Saturday 11 March 2017

the light inside

The Summer holidays from school allowed me to get ahead with some of the build.

With one window in I then attacked the other small windows. The first one after the study window was the kitchen splashback window:


Firstly I finished quite a lot of the internal framing (so I would have something to attach the windows to).

One of the great things about being the builder is that I can make changes to things as I go.

With the kitchen splashback window, originally I had it placed lower - about 150mm above the sink level. But I soon realised that I would be mainly looking at the ground at this level. So I moved it higher.



And this is the view I will now have:


Next came the bathroom window - to the right of the photo. It has a fixed 600x600mm lower panel and a 600x1545mm openable upper. (Hard to get a front on shot!!):


Below shows the cavity (pocket) door that separates the bathroom from the guest bedroom. The bathroom will have a regular door at the other end into the kitchen.


Finally - the second window in the main bedroom:



And the view:


Then I made a start on the roof trusses. But first I realised I needed to put verandah joists up to have something the fix the verandah ceiling to. They needed to be in place before the trusses were erected.


Each half of each truss is just over 7m long and weigh around 40kgs.

It was a bit of an effort to get them up on the roof by myself. But I managed!

The first two were tricky to get vertical and stable. Once this was done the other went up reasonably easily.








I still have some tie-downs to fix before I can get professional roofers to put the tin roof on. I decided not to attempt it myself as each metal sheet will be 14.2m long each - too unwieldy for me to get up on the roof. Also - if anything were to go wrong, or bits of roof were blown off - the roofing company will be held responsible.

I will also be employing some window professionals to put in the four x 2.1sq.m double glazed front windows as they each weigh over 200kgs!!


Finally, last week I installed two glass sliding doors.

The first is a double glass door - one fixed and one sliding which goes in the guest bedroom:




The other is a triple door leading from the lounge to the back deck:




I used some deck off-cuts to make a temporary ramp up to the deck as I will soon begin using this door as my main entrance to the building. At the moment entry is through the container doors in the guest bedroom and I want to close these permanently and finish off the internal framing over these doors.