December Monthly Update
December Week 1:
At the end of last month Dan was just starting to wrap the middle section ready for spraying.
This would be our first time using an airless sprayer for painting, which also meant we were using a brand-new unit for the task.
I’m not going to lie, it was a learning curve to both set up, prime and use, but after one stressful evening, and then an iffy morning, Dan went from “this is f****ing shite, I’m sending it back!” to “this is f****ing amazing, I can paint an entire room in 20 minutes!”.
The rooms are not small, as you know, so even though the prep work to wrap everything up like an episode of Dexter takes a lot of time, you do save time and your sanity in the spraying process.
Over the course of the working days of this week (Monday - Friday, minus a half day in the middle), the entire middle section, except for my office, received a mist coat for the fresh plaster, a watered-down colour coat (10%), and a top coat.
If you remember from a previous update, every single surface is being drenched in one single colour for now. When we have time and funds post-finance, I’ll tackle each room one by one to give them their own personality.
I said everything was sprayed except the office, and that is true.
The office houses the stone Inglenook, and there wasn’t a simple way to protect it, because of how the stud frame joins it at each side. Therefore, this room was painted by hand, which took 1.5 full days to do end to end. The time was used up mostly in cutting in around 4 joins with very uneven stone work. This room is also the only room that will have a splash of colour when we move in, and that colour is going inside the back of the inglenook itself.
It won’t necessarily match the vibe of the rest of the house, so don’t have a panic about what it ends up being! This feature will end up being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, so it’s more important that it’s a great background “set” and is on-brand for our organisation than fitting the mood elsewhere!
The rooms from plaster to paint look like this:
The Lounge (was: Library):
The Office (minus colour completion)
Because it wasn’t being sprayed, everything moved into this room temporarily!
Bedroom 2:
Bedroom 3
One of the days this week, Thursday, was a no-progress day. After working for a grand total of 4 days, the biomass boiled died… AGAIN.
This boiler is literally the most unreliable thing I’ve ever used, and Dan tried for about 4 hours to get her going again before giving up and calling in the pros. The engineer was here for a fair while and couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong, but thinks it might be the fan (that creates a vacuum) or the control unit (which tells the fan to create a vacuum). Either way, after removing and replacing some wires, it did run (and still is).
I don’t think Dan will cope with this boiler, and it eats so much time to keep it running, so we’re going to have to look at alternatives in the not-so-distant future. I hope it lasts the winter 🤞
Also this week, the roofers came and replaced some slipped slates from the summer storms, we’re winter-ready (ish), and hopefully we’ll stay dry.
Also this week, Dan framed out and boarded the understairs cupboard, ready for the UFH manifold to get popped into. I don’t have an image of this complete, so the part done snap will have to do.
And, also this week (it’s been a bitty week!), we selected the flooring for the entryway, walkway and office. The supplier has sent a quote, it has been accepted, and we’re on our way to usable rooms 🥳
At the time of writing it is Saturday, and both of us have a big day tomorrow trying to lay some underfloor heating pipes.
Please send positive thoughts, we’re going to need them, and maybe a trip to the pub!
‘til next time…
December Week 2:
Underfloor Heating
Sunday of last week was day one of underfloor heating pipework, and it was a journey. We need to probably deep dive into just the UFH a bit because we’ve not talked about it too much, but in brief, the structure of the downstairs of the middle section is as follows:
Dirt. The base is dirt for most of the subfloor, but there is a concrete part that looks like it has had underpinning work in the past.
Cavity/Air gap. There is a vented cavity under the joists that has the original Victorian-looking air bricks on the sides. I was keen to keep the suspended timber floor because it wasn’t broken before, so there was no need to actually change it. Given how severely wet our area is, it felt like the right move.
Joists with insulation. The joists are all new, because the old ones were all wonky and bowed. Between the joists is 150mm PIR insulation, sealed with foam. The floor is a lot warmer than the uninsulated suspended timber floor before.
Weyroc boards. These are big, moisture-resistant tongue-and-groove chipboard panels that provide a flat and stable surface for flooring above. Would original floorboards have been nice? Yes. Would they have been left visible? No. They also weren’t salvageable from this section, so this is our outcome.
There are also no radiators or pipework for radiators left in the downstairs of the middle section, because we knew we were going down the floor heating route at the start. I did a LOT of research and ended up landing on Wunda, who do a product called “rapid response boards”. These boards are overfloor-underfloor heating, and they sit on top of the whole subfloor structure, heating only the finished floor product, which can be pretty much anything.
The worry I had/have about Wunda is how affordable it is. It’s not pennies by any means, but it’s also not anywhere near as much as we were expecting to have to pay, so I had a panic over quality/longevity/reliability. I guess we’ll soon find out!
A large part of the affordability is perhaps explained by the physical requirements for install. Planning to get it all done in two days was our fault, yes, but I still think you’d be a physically broken shell of a human if you had all week too! The process goes like this:
Step 1: Cleaning & Prep
All areas need to be clean, dry and dust-free. All DPM needs to be cut back, all holes filled, and all door jam studwork bottoms cut too. Also, remove all doors and skirting… we only had 2 doors to take off, so that part was straightforward.
Step 2: Tea Break Apply the Edging Strip
This is like a foam skirting board that has a sticky back and a plastic skirt that you wrap around the room to provide an expansion gap and clean edge on which to lay your final flooring, then the foam top is cut off, and the rest is hidden with your actual skirting boards. It’s a very straightforward application - by FAR the easiest part step in the entire process.
Step 3: Dry fit the Rapid Response Boards
For this, you’re going to need your map.
