hall. Here we made use of plates with two sides ready for putty.

We could reach the entire ceiling from ladders here, so there was no need for a scaffold in this room. That was good because we had no room for one either. Luckily, there was room for the gypsum elevator so we could hoist up the plate into the ceiling.

It turned out to be so that the room was not perfectly square! That caused us some challenges. Instead of fixing the issue, we had lunch. Sometimes a lunch break is solving issues by itself. After lunch, we concluded how to get the plate up for the correct position. It went much more straightforward. At some places, we had a little more gap compared to other places. In the end, this does not matter because we will apply putty to all seams.

We filled the ceiling with the help of three plates. One of the plates was a bathroom type of green gypsum. It is so lovely to have another room finished.

Although it is lovely to have one more room finished, it had been majestic to have the vertical walls of all rooms finished this Sunday, but that did not work out. The final wall of the first floor is in the hall towards the bedroom. That is the place where we leaned the plates we hoisted up on 18 July. We only got two plates left of that stack, so moving those out of the way was easy. When changing the work area, you can be almost sure that there will be surprises, so this time, we had to put more isolation in the final wall. We started on this, but that was not finished.

We are slowly coming to the situation that we need to work on the big dreaded plate swap. I have been wondering if there are ways to improve the hoisting somewhat. Today we discussed this extensively, and I came up with a new suggestion for doing it. It is primarily the hoisting of plates from the first floor down to the ground floor that I have been thinking about. Look, when hoisting things up, the best thing is to put the plates below the cable. When hoisting things down, we don’t have anything like that. So how are we supposed to do that? I suggested that we have a temporary platform in the staircase where we load the plates, lift them up a little bit, remove the platform and let them down to the first floor. The benefit of this method is that we can safely prepare for the hoist.

I only need to create a temporary platform at the floor level in the staircase hole. I tried to put up a bar at the correct height, but we don’t have a scaffold pipe of the exact length to fit that place. On a slightly higher position, there was the location for a regular scaffold ledger. I am wondering how I will make a temporary platform that can extend the floor. It just needs to stand up to 400 kilos? I put up the ledger there. I need to experiment more with this another time. It is absolutely critical that the package of plates can be hoisted a little tiny bit so that the temporary platform can be removed. If that is not possible, then the whole plan will not work.

This cliffhanger, as it were, concludes this week. We are making good progress, but we have no idea if we will make it until the floor deadline, the end of October. We thought we would move the sheep halfway last week, but the current area has proven to provide plenty of grass for the entire week. We will probably move them next week because the grass keeps growing elsewhere, and it is better to have it grazed before it gets too long.