House developments

Before starting the second coat of render on the house, we had to install the polystyrene insulation around the slap and the cement sheets to hold them in place. As should be knows we had to build a fairly thick slap to deal with our ground conditions - it ended up being about 40 cm thick (see entries 40, 42 and 43). Along the edge of this slab we now have installed a 30mm thick polystyrene sheet and this again is covered by a 4.5mm cement sheet. The cement sheet will eventually be painted in a colour that hopefully will go nicely with the final render colour - we are currently thinking dark grey, but not yet decided.

The cement sheets and polystyrene was fastened to the slab by drilling a hole through the cement sheet and polystyrene and into the slap. A nylon anchor nail was then inserted and nailed in place to hold the sheet up.

Cement sheet/Polystyrene in place before second coat of render

Close up of the cement sheet and polystyrene seen from above

After doing the above, a zink alum flashing was installed on top of the polystyrene to ensure that water does not get between the slap and the polystyrene. The second coat of render is then placed on top of the flashing, making the final result like this:

The third coat of render will build up a bit more to get closer to the edge of the flashing

As should be clear, this means that we have now also started with the second coat of rendering on the main house. We are following the same recipe as we used with the workshop, and more or less the same method, just ensuring that we rub it down before it gets to hard. We have so far done all the southern walls of the house and today most of the eastern wall. We estimate that we probably have another 5 to 6 days of rendering with the second coat before it is completed.

Southern wall of main bedroom

Eastern wall of main bedroom and southern wall of movie/music room

Main entrance and hallway. The render up top is fairly fresh on this picture and as such quite a bit darker.

Southern wall of laundry

In the meantime we have also completed the rendering inside the workshop. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than we expected and we are not entirely happy with the result. It is OK for the workshop, but not the finish we would want inside the house. In respect of the colour we tried this room by using the same two sands, lime and then white cement instead of the normal grey cement. This made the finish different from the cement grey colour we have after the second coat, but not exactly what we would like inside the house. As such, we probably will try inside the garage by using a white fat sand rather than the yellow fat sand we are currently using. Once this is done, we will post more pictures and let you know how it all went.

When it comes to finishing the render we are having problems getting a really nice smooth finish. The main reason seems to be that as we are doing segments at the time it is virtually impossible not to get lines where two segments meet. The other part is trying to get the rubbing done to such a degree that you cannot see any marks from using the trowel. If rubbing too early it is easy to get marks from our hands/fingers and if rubbing too late, the render is so hard that you cannot get it all that smooth. We tried with a sponge float, but this was not very successful either, so we have to work on this to get better to get the required finish. If anyone has any good suggestions or links to websites showing how this is best done, please let us know by sending us an email.

Anyway, the result of the workshop is like this:

It looks good at a distance, but not so good close up.

We'll finish this entry with a picture taken from the hill to the east of our property:

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008