Plaster board and a new video

The last couple of weeks we have been really busy working with plaster boards. After delivery, Geir started cutting all the wall boards to the correct sizes. Normally, it would be best to do this at the same time as you put them up, but as we had sheets all over the floors, we had to cut them up in order to move them around. And as you should put up the ceiling boards first, this was just how we had to do it. We're pretty sure that if you had a team of 4-6 professional workers, they would not have needed to, but with initally one and then later 3 people, this was just the way to do it.

Our experience with plaster board work so far has only been the little bathroom we have in our little cabin (see entry no 35 and 38), however, as we have been told that putting up the plaster board and finishing it off normally costs around AUD18,000 for a normal house, we thought we could save a bit of money by doing ourselves also for the main house. As anyone who has done this work before will know, lifting up sheets that are 4 meters and over is not an easy job, so we hired in a colleague of Jodie to help us out. He has previously worked with plaster boards so we thought this would be a sound investment, especially when it came to putting up the ceiling boards.

We mentioned in our previous update that we would also hire a plaster board lifter to help us in the work. Unfortunately we do not have any pictures of this in action, as we were all busy doing the would and did not get the chance to take any photos. However, we can highly recommend using one if you are not an experienced plaster board fitter. For us it made it much easier to do the lifting, as one person could use the machine to lift and two people could watch the ends of the sheet as it was lifted up to the ceiling. Professional plasterers don't use this type of machine as it is a bit slower than you can lift it if you are 4 or 5 people, but for us it worked well.

Anyway, here are some pictures to show what we have done over the last couple of weeks:

Ash - who helped us out !

Ceiling boards fitted in the office

The edge of the boards fitted in the office. We made templates for the curved walls and transcribed this to the sheets before lifting them up (see a later picture on how the templates were done).

Ceiling boards in place in various rooms. The blue sheets are for wet areas and are used in the bathrooms.

Ceiling boards in place. Glue in place (pink blobs) for putting up the wall sheet.

Top wall sheet in place in bedroom 3. The wall is being fitted with sound insulation in order to reduce the noice from the bathroom and shower. We have also sound insulated the wall between the two bedrooms.

Geir making holes for the power points

Pantry wall - insulated from the other rooms in order to keep it cooler than the rest of the house. The room has a pipe going to the outside at floor level and will also have a vent in the ceiling in order to draw cooler air from the outside to the inside, and to let the hot air up into the roof space.

Geir making template for a wall sheet to be fitted to the kitchen wall.

That's it for pictures for this round, but we have also made another video showing the inside of the house as per 18th of August 2007. All the walls should hopefully be finished tomorrow and then we will start doing the tricky work of plastering. More about this later.

Cheers for now !

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