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

Finished the first floor Sunday, 29-Aug-21 21:24:07 CEST

Sunday, 22-Aug-21 17:23:25 CEST

Finished the ceiling of the hobby room

This week we finished the hobby room on the first floor.

Monday 16 August

It was feeling like autumn today! It was windy, rained, and it was not warm anymore. In the evening we went to the new house and worked on the ceiling in the hobby room.

We decided to aline the beams in the top ridge towards the seams in the OSB plates. With the top ridge sorted, we marked out the following beams every 40 centimeters on the north side of the room. This work took the entire evening. It takes so long to do this because I had to roll around to reach all sides. We made no particular calculations for the chimney. That will come as a surprise.

When the locations for the beams were marked on the ceiling, it was easy to calculate how many beams we still needed. We need 8 more beams. That includes the wall in the hall on the ground floor.

Many things need to be done before the end of October. We made a list with two sections.

Section one

Hobby room on the first floor:

• Beams in the ceiling.
• Isolation of the ceiling.
• Gypsum plates on the ceiling.

Staircase hall and utility cupboard on the first floor:

• Gypsum on the east wall.
• (Re)isolate the ceiling.
• Gypsum on the ceiling.
• 18 millimeters thick multiplex for mounting floor heating distributors.

First-floor final preparations before floor heating:

• Apply 20-millimeter thick fibreboards
• Remove temporary stairs and scaffold.
• Edge towards the staircase.

Groundfloor all rooms:

Section two

• Styrofoam along the bottom edge of the walls.

Ground floor hall:

• Beams in the east wall.
• Gypsum on the east wall in the hall.
• Beams in the ceiling.
• Gypsum plates in the ceiling.

Workshop ground floor:

• Gypsum on the east wall.
• Beams in the ceiling in the workshop.
• Gypsum in the ceiling.

Bathroom on the ground floor

• Finalize the ventilation (ventilation specialist).
• Gypsum on the south wall.
• Beams in the ceiling.
• Gypsum in the ceiling.

Livingroom

• More isolation material in the ceiling.

Empty all floors.

I think that section one has to be done before the end of October. If we run out of time, we can concentrate on section one and empty all the floors well on time.

Tuesday 17 August

Today during my lunch break, I went out and bought the beams we were missing. I bought ten beams instead of eight. It is not unlikely that we will use some extra here and there. In the evening, we went to the new house to continue applying the beams. The very first beam we picked up was turned. That caused us some challenges. After a while, I called it off, and we took the corkscrew beam down. The rest of the beams were okayish. We got them in place without too many issues. The corkscrew beam was cut into three smaller pieces, and we placed them at the bottom of the ceiling. The transitions between the pieces still had uneven edges, but I could shave those off a bit to create an even surface for the gypsum.

We were lucky with the chimney. It was right in between two gypsum plates. Tomorrow we can put up a couple of smaller pieces around the chimney to let the gypsum connect to a solid surface. Then it is time for isolation. It will be great when we get this room done.

Outside, the autumn feeling continued. It rained, and it was windy and not that warm.

Wednesday 18 August

The weather today was a little mizzly. That did not matter because I worked from our old home until lunch, and after lunch, we went to the new house to continue the work on the ceiling of the hobby room on the first floor.

We started working on the isolation of the ceiling. Most of the ceiling is straightforward. There are two points for light, and there is a chimney that we will need to workaround. Here in the photo, I cut out isolation for an extra block of wood where the lamp will be hanging. Will it fit? Yes, it fits really well.

I screwed holes through the beams and threaded the pipe with electricity through the holes. I also put wood blocks around the chimney so that the gypsum will have something to be fastened to around the chimney.

Today I was on the scaffold, and my wife cut the isolation plates. I tried to keep up with the pace she cut the plates, but she was quicker than me. We mounted the table saw so that it was easy to cut plates to the correct size.

This time I fastened the plates with screws as well. I don’t want to see that some of the plates have fallen down overnight. We learned the hard way that it is better to fasten the plates.

The entire ceiling was isolated this afternoon. That is already an achievement we can be proud of, but we carried on and mounted three gypsum plates in the ceiling. We finished three plates on the southeast corner of the ceiling. Here I got my Microsoft T-Shirt I received at a Developer Conference in the Hague a really long time ago. Bill Gates held an opening speech. That was special.

After working inside the house, we went out and pottered around in the garden. It had stopped to mizzle, so that was nice. Our Belle de Boskoop / Goudrenet apples are doing fine. The Alkmene apples are fewer and not so successful this year. Last year all our apples were eaten by wasps. I do hope we can avoid that this year.

