Worked on the ceiling Sunday, 08-Aug-21 21:18:43 CEST

Finished the ceiling of the hobby room Sunday, 22-Aug-21 17:23:25 CEST

Monday, 16-Aug-21 21:42:31 CEST

The gypsum plate swap

This week we worked on the gypsum plate swap, moved plates up and down.

Monday 9 August

Today the first part of the Sixth Assessment Report from IPCC was released. I will depart slightly from the story about my house and talk about the IPCC report, and below my findings of the report, I continue the usual rattle about the building of our future house.

There was a press conference about the report. The rest of my life will be influenced by what is presented at this press conference. Here is a very brief and shallow representation of the press conference.

The panelists were very proud of the report. Due to the pandemic, they had to do the work remotely, which worked out very well.

Inger Andersen held a speech where she said that all governments had to live up to the already made promises, and countries that still have not made any promises also need to finish their plans.

Petteri Taalas said we are heading for 2 to 3 degrees right now. The conclusions are crystal clear; governments need to increase their ambitions.

Hoesen Lee started to present the report. He said there are no places on the planet where you can hide from the consequence of climate change. It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.

Valerie Masson-Delmotte and Fanmau Zhai talked through the report. If we can rapidly reduce CO₂ emissions, then temperatures can be lower. What is new in this report is the advanced understanding of how human activities change the climate. CO₂ increases the temperature, and pollution cause cooling. Oceans are acidifying. Glaciers are decreasing.

The new report is providing a more detailed regional view of the consequences of climate change. Here is a link to an interactive map to find out about the climate in regions of the world.

Some changes due to climate change can be slowed down or stopped if emissions are reduced. That is good news!

The climate we experience in the future depends on our decisions now.

The report contains much information for risk management. As such, the report has influences on insurances worldwide but also the solvability of companies. They worked so hard on getting this report done one panelist got a little tired during the presentation.

In the previous reports, the area of climate sensitivity was fuzzier. In this report, recent advances in the science of climate sensitivity have been narrowed to be more precise. That is one of the reasons it is possible to create an interactive atlas showing regional information from around the world.

This new report is made with the ambition to make the outcome easier to understand. The writers have tried to find easier to understand sentences and illustrations conveying the message of the report. The report is written in three levels: easy, medium, and for specialists.

COP 26 was discussed during the questions section of the press conference.

From the questions and answers, it was clear that many questions aimed at the responsibility from specific countries or governments, but the core of IPCC is not to make such standpoints. IPCC presents the apolitical findings of apolitical scientists.

The IPCC press conference left me with mixed feelings. I knew all the things they said. Now it was repeated, and the message was more robust, bolder, and more precise. I am curious how the report is received by the people that still need to be convinced. It will take a couple of weeks, or perhaps months until I noticed the reply to this report.

I am not actively involved with the media promoting climate change denial propaganda, so it will take some time to figure out the response. It is not until several people around me are parroting the exact climate change denial key phrase that I know the response. At first, there is confusion about what IPCC is. That is a given. Climate change deniers at this time are incredibly thick-headed, so they gladly come up with cherry-picking data that was debunked 15 years ago. I think we go into a new era of climate change denial that is more subtle and hard to recognize. We will see. I am curious.

We went to the new house in the evening to give our sheep a new area to graze from. They were happy with the new patch. It took the whole evening to move the sheep and finish connecting the electricity for the fence.

Tuesday 10 August

Today we had a regular day from home. In the evening, we went to the new house to give our sheep their food supplement. We also put up the two final gypsum plates from the batch that we moved on 18 July.

We also discussed what we would buy tomorrow at the hardware store. We need a couple of beams for the wall between the workshop and the hall on the ground floor. This is caused by the builder using OSB plates for building the house. They are 122 centimeters wide. The gypsum plates are 120 centimeters wide. On a wall between the workshop and the hall, the first loadbearing beam is missing the first seam of the gypsum just slightly. In that case, it is possible to mount an extra beam on the loadbearing beam, but for the next gypsum seam that will not work, the seam is too far away from a loadbearing beam. In that case, we figured out we connect the extra beam on top and bottom. Then the difference is getting bigger and bigger.

