Plasterboarding finished upstairs

Finished, finished, finished. The plasterboarding upstairs is finished. What a relief.

Thats 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a couple of corridors/landings, stairs and of course ceilings for each room. It's taken over 130 sheets of plasterboard, 400 m². It seems to have taken forever, and I'm in no hurry to start again downstairs. The good news is all the doors and windows for each room are fitted, the first fit electrics are finished and it's now time to start plumbing in the bathrooms.

A few things I've learnt from plasterboarding :-

1. Square and level - Pay extra attention to getting floors, walls, ceiling, door frames etc. at 90^o and parallel and level. Big rectangular plasterboards fit much better into 'square holes'.
2. Good quality screws - Cheap plasterboard screws are a false economy. They don't pierce the metal studding easily and tend to tear the paper surface of the plasterboard making filling more time-consuming. Use the supplied screwdriver bit in the box of screws and chuck it away at then end of the box. Use a new one in the next box, suprisingly they do 'wear' and can cause the screw to wobble as it's driven it.
3. Buy a Surform - It's invaluable for shaving off very small amounts or removing the bumpy broken edge to give a clean sharp cut edge to the board. I've never had much joy with a Surform on wood, it's intended use, but for plasterboard it's excellent.
4. Don't be too exact - especially when working on your own. Cutting to the nearest centimeter is fine and allows a little room for maneuvor if the floor or ceiling is not quite level.
5. Chamfered edges - Keep the tapered edges of the board together and on external corners, keep the cut edges for the floor and internal corners. Filling the joints is easier.
6. Planning - Take into account the size of the plasterboard. Avoid walls just slightly longer than the width of a board, or a door positioned the width of a board plus a few centimeters from an edge so as to prevent very thin in-fill. The same for ceiling height, make it the length of a board + 1cm to allow for irregularities. Any gap will be covered by skirting board.

 6:49:51 PM   Plasterboarding techniques hints and tips   

Trellis

The trellis work, that Caroline and I bought the other day, destined for between the two gites is up.Those funny white blobs in the photo and the white stuff on the ground is snow. Snow, cold wet snow. Not what I expected when I started, but once the concrete mixer is going, there's no going back.

When the digger man arrives to dig out the hole for the septic tank I am going to ask him to put the topsoil in the border around the bottom of the trellis. Should look good with some shrubs and flowers.

Time to relax with some home-made cider. A gift from a local farmer after Caroline helped fix his PC. Thank you virus writers :-).

 8:21:03 PM   Trellis   

Hard landscaping

I've been on half-time this week, mainly because of school half-term and partly due to half-energy levels. A few days recuperation is most welcome. Most of my extra free time has been filled either with playing with the children or shopping for building supplies.

After bashing up the concrete ramp in front of the gites last week I've taken advantage of the better weather and concreted in a load of flower bed border edging pieces between the two gites. Caroline and I have bought some fencing which is going to divide the flower bed and give each gite a degree of privacy. Next major landscaping job is to edge the terrace area in front of each gite with granite sets and in-fill with paving or block pavers. Not sure yet.

Before the main influx of guests in April I would like to get the outside of the building finished. The sooner the better, as it then gives us some time to plant up new beds and window boxes etc.

 2:14:43 PM   Hard landscaping   

New Doors

The menusieres came today and installed the two new front doors in both gites.

I have been working alone for the last few days on the placo. I've been doing all the fiddly bits, over doors, round the veluxes, the window bays, etc. Lots and lots of small bits of plasterboard. I think all the in-filling is going to take longer than putting up all the main boards. The worst part is that as we approach the end of the placo upstairs it means there is going to be days and days with a spatula in hand filling all the joints and gaps.
It's got to the point upstairs that I carry a screwdriver round in my pocket so I don't get trapped in a room cos none of the doors have door handles yet.

 10:06:11 PM   New Doors   

Placo, whacko and sticko.

It's been a few good days in the office this week. My office being the two gites across the courtyard.