I checked the progress of our runner beans. They had shown no signs of making beans the last time we looked. This time I got a surprise, there were already large beans hanging there! I picked the biggest of the beans, and we took them home. Cooked them and had them at dinner. There were two sorts of beans, one had tough skin, and the other was pleasant to eat.

There was more in the garden! I discovered a flowering Malva sylvestris in the flower garden. We got another more common Malva elsewhere, but it has not made it to the flower garden just yet. This flower came out of a seed from the bird seeds mix I sowed on 17 June.

Thursday 19 August

It is already Thursday, and we are stoked to make the best of this week! I understand if you think it starts to become a repetitive story, and that is so correct. It is one gypsum plate after another, and we have to do this. Today we arranged that we got tomorrow off. It was impossible to get the whole day off, but from 10 in the morning, we will go to the new house and continue working. For today we worked the whole day, and after work, we went to the new house. It is already dusk when we arrive at the new house. Last year at this time we had no permanent electricity, now we just plug in our lamp.

We placed two plates in the ceiling. That makes it 5 in total so far in this room. The last plate on the north side needs to get cut because it is a little narrower. It would be wonderful if we finished the ceiling tomorrow. There are extraordinary things around the chimney, and every plate needs to be cut. We will see how it goes.

After work on the ceiling, we did not go out in the garden. We went straight to our old house.

Today we got the quote on the floor. It looked okay. Our floor and heating specialist asked if he could come and install the necessary piping in the ceiling the following Monday. That is totally fine, obviously.

Friday 20 August

Today we started the day with regular work. My wife and I had to finish things that had to be done before the weekend, so it was okay to work the first two hours of the day. At ten in the morning, we both signed off and went to our new house.

The first task for today was the gypsum plate around the chimney. I had a rough idea of how to figure out how to do the gypsum plate. The first thing I did was measure the circumference of the chimney. It was 87 centimeters around the chimney. With that, I could calculate the radius of the chimney. So far, all was fine, and I did not spot any pitfalls with my plan.

Next up, I had decided to make a template from cardboard to see that it would work. I had to make a circle with a radius of 13.8 centimeters. How do you make a circle without any tools? I took a stick and drilled a hole for my pen, and then I screwed a screw 13.8 centimeters from the hole for the pen. Then I placed the screw at the center and let the pen draw the full circle. I was proud of myself! This was going to be so beautiful and perfect! Next, I cut out the hole for the chimney to test my template, and it did not work at all. I was a bit confused at first. How could it possibly go wrong with such a perfect formula and everything?

Well, it is pretty simple, actually. The chimney is not going through a perfect round hole because the ceiling is slanted at an angle. The hole of a perfect cylinder through an angled surface is not a circle but an ellipse! This is basic geometry, really. So now I took out the formulas for calculating ellipse? No, I skipped that part. I freehanded the difference from the circle. That worked as well.

Kind of. It was easy to make, fair enough. But it did not fit nicely. There was another thing I had not considered. The gypsum plate is a little more than one centimeter thick, around a quarter inch. When I cut the shape of the chimney, I cut it perpendicular to the surface of the gypsum. On the other hand, the chimney is not perpendicular to the ceiling, so I had to widen the hole a bit before the plate fit around the chimney.

Somehow there was a gap left I had not seen coming. I had made the template to the edge where I thought the edge of the plate would be, but it was not the correct location. It had been much better to make the shape based on the opposite side of the plate. Well, it was good enough to keep this plate. There is a gap that was bigger than I had anticipated. We will fill it with putty. You will not notice anything.

Next, I made the plate for the opposite side of the chimney. That was much smaller, and I had learned a few tricks along the way. It fit nicely on the first try.

The end result looked much nicer from a distance than I had thought when close to the construction.

With this hurdle out of the way, we had another 5 plates to cut and mount to the ceiling.

The last piece of the puzzle to fit on the north side. The plate on the lift with a ladder next to it. Beautiful!

When we had come so far, we had to push on and finish the ceiling today. It was a little challenging because we had run out of the stack we moved on 14 August for the very last plate. Luckily the last plate was smaller, so we cut it downstairs and moved it up, and that succeeded. I was delighted when I put in the last couple of screws in the ceiling. Especially happy that we would not need to hoist up more plates before we could finish the hobby room.

 

This means that we finished the “Hobby room on the first floor” part from our TO-DO list that we set up on Monday this week.

It was warmer today. It was like the summer had come back and temporarily pushed away the autumn for how long it would last.

After working on the ceiling, we pottered around in the garden a little. Gave the sheep the food supplement, and then we went home. I had a strange feeling it was Wednesday or Saturday. That was because we had this extra time off from work this Friday.