We also need some styrofoam plates to fill up the space at the bottom of the walls on the first floor. If I remember it tomorrow at the store, we might buy plates for the angle grinder so that I can finish the helophyte filter decoration.

Wednesday 11 August

Today I first had half a day of regular work. Yea, it is what it is. After that, we went to the hardware store to get stuff for the building of our house. We picked up 6 more beams to support the seams of gypsum plates.

We also bought one package of styrofoam of 5 centimeters by 50 by 100 centimeters. We also bought a blade for cutting concrete, yeah.

Then we went to the new house to start working. We decided to move gypsum plates from the first floor down to the ground floor. We were going to try the method I had figured out last week. It turned out to be so we could move 5 plates per time, but not more. But that was sufficient. We worked the whole afternoon on moving down the plates, and indeed it was hard work.

At the end of the afternoon, when we got one or two packages left to move downstairs, it was so close to having this mission completed or missing one package of plates. It had been such a disappointment for me to abort the mission, but we were exhausted. We had a break and drank some water, and recovered a little.

We saved two plates on the first floor. You never know if they can be used, and it would be a pity to be forced to hoist them up again. So we left two plates. With that, all stacks of gypsum plates on the first floor were depleted! Now we had an empty hobby room for the first time! So great to experience the entire floor.

When the floor is empty, we can build the scaffold in this room, drive around with it, and finish the ceiling. It will be so great.

Thursday 12 August

This evening was slightly different because our son went and got his second jab. We brought him there. That means we are all fully vaccinated except our daughter. Her jabs are delayed slightly because she already had Corona.

Then we went to the new house to give our sheep their food supplement. They were happy to see us. The task for tonight was to break down the scaffold in the northeast room and move it to the hobby room on the first floor. It was late when this was finished. It is fantastic working with scaffolds. They are tools that truly make things possible. I had not thought that building a house would give me a particular relation to scaffolds. The system with building blocks you can put together is connecting really well with me as well.

Friday 13 August

It is Friday the 13^th, and it is not feeling that bad actually. As far as I know, it is the first Friday, the 13th of this year. We will see how this day is going. I am not at all a superstitious person. Actually, without calling myself an active atheist, I do not really believe in any god at all.

And additionally, not being superstitious. That sounds very uncomplicated, does it? I can agree that my life is complicated enough without having the burden of brain problems. I really do not like all sorts of constructions where people think they can delegate their accountability. It is cheating to do that. Then it does not matter if you are just stupid, using drugs, or adhere to a systematic scheme for delegated accountability and mind control. It is immoral to not live up to accountability, which I believe in.

Enough about those things for now.

We went to the house as we committed ourselves to do every day. For the ceiling in the hobby room, we had beams in the sea container. We ordered these beams already on 12 November 2020, and that is just 274 days ago. It is not even a whole year!

Then we stood looking up the wall and concluded it had been easier if we finished the wall before working on the ceiling. That was not the only conclusion we made. The second conclusion was that we had not enough beams to finish the ceiling. My wife figured it out within seconds after moving the last beam into the house and upstairs. “It is not enough,” she said. I was still happy we moved all the beams from the sea container into the house. “These are all the beams,” I said, and on that, she replied, “it is not enough.” It can be so that when we bought these beams, we still had the idea that the plates should be mounted at a distance of 60 centimeters, but I went looking in the blog, and we were already mounting ceiling beams at 40 centimeters at that time.

Well, we need to buy more beams before we got this finished, that is okay. Then we started moving the green plates at the top of the stack of gypsum plates in the living room. We put them upright towards the wall in the living room.

With the green plates out of the way, we just had to remove the pallet under the green plates.

Every time we take away a pallet under a stack of gypsum plates, it feels like an enormous milestone in the project of finishing the house. On the other hand, when the stack is gone, it is like it had never existed.

Moments later, we had maneuvered the pallet out of the house, and the top of the stack we need for the first floor was revealed. That is so great. Whenever the stack is lower, we get more and more the feeling for how the room will be when all is finished.

