So, let’s start with the way things were ‘meant’ to work out. We had a plan that looked like this:
- Knock down high spots on filling
- Rough coat of plaster (with mesh embedded)
- Skim coat plaster (walls and ceilings)
Simultaneously:
- Pour foundation for garage
- Arrange for garage to go up shortly after plaster is dry
- Move contents of house (Wood for battens, offcuts of drywall and stuff etc) into garage
- Start laying floor.
Of course, it’s not quite worked like that. So, first up, it worked out that we couldn’t reasonably justify the cost of plastering our ceiling (despite it’s unevenness), so we’re looking at getting regular joint compound and a “level 4” finish (filling the joints) and imperfections, then sanding back to smoothness, then coating in paint. Hopefully we can justify the cost of our plasterer’s recommended drywall person. I’m not sure about the carbon footprint of a much smaller volume of joint compound and a coat of paint VS clay or lime, but I’m going to try not to think about it.
Then our plasterer talked to his plaster-guru type person (who will also be working on the project) who said that while you don’t end up with dips if you don’t fill the screw-holes, you can get colour differences (because of the black screwheads on the light grey board). So he recommends filling the screw heads. Also, to cut costs further, we’re looking at a thinner skim coat which means the mudding has to be sanded back.
Cue what we’re doing at the moment – frantic filling and sanding.
We’ve filled 4000 holes* (Or there abouts). We have also sanded them. Well, most of them. We still have the laundry and the little pantry to do (which is a task for tomorrow, because 6pm rolled around quickly today).
We did take a brief break at the weekend to run and grab a free tablesaw. Our lovely friend has a lovely workshop with a very nice saw, but to save us carting the many sheets of ply over to his house (and ruining a blade) on a job that is, frankly, not one that requires fine work(wo)manship, we have been on the lookout for a tablesaw so we can just rip the ply into the strips required for the underfloor heating. Ideally, we wanted a jobsite saw, but those do not get given away free.
Not yet, anyway.
But up popped this tablesaw, which allowed us to christen our new EV with a goodly coating of sawdust.
There’s nothing like spending a terrifying amount of money on a car, then filling it with dust. Incidentally, don’t, in future, put an extremely dusty object in the car then open the sunroof. It’s a very bad plan.
Anyhow, so we tidied the house, we checked and set screws to a better depth for filling (not all our screws (by any means) were perfectly set. That was fine with a mesh and 1/8″ skim over it, but not fine with a 1/16″ skim…), we filled, we sanded, we cursed. After pushing solidly for a week we reached today when it was almost…almost done.
And then…
And then…….
Yeah, so I called Tuff-Shed today and found out that our shed plans have been delayed… possibly 4 weeks delayed (which is impressive since they were only meant to take 3 weeks to arrive and that was 2 and a half weeks ago). That means that our carefully scheduled concrete pour is not going ahead. So I cancelled that. Which means that we’re going to have stuff sat in the house… for a while. Because…no garage.
Then, we got a message today from our plasterer saying one of the team he was getting in for our job isn’t available for another week… which potentially runs into a period when we’re not available.
Which means another delay :(
Balls.
*In drywall, plastershire.
And though the holes were rather small
They had to fill them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to make them hate drywall,
