Tiling

Well i finally got down and dirty with the tiles and adhesive, but not before I put down the Durabase CI mat to decouple the tiles from the screed. I wanted to make sure any shrinkage was covered. Its interesting stuff, a kind of rigid waffle that is cut and then stuck to the floor. Allegedly it allows screed floors that aren't fully dry to dry out buy not trapping the moisture, giving a route to pressure adjust and balance.

Well it was cut and stuck, the indentations filled, more adhesive and the tiles laid over. Time will tell if it does its job and if on e still gets as  solid a base. It did add a stage but probably not more than an hour and an extra 30% adhesive.

I also used the LASH tile levelling system. This was the cheapest of the systems and didn't require any tools. As far as i can see the only shortfall of this is the lack of an edge clip which means that there is no additional support to the base on edges and potentially your tiles could run slightly in that direction. In  terms of ease of use though, 10/10.

Meanwhile John is busy on the walls, doors (Eclisse pocket sliders are always a bit tricky when you haven't done one for a while, and the instructions are some of the worst on the market!), and leaks – yes we have one mystery leak on an exposed elevation that is keeping one wall VERY wet. The hunt continues. The new oak doors came too and we will do a post on those separately.

The Apprentices are on the first lime skim coat downstairs and its all starting to look a bit closer to being a habitable room.

Pics to follow soon.

Wonder wall

Our “wonderwall”… from the great father and son team of Dan and Jim Hurles from Kilkhampton. I will get some better photos of this as soon as it’s all finished and tidied. It was a pleasure working with them, no hassles,  just a good job efficiently an d beautifully done.

We asked them top use a more traditional and chunky style to mix in with the front wall. We also chose a herringbone top course to improve stability and resistance to slip. We have found that flat top courses tended to become unsettled with both children and dogs leading to the top course falling off. The herringbone should reduce the likelihood of this.

 

 

If you need any stone walling done we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them, call Danny on 07900910082

More lime

Finally getting onto some finishing details. Today John started the lime plastering skim coat and we are experimenting with the primer. “Officially” one should use a primer from Bayosan to go onto regular plaster but we are doing a bit of atrial as at £100 per 10 litre pack it ain’t a cheap solution. We are trialling our own PVA based concoction which comes in at more like 10p per litre (which looks remarkably similar)… of course time will tell so we may not know for 2 years but that’s the nature of experiments. We will update at some time in the future and in 2 years will know for sure… if it fails dramatically i suspect we will know a lot sooner.

Here’s John  getting into the fiddly detail and making a fine job of highlighting the oak spreader.

Munster Windows

We today we had the pleasure of the Munster fitting team, Jamie Phillips, Dariusz Zawada and Mateusz Trojak. We can only sing their praises, professional, polite, respectful of the site and the team, accurate fitting, tidy… they even took their own packaging and waste away.

There were 11 windows/doors to fit and having travelled 4 hours to get here they arrived around 10am and left us just as it got dark. Being a renovation this was never going to be an easy fit, but they relished ion the challenge and thoughtfully fitted the windows, knowing whether to ask to fit plum or to the reveals showing a good understanding of the difference in  renovating an old building to throwing up a new build.

We are looking forward to having the same team back (please) to do the second stage next year, and possibly to snag some of the minor manufacturing blemishes in the paint finish on a few windows.

We chose Munster as they were recommended by our architect, Squirrel Design and they proved to be cost competitive with a good quality product.

  

New openings…

Been blessed with a glorious day for the window fitting for Barn 2 (the first barn we are working on) today so been an early start just finessing the openings ready for Munster to come and slot them in.

After this we are onto plastering, finishing details and second fix…

       

Blackmountain Thermalflex trial

We recently took delivery of a load of Black Mountain Thermalflex insulation. After long chats with Andrew Evans we decided to try this instead of our originally planned sheep’s wool. One of the deciding factors for us was its greater resistance to slump and its improved sound absorption. The product is more rigid than wool so holds it shape more easily in the roof and stud walls.

On the application side we found it pretty easy to install, coming in a convenient 380 width for our 400 centres studs.

Cutting was easiest with a serrated knife. It was suggested that an electric carving knife is THE best but we found a good old bread knife pretty good. One thing we did find was that the product was much harsher on the eyes than the wool we had used previously… so our recommendation, WEAR GOGGLES, especially if you are working overhead. We all had red irritable eyes for the first day after we put it in… 

You can download the ThermalFlex tech sheet and get a bit more information on it. We found the company easy to talk to and very responsive to enquiries.  We plan to use them for our rigid board insulating sarking for the roof too.

 

Oh yeah, check out John’s curved wall using 2 sheets of flexible 6mm plasterboard layered together…

Door envy

We asked our friends at Traditional Oak to quote for our internal doors, sadly they were out of our price range for this project but thought people would enjoy seeing what they can do… from a project in big budget Londinium.