Still putting up plasterboard, but we are getting a bit faster now. Most of the walls are new ones and so are straight and true which makes it much easier. I think we are going to run out of green placo - moisture resistant board - for the bathrooms. The shortage is because it's twice as heavy and twice the price of normal placo so I was very conservative in my estimates. Hopefully I should know when I finish the last en-suite next week.

By Tuesday afternoon, Ian and I found ourselves gazing out of our renovation cell looking at the sunny weather outside. It looked absolutely glorious. After lunch we decided that we needed some fresh air. Pick-axes and sledge hammers at the ready we attacked with gusto the old concrete ramp that lead up to the original barn entrance in the middle of the two gites. As part of the hard landscaping plan we wanted a large flower bed between the patios of each gite to give each a little privacy. Flowers don't grow in concrete, so whack, bash and break to smash up the ramp. It's very deceiving quite how much concrete is in a ramp. A tiring, but satisfying job done. Tick.

Wednesday followed a similar pattern, placo upstairs, sun shining outside. After lunch we needed another task we could complete and tick off the list. The placo just seems to go on and on at the moment. A little more hard landscaping allowed us to fit the patio door to the side of one of the gites. The two front doors are still on order. There was quite a bit of fiddling and angle grinding to get the concrete door sill level for the door. It's the first door we've fitted so we had to offer the door up 5 times before the final fix. It got heavier and heavier everytime we moved it. At last, 3 tubes of silicon around the frame to stick it in with a number of angle bracked screwed into the granite for belt and braces fixing. Stuck.

 8:54:41 PM   Placo, whacko and sticko.   

Plasterboarding

It's been three days of solid plasterboarding (plaque de plâtre or placo for short) and even though the piles of placo are getting smaller there still seems an awful lot to do. All of the outside walls upstairs are finished and most of the stairwell along with the start of some rooms leading off the top of the stairs. Caroline has been pointing the exposed stonework in the stairwells with a traditional lime mortar. With the placo in place round the stairwell it's looks really good.

The main problem has been the sloping ceilings and exposed trusses (beams) that are not square, parallel or regular, so just about every board so far has needed at least two or three cuts with slight trimming and adjustments. To make calculating all the angles a little easier we've made two large adjustable 'protractors', a couple of bits of wood about 60cm long bolted at the end with a wing nut. It means we can transfer the angle from the wall to the board easily and accurately; essential when you haven't got a known square or level edge.

One of the other things that slows you down is the constant attention to providing a good fixing point for things that are going to be attached to the walls. For example in the bathroom you need to calculate the position and height of the sink then adjust any uprights etc, and ensure that a strong batten is secured behind the wall to screw the sink into. You just keep stopping and starting all the time and lose the flow.

For all the walls we are using a metal studding system. On the ceiling and floor are screwed metal U shaped channels called rails. The vertical metal studs, montant, slide between the top and bottom rails and are placed loosley to allow for adjustment at 60cm intervals (a placo board is 1.2m wide). The placo is screwed via self-tapping screws into the montant and the rail securing everything. Insulation (bought as a roll 60cm wide) is simply slotted between the uprights.

In the photo you can see the montant and the rail with grey coiled electrical conduit (gaine) hanging down to be enclosed in the partition walls for some of the switches and sockets. The green placo (it's normally grey) is special moisture resistant for use in bathrooms etc.

All the internal doors you buy come with the frame already around the door ready for fitting. The frame has a rebate the width of the montant and it so just slots in. Fitting a door is simplicity itself. You just push one side of the frame up against a vertical montant, slide another up from the other side and then screw through the two montants into the door frame and as long as the montant is plumb it's finished.

Things should start to get much easier and quicker with the new internal walls because 'everything' is square, horizontal and vertical with the ceiling height engineered to be 2.5 meters high (the same as a plasterboard). Just a straight parallel cut on the board for the correct width.

I think we are going to be placo'ing for quite a few days yet.

 9:53:34 PM   Plasterboarding