It’s called a pipe layout, and it shows exactly where to put the boards, the pipes, and everything else too. This was kind of nerve-wracking, because this entire pipe layout that Wunda created was from my own measurements and rough floor plan that I sent over. Dan checked the measurements but not the floor plan, so I needed a bit of luck to get this sorted. For reference, this is our map, and then me reading the actual map, because by default that was also my job.
With some orienteering practice, we began to lay. A couple LOT of hours later, we had the full middle section + entryway boarded, cuts complete (definitely Dan’s job) and everything was exactly correct on the map. Wahoo!
Then we headed in for dinner around 9pm before Dan went back out to do the next step:
Step 4: Stick the boards down
This step I wasn’t around for, but Dan worked through the night until 2:30am getting it done. Using the adhesive spray provided, Dan sprayed the floor and a bit on the board, for every single board and cut piece, in the entire middle section. Each board needs 80% contact with adhesive, so that’s what they got!
Time totals for day one are:
Jess = 12 hours
Dan = 19 hours
Physical situations were:
Jess = Exceptional lower back pain. Not new, very bad.
Dan = Exceptional knee pain. New, pretty bad.
Day two then got going with…
Step 5: Channel Opening
I’d seen a hack on TikTok using a hoover (vacuum) nozzle to break into the pre-cut channels, past the super-strength aluminium cover (which is VERY sharp btw), and I went straight to that for my role of pathfinder for the pipes. Following the map (see section further up), I just went and did that. At the same time, Dan was cutting through the foil and the boards too, to create new channels where there currently were none.
With our system set up, we went and smashed it out.
Step 6: LAY THE PIPES
At this stage, both Dan and I have numerous cuts on our hands because we both refused to wear gloves from start to finish, but the pipe was calling so, following our map and channel pathfinding, we piped.
This was, by far, the hardest part of the process. Not necessarily because it was hard, but after the rest of it and a bazillion hours, with existing physical pain, it was hard going and the pipe had a mind of its own. The instructions say to flip the roll of pipe 180 degrees at every turn, but I couldn’t get my head around which way it was supposed to flip, so after a whole hour that saw very little progress in the bank, we switched tactics and “drove around the corners”.
We also went off the instructions fairly early and resorted to a bit of tape over the bends to ensure they definitely didn’t move, and Dan tapped the pipes tight into the channels with a rubber mallet too, which sped up the process exponentially.
By 10pm, we had all the pipe in, labelled with zones and loops, flows and returns, That meant that, technically, it was ready for both commissioning and the self-levelling compound on the lounge section, ready for engineered wood floorboards to be added in the new year.
Time totals for day two are:
Jess = 14 hours
Dan = 15 hours
Physical situations were:
Jess = Cuts on both hands from the metal foiling. Next level lower back pain, crutches required. Not new, very bad.
Dan = Cuts on both hands from the metal foiling. Hand, back and exceptional knee pain. All new, very bad.
Shells of our former selves, we headed inside to crawl up into balls and toast to a job well done 🥳 100% worth it.
Photographed, it looked like this:
Little Bits
In the middle of all that, when Dan was cutting pipe channels, and I’d finished with the hoover nozzle, I did some “polishing”.
Putting sockets and switches back onto the wall was part one, but a bigger moment for both of us was removing the plastic wrap from the trusses upstairs that had been wrapped for painting. They look SO GOOD.
The Compound
Ahead of next week, when something VERY exciting is happening, Dan needed to make the floor be flat in the lower section of the lounge.
Armed with WAY too many bags of self-levelling compound, but coincidentally not quite enough bags to finish up in one fell swoop, off he went! Each batch was mixed and poured, creating a little bit of colour variation right up until the last tiny bit, which was when the compound ran out.
Dan headed out to grab another few bags to get the job finished, and although it looks like there’s a tiny lip, there actually isn’t.
The floor is fully flat, she’s ready to go and we’re holding at this stage until the new year, as the flooring contractor (and us!) need a little more time.
The little plastic skirt on the edging strip from the underfloor heating came in very handy here. Its job is to help provide a seal for situations just like this. Remember, this floor has a GIANT gap underneath it, and the top boards are just boards.
Both of us were really worried the compound would just wibble wobble its way down under there, but the skirt and Dan’s micro-filling meant that, oddly, this went really well. Yay!
The Boiler/Heating
Monday this week also had an important moment. Yes, the boiler was working again last week, but it also died again last week, and the summary of a painful situation is that it is dead. It’s actually not fully dead, but the cost of making it not dead again will vastly outweigh the value of the unreliable biomass boiler itself. The issue we have now is…
The cost of a new, reliable (ish) biomass boiler is absolutely not possible.
The feasibility of putting air source in is (hopefully obviously) ridiculous, given the general thermal envelope being disastrous outside of the middle section.
Ground source is not doable right now. There’s no chance she’ll be done in the next two years, and digging into sheet rock is not simple or cheap.
Gas isn’t going to fly. It scares me with a giant gas tank next door and mains is impossible.
Oil is the only answer left.
Therefore, Monday was emergency quote, spec and location decisions for a new boiler for the main farmhouse. The fact we’ve been backed into the oil corner is sad, but at the same time, there genuinely isn’t another option here. The boiler home is found (Dan’s Pantry, sorry Dan), the tank home is found (Dan is in charge of making a base), and the whole thing is happening next Tuesday, because we’re an emergency case.
Did I mention we need to stay in this house over the Christmas period? Well, now you know!
So, with a new thing we did not have time for on our December schedule, Dan cut trees in the week, then on Saturday, I took Bryt to go be a gundog for a day, which she nailed, and Dan borrowed a digger to start digging the base out. We all had fun,
It’s Saturday today and we have a busy Sunday in awful weather coming up tomorrow, but we will keep going!