Finished ventilation in the washing room Monday, 18-Oct-21 21:52:09 CEST

Ready for the floors Sunday, 31-Oct-21 20:52:04 CET

Sunday, 24-Oct-21 18:53:23 CEST

Started the last gypsum project

Started on the final gypsum plates project in the washing room on the ground floor.

Monday 18 Oktober

Today we worked from our old home. I hope to start writing "today we worked from our new home" in a not-so-distant future. It would be nice if that happened within six months from now. Until that happens, we need to pull ourselves up and continue working for the future without breaking mentally or physically.

As usual, when switching to another task, it feels a bit uncomfortable at first. So also this time with the work on the remaining walls of the washing room on the ground floor. How is this supposed to be done?

I found that the green pipe in the middle is the lowest. It decides how high the ceiling will be.

Next to the green pipe to the left is a gray pipe, the next higher object.

This evening we did not get so far. I stared up at the ceiling for a while. Concluded that the gray pipe was mounted with a bracket that was too big, but I did not do anything about it. We gave the sheep their food supplement, and then we went to our old home again.

Tuesday 19 October

Today I arranged that I could have holidays next week from Monday until Friday, full days. That feels good. I do hope that gives me enough time to work on the project.

In the evening, we went to the new house again. I thought that I had got some time to figure out how to start on the ceiling so I would stand there and look up into the ceiling, and all would be clear, but I concluded it was not something I wanted to start on a Tuesday evening.

I removed the bracket for the gray pipe, though, and mounted it with my own metal band bracket. That worked!

If I am only standing looking at the ceiling, it will take longer than a week to fix this wall and ceiling.

Wednesday 20 October

On the way to our new house, we picked up isolation material for the washing room. We also bought metal corner bands that you use to reinforce gypsum corners. We got more than 30 meters in this house. I don't know if this is sufficient, but we will try this first. Well, when the time is right.

My priority will be the wall and the ceiling in the washing room, but perhaps my wife will start applying putty while I am busy in the washing room.

I got started with the ceiling and wall. I redid the bracket of the gray pipe again. Then I finally got some beams up below the gray pipe. I think I will work myself along the wall to the right and build the innermost corner between ceiling and wall. The angles were so awkward I had to use an angle mount for the bit. We bought it a year ago and, 14 October 2020, and it has served me well. Tonight it lost a ring. I tried to get the ring back, but that did not work. It had been press-fit or glued or something. Not sure how it had been mounted. Now it was off.

We got friends visiting us because we are giving them our stack of gypsum plates. We discussed when and how the gypsum stack would be removed in the living room. They will come and get the twenty plates next Friday. They will also help us get the woodstove out of the house not coming Friday but the Friday after that.

The green plates we will use in the washing room and the leftovers we will keep for additional gypsum projects. They will be moved out and placed in the sea container.

Well, now the washing room project is started, from here it is just a question of having it going at a good pace without any complications.

Thursday 21 October

Today we worked from our old home. I will be in the office for a meeting tomorrow, so this week's presence at the office is planned for Friday.

After work, we went to the new house. I continued working on the ceiling and wall creating support for gypsum plates.

It looks messy what I am doing and hurts my perfectionistic nature, but I try to convince myself that this will all be covered in gypsum, so this is something only you, reading the blog, will see.

When the support structures are up, we will apply plenty of isolation material. Then the gypsum plates. But that is for later. This evening I was working on the piece between the pipes. You can see that there emerges a corner-shaped ridge running along the wall below the pipes. There are gaps at the places of the pipes, but that does not matter. This is the top corner of the wall and the ceiling. Every 40 centimeters, there will be beams running across the room. I will wait with those until I have a beam running across all walls. It is much easier to anchor things in things rather than hanging things in the thin air.

Friday 22 October

It is already a far way into October. Here in the north part of the globe, we are approaching colder weather. I biked to work against the wind, and it was a lot of wind. It started raining while I was biking but stayed more or less dry. Yesterday there was storm damage at some places towards the south of the Netherlands. We had a garden chair falling over. That was it.

At work, there were not many people at all. It is as if Fridays are not very popular days to get to the office if you have other options. I had an appointment to meet with a colleague, so we had our meeting, and that was good.

After work, my wife and I went to the new house. Our sheep had consumed most of the grass they had on their current area.

I told my wife that this was not good, we had to do something about it tomorrow. Then suggested we would move the fence just a nudge, so they had something until tomorrow at least.

While we worked on that, two sheep escaped from our enclosure. Soon after, the last escaped as well. They started grazing outside the enclosure next to the house.

What should we do now? Well, I suggested we block the route from the current place until the southwest corner of the house. So we started by doing that while the sheep were still grazing on the west side of the house.

I went inside quickly without running, picked up our last net, and made a fence from the north side of our house to the wall. Now they had an area fully enclosed. Then we could rearrange the nets so that they fully met up with each other. Then it was just a question of connecting the electricity to avoid escaping again while we were not around.