Saturday 14 August

It is halfway through the month. This morning when I worked on making our breakfast smoothie, one of the peaches opened up and revealed a perfect seed. Last summer, 24 August 2020, I tried planting a peach seed, but that did not work. I tried to force open the nut at that time, and I could only get half of the nut from the seed. So we are trying again. I planted it in the same pot as I used last time. I found the last seed-house in the soil, and it was empty! Then I placed the pot in the fridge like last time. I had the pot in the fridge for a really long time because I wanted it to be successful, but that did not work at all. This time I will have the pot in the fridge, perhaps only a month.

We went to the house, it was nice weather. Both our son and daughter came with us today. She is doing fine with the rehabilitation, and soon, she will go back to university when the next semester is starting.

In the morning, we had decided to move up gypsum plates from the first floor. We moved the plates from the stack and placed them below the hoist. When we had five plates below the hoist, we put the straps around the plates and hoisted them up to the first floor. We did three hoists like this, so we got 15 plates moved up to the first floor. That is enough to do almost the entire hobby room.

My parents-in-law came to us today. I had time to do a little task between the hoist of the plates and their arrival. I cut the corners of the roof tiles of the helophyte filter. The concrete saw blade cut through the tiles as if it was butter. Not a single time the tile broke when I did this. It looked gorgeous with the corners like so.

Then came my parents-in-law. They enjoyed seeing all the things we had done in the house. It was great to see them as well, and we are all vaccinated two times. They brought some plants and seeds as well. My mother-in-law suggested we put succulents on the tiles, and that is a great idea.

In the afternoon, we commenced working on the house; we decided to finish the walls of the hobby room to do the ceiling when that is done.

It turned out to be so that two of the beams on the wall were uneven. I had to shave off wood to prepare the wall for the gypsum. I produced a lot of wood curls!

Closing in the wall. We got one scrap plate standing against the wall. Tomorrow we can do the plates on the other side of the chimney.

Sunday 15 August

This morning when I woke up, I thought it was Monday. The second thought was that we had so much to do in the house that it was a pity it was already Monday. When I woke up for real, I concluded it was Sunday morning, and we had a full day to work on the house.

Our kids did not want to join us today. They had other plans. So it was the two of us, and the sheep obviously.

We finished the east wall of the hobby room, followed by the west wall.

When the west wall was finished, we had a lunch break. After lunch, we continued with the beams. All the beams delivered by the builder are used, except two. We use those two to support a stack of gypsum plates leaning to a wall. From now on, we will work with extra beams. The beams we bought last Wednesday on the ground floor in the hall will be used here because the batch we bought in November last year was too small. I suppose it does not matter because we will make another visit to the hardware store next week.

The goal is to create a layer of beams on the ceiling to hold isolation plates in the pockets. On top of the pockets, we will put the gypsum plates. First, we put beams along the edges of the ceiling. Just do it!? There were electricity pipes on two spots, so two beams had to be provided with a hole at the exact correct spot. We did that, no worries. It is just that it is easily forgotten that everything in this process has caveats.

Talking of caveats: The topmost point of the ceiling in this room is where the surfaces meet. Are they equal? No, they are not, so how do you put up all the beams straight? I suggested we use an edge of the OSB plates as a reference point, and then we make all the beams according to that. The suggestion was approved, and we went ahead. We marked out 40 centimeters between the beams and decided that there would be a full plate on the west side of the room. On the east side of the room, there will be a smaller plate. This does not matter on the south side because there everything is straightforward. It is on the north side where the chimney makes things more complicated. We will have to deal with a smaller plate around the chimney, which is an excellent thing. So that was the reason for this plan.

The beam length was 444 centimeters and the beams we bought last year in November were 450 centimeters long. We just had to cut a tiny bit off each beam. With all beams cut, placed on the scaffold, and marks made on the OSB, we were ready to mount the beams to the wall.

For the south side, we had to mount eight beams, and we had eight beams. So we lined up the scaffold and started screwing the beams to the OSB. It was tiring work indeed. When we had mounted all beams, we were tired.

After a bit of break, we decided on going out in the garden and do some pottering around.

We received a couple of plants yesterday.

• Alchemilla, or lady’s mantle. It can be used for making tea, and it has small green flowers.
• Zee wormwood.
• A fern. I still have to figure out what fern it is.

I planted these tonight in the flower garden. It is much better to have the plants in the soil as soon as possible.

This concluded this week. It is perhaps the last week it feels like summer. From next week it will be slightly colder.