Week 29 - Plastering complete, starting second fix

The plasterer finished off  the rest of the house by Wednesday, a total of 5 days for him to do the whole house on his own - pretty impressive and we're very happy with the standard of his work. We can't stop running our hands over the walls they are that smooth! Overall plastering has worked out a lot cheaper than we expected, definitely worth getting someone in to do it.

 

With plastering completed we are officially onto second fix, which meant we could go and buy lots of goodies! Outgoings have been pretty tame recently so our bank manager must have had a shock when we went and ordered the heating system, kitchen, bathrooms, electrics and tiles all in the space of a few days. Should give me plenty to be getting on with.

 

This weekend I made a start on the bathroom. I'm quite paranoid about leaking bathrooms now after seeing (and usually having to fix) plenty of failures, so I'm making sure there is a double waterproof barrier as you would find in a wet room. The first barrier is achieved with a waterproof membrane, a wet room would use a much more sophisticated membrane but just ordinary DPM left over from the floor slab will do for us just fine. Over this is laid WBP (Weather and Boil Proof) ply wich doesn't fall apart when it get's wet, unlike normal plywood. We will tile directly onto this which forms our second waterproof barrier.

The shower tray has been bonded into place, I'm pretty sure you would have to lift the floor if you wanted to take the shower out now. The waste has been connected up and sealed with silicone to be doubly sure.

 

The bath has been framed out with sturdy 3" x 2". I hate the flimsy feet supplied with baths and would rather build something more suitable for the weight of a grown man plus 50kg of water! The more rigid everything is the less likely you will get movement causing leaks. We're quite pleased with the small boxing around the waste to the toilet, generally the bathroom has very simple clean lines thanks to the plumbing under the floor. The toilet and bath are all plumbed in now and ready to go but we won't switch everything on until we have tiled.

 

Iona has started spraying the whole house with her new spray system. It seems quite a bit quicker than using rollers and brushes but it certainly isn't a miracle worker, there is a lot of prep needed and it still makes a fair mess. Were thinking it's OK while the house is empty but it might not be as useful for applying the final colour.

This is just a couple of coats to white everything out so we have a good base to start from. It looks really striking and will be a shame to have to add colour on top of it.

We took the opportunity to cut the holes for the downlights before painting while you could still see the joint lines between the plasterboards and could use them to help show you where the joists are within the ceiling void. As it happened, our recorded positions of the wires above were perfect and we didn't have any problems pulling them through.

 

I couldn't resist adding ballustrades and the handrail to the stairs at the end of the day, still a little work to finesse it but it looks great so far. Just need to decide what we want on the tops of the newel posts, something simple I think.