When we went to the house, I thought I would build a little more on the washing room, but that did not happen. After the adventure with the sheep, we went to our old home.

Saturday 23 October

It was a beautiful morning. A great tit was singing outside. I recorded it so that you could hear it as well.

It is a lovely bird. I like it when it comes to the garden. A few years back, I had a bird feeder at the office. Then I could get acquainted with different birds. There were many great tits and blue tits. I made a blog post about these birds with the funny name "Obsessed by tits."

We had an appointment at the reseller of hay, and we had a slow morning, so we had to eat our breakfast standing, so to speak. Then we went to the house, picked up our big trailer, and went to the strawman. We are virtually neighbors; we can almost see his barn from our new house.

We bought nine packages of hay. It was just an arbitrary number because this is new stuff for us. We have no clue how this is working. The idea is that we can give our sheep to eat from this hay to survive the winter months.

The reseller said we should not advertise this business too much because the demand could quickly drain the store, so to speak, although I think he had enough right now.

Back at the new house, I continue to set up beams that will support the gypsum in the upper corner of the ceiling and wall. It is so complex to make the corner tight against the pipes and still provide the necessary support.

Today I finished the top ridge of the south wall. Then I mounted the top of the west wall.

My wife started preparing for applying gypsum in the bathroom on the first floor. It is a new task we have not done before, so it is also a research project on what to do and how. We got some putty knives and plaster trowels left from a long time ago when we decorated our old house. First, I had steel trowels, but they started to rust, which was not good in that project we worked on over twenty-five years ago. So I bought stainless steel trowels, and those were good. I found most of them in the shed of our old garden. We got pointer trowels and square plastering trowels of various sizes. I had a mixing rod, but that is nowhere to be found.

After lunch, we moved the sheep again. This time we made use of the west side of our north neighbors plot for the first time. On the north side, we got two neighbors, and they both agreed that we have our sheep grazing the area on the border of the two plots. The thing is that both neighbors have been very active with the brush cutter, but it is indeed backbreaking Sisyphean work. If that is the plan, only rely on a brush cutter, then you need to be very strong or have a tiny area to look after. None of this applies to my neighbors. They are pleased that we can have our ladies working for them. We are happy we have a greater area to provide them with calories.

Sunday 24 October

This morning had a beautiful sky, but I did not take any photos of the sky. We went to the new house and started on our projects.

Today it was more of the same. Yesterday I reached the west wall, which means I had an entire long beam along the west wall. On the east wall, I put up another beam. Now it was possible to connect the west and the east with a beam across the north wall, but I want to have all beams level. There appeared to be a discrepancy along the south complex wall, and my solution was to correct the first part of the south wall so that the east wall would come out correctly.

The angle screwdriver extension that I had bought on 14 October 2020 started to fall apart a couple of days ago. It lost the outer ring holding the bearing in place. Then piece by piece, it fell apart. It lost bearing balls. Today I had the dilemma of using the Wolfcraft screwdriver extension earlier this week because now I had to remove the screws to adjust the beams, but the tool I had used had decided to self-destruct. I managed to use it for a couple of more screws by holding it together. Then it was totally wrecked, and I had one screw left. What should I do now? I put together four straight extension pieces one after another, and it was possible to bend slightly, just enough to take the final screw out.

I finished the beams in the washing room so that I had leveled beams all-around all walls, but they are not thoroughly fastened just yet, but they are up and reasonably level. This is good because I have a basis for building on, which will be a little quicker.

There was more today; we got a visit from my brother-in-law and my wife's sister. They had a look at our progress and enjoyed seeing what we have done so far. Every time we get a visitor who has been to us before, it is natural to review what we have done since the last visit. We worked hard indeed, and there is good progress. It takes a long time, and we are still not living in the house, which is sometimes frustrating. When they left, I noticed my mirror in their car's logo, so I had to take a photo of that. Kind of cool, I must say.

After the visit, we continued working on our tasks. I did not finish any important milestones today, but I was happy with the result so far. This week was all about starting up the project of support beams in the washing room.

We went out and harvested the last corn and a large portion of beans. More beans are to be harvested, but it is questionable if they will survive when the first night-frost sets in. It is due to climate change that we can harvest beans in late October. That is obviously wrong, but we go with the flow and do it because it is possible. Today we harvested the rest of our Belle de Boskoop apples (Goudrenet). Now we have got apples for a couple of weeks. We made an apple pie with these apples, but we also used them for our breakfast; we put them in our smoothie. Before, we used much more bananas in our smoothies, but we are trying to use less of this fruit because it is coming from far away. The main ingredients are the fruit that grows in the Netherlands so that the freight distance is shorter. Shorter freight means less CO₂. Less CO₂ means we are happier.

That was it for this week. Next week we both have a whole week off to work on the house!