Giles and Paula Add a Room Onto the Side of The House

[Chris]

Progress is coming along nicely.

[ROman]

I think it looks GREAT….

[RoxRocks86]

Definitely enjoy seeing the progress

[Giles]

@neph93 The coping stones?

[neph93]

@Giles:

@neph93 The coping stones?

Indeed, the coping stones. My befuddled, timber orientated, bilingual head wouldn’t find the correct name yesterday evening.

[Giles]

The lantern is one of the things I have been excited about ever since we had the idea.  Love it….

[Giles]

I've decided to slow things down a bit.  Things are going really well, but I made a cock up with my floor height calcs. so I need to add some more screed else finished floor level will be below DPC.  I don't think it will make a blind bit of difference to the functionality of the building, but it's outside of building regs.  It'll never be noticed, but I may as well do it right.  I need to wait for the current screed to dry naturally (about another 30 days) or put the underfloor heating on to accelerate the drying time.  But that means I have to screw up our current kitchen earlier than I wanted too, so on balance, a slow down is more sensible.

[organisys]

There might be a risk the underfloor heating could dry the screed too quickly?….cracking??

[Giles]

The way I would do it, is have it on at 5 deg for 24 hours, increase by 5 deg for another 24 hours, repeat until max temp reached, then do the same in reverse….

[Finn666]

how thick (in cm) is the screed? @Giles …normally the rule is 1cm screed needs one week to try (without any kinda accelerator that is!).

about drying the screed with turned on underfloor heating, the way to do it is sth. like the following:

25c - day 1-3
30c - day 4-6
35c - day 7-9
40c - day 10-12
45c - day 13-16
40c - day 17-20

for info, if the screed is bound with calcium sulfit, you‘re not allowed to heat it up more than 50c!

[Giles]

Thank you.  45mm.  The standard guide for the screed we have used without the underfloor heating is 1mm per day.  I'm happy with not accelerating it…

[Giles]

I'm being sent a meter to test moisture content, so we can lay the next layer of screed as soon as this layer is dry.

In the meantime, I have a couple of Victorian doors I got off The Bay that I can be tarting up….

[Finn666]

perfect, as well as the meter you get to measure the humidity!
iirc a good figure should be sth. like 1.5%, 0.5% or 0.3%…depends on the screed used!

the doors goong to look nice!

[Giles]

@Finn666:

the doors goong to look nice!

With some elbow grease and these…..

[Giles]

The ground workers are back, including my favourite, He-can-lift-a-ton-but-can't-spell-it-John

[RoxRocks86]

Looking forward to seeing how the doors turn out!

[Giles]

Thank you Rox

[Giles]

Whilst Les is away, the slab layers play…..

[Appfaff]

The addition is looking great! It’s been fun going through this thread. Thanks for sharing the progress @Giles !

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[mclaincausey]

Man an auto-tamper would have been a godsend for that process when we did our patio. I won't pretend that this kind of work is fun.

The sandy soil here is so unstable that several inches of excavation filled with crusher fines and sand and then with extremely heavy flagstone cut and leveled is the best way to do it. Prior owners tried to grout flagstone together with concrete for our front walkway, and the predictable result was a sinkhole buggered it up and left a water meter poking out of the ground in the midst of the walkway. Quite a hazard–lucky we have not been sued for someone busting their ass on it. We picked this as a battle for next year.