Saturday 21 August

It is Saturday morning when I write this. I woke up ahead of the alarm clock, and I slept well. When working hard, it is essential to look after the sleep. I lately had a tendency to go to bed later in the evening, but that is not good. Yesterday evening, I felt that the pain radiated up through my arm when stretching my right ring finger. My “doctor,” my wife, advised that I should put less load on that hand for a couple of days. So that is something I will try. This morning the hand was feeling better already. Let’s keep it like that.

The first task of today in the new house was the utility area on the first floor. Our heating specialist had requested we put up a thick plate to support the heat distribution unit that he needs to screw onto the wall. He will come on Monday to prepare for the installation, and I expect him to be busy also in this area of the house. I think there will be two pipes coming up through the floor at this location.

We will build a cupboard around this area. There were two ways to do this. One way would be to unscrew gypsum plates and mount the board inside the wall. That would take a long time. We decided on putting the board on top of the gypsum plate. There are so many difficult choices all the time. We went for the easy solution. One crucial detail, though, we left space outside the board for a gypsum plate so that when we built the cupboard, we can cover one side with gypsum, and it will become one nice surface.

Next, we decided to work on the hall on the first floor. That was fine, but quickly we discovered that the electricity for the fire alarm detector had not been mounted in the ceiling. I contacted our electrician, and we worked out a solution to this problem via video chat. According to our building permit, we are supposed to have a fire detector on the first floor on this spot, and it is supposed to be on its own electricity group. It is conducive I made this scheme myself; otherwise, I had no clue what this is about.

I still remember the first time we discussed the electricity scheme of the house with our electrician. We got the scheme approved as part of our building permit. Still, I had no clue if it was overlooked by the permitting authority or if it was totally okay. Our electrician read it and was totally fine with the drawing. I was so thrilled when he said it was okay. I studied how to make these drawings from scratch by finding examples and explanations on the Internet.

The conclusion of the discussion with our electrician was that we will keep one gypsum plate unmounted to provide access to the cables on Monday when he comes to our house and fixes the cables for the fire alarm. We put up all the missing isolation pieces in the ceiling and arranged the electricity to come where we wanted them. The idea is that there will be one light point on one side of the staircase, and there will be another on the other side. That way, the staircase will be lit up from two sides. There is also a point in the corner of the hall on the first floor.

With the fire alarm issue out of the way and all the isolation applied, we started putting gypsum plates on the wall. The first plate had a triangle shape, and I found a scrap piece in the same shape. Just had to note the numbers on each side. My wife found it really funny that my drawing was so realistic!

We worked the rest of the day applying gypsum to the east wall of the hall on the first floor. It took a longer time than I had anticipated. I was glad we had the wall done. That means we can start on the ceiling tomorrow.

Unfortunately, there are some other things to do tomorrow apart from the ceiling. We will need to move the sheep tomorrow, and our daughter is ready to go back to her apartment, so we will bring her there. She is starting a new semester at the uni. She will be back in a week, but that is more temporary. We will see how much we can do.

After the work inside the house, we pottered around in the garden for a while.

	Discovered a new Malva Alcea + Malva moschata in the flower garden.
	Larvae of Privet Hawk-moth.

 

Sunday 22 August

Yesterday evening we decided to bring our daughter home on Monday evening. That means we got a whole day to work in the house. I do hope we can put up a couple of plates in the ceiling of the hall today. Before we can do that, we need to hoist up more plates.

Five plates were enough for the ceiling in the hall. It was still fresh in our memories, all the steps we need to take to hoist up more plates, so it went really smoothly.

With plates available for the ceiling, we could start preparing for the first ceiling plate. It was tricky to get the plate in place.

When we had it mounted with screws along the edges, it was time for a lunch break. It was challenging to get the plate over the edge of the corner. This was the most challenging gypsum plate so far in the entire building. The following two plates were more accessible but not super simple either because there was enough room to turn the plates when lifted above the scaffold.

In the afternoon, we had mounted three plates. There are smaller pieces still needed. When that is done, finished the ceilings on the first floor!

We had a short break, and then we went outside to move the sheep to a new fencing area. This time the sheep got an area on the northwest corner of our farm, from the pear trees to the north side of the house to the birch tree forest. They loved it. This is the second time they are grazing here. The first time we had them in this area was from 19 June. Last time the rapeseed plants dominated the area, now it is much more grass here. After they had been here, we cut the rapeseed and even sowed some grass. In many places, there is now lush green grass instead of the rapeseed and thistles only. For every turn around the farm, it gets better and better. Next week we will receive two more parts of the fence to make their area bigger if that is needed.

When we were done with the fence, it started raining heavily. We were so lucky.

Hereby this week came to an end. We finished putting up gypsum plates in the hobby room and we came a long way in the hall. The sheep got a new area to graze from.