Finishing Touches

The Christmas/New Year period should have been spent at the beach and lazing around, but there is no rest for the diligent owner builder so our time was divided between the beach and finishing lots of little building tasks, that all together ended up taking a long time.

Quick and easy was the replacement of the rusted handles on the flyscreens of the sliding doors. After less than a year the handles had started showing signs of rust and after a year and a half they were clearly unacceptable. I phoned up my window supplier, Rylock, expecting to have to explain in detail how the flyscreen door pulls had rusted in such a short time, but to my surprise they were really good about it. Rylock explained that their supplier had changes where they sourced the handles though without notifying Rylock and that the quality had changed. Rylock then sent me out new door pulls for all the flyscreen doors, and with a couple of screws the door pulls were replaced. The new ones look great and just as well as they have the company name on them in big letters.

Rusted door handles

New door handles

Another quick job that had been waiting a longtime to be done was installing the vent to the kitchen range hood. I had earlier painted a plastic gravity closing vent in a colour to match the render (I had used this paint to fix up minor blemishes in the joint between the ceiling and walls. I just used 38mm screws to hold the vent in place and screwed them straight into the hemp wall without using a pilot hole. It held tight no worries. But my tip for other screwing into hemp walls is to screw until tight but do not try to over tighten as this may cause the screw to loosen and come out.

Exhaust fan vent installed

The temporary door to the bathroom was replaced by the real one and lockable door handles (although or sliding doors they are really door pulls) were installed on both bathroom doors. The door trims were also added to each of the sliding doors to hide the track system at the top.

Lockable door handle

Trim to cover sliding door track

The remainder of the Colorbond angles were installed to cover any gaps between the walls and the eaves lining. And Colourbons cover strips were added to the mitred corners of the eaves lining.

Corner of eaves lining

Sikaflex Sikasil-C silicon in charcoal colour was used to fill the gaps between the polished concrete and the aluminium frame of the sliding doors. The gaps varied from very little up to about 8mm and varied along the length of the same sliding door, but once filled were hardly noticeable.

The big job for the holidays was cleaning the outside of the windows, something that had not been done since the windows wee installed. Although they had been covered with plastic during the rendering some of the windows and particularly the fly screens were filthy and quite difficult to clean.  Big thanks to my partner and my sister for dedicating part of their holiday to this task.

Next job was sealing the gaps between the windows and the render. In places the render came right up to the window frame but in others there was a substantial gap up to 10mm and over some of the sliding doors even more. I used sandstone coloured Sikaflex Pro polyurethane sealant to fill the gap. Where the gaps were large I pressed foam backing rod into the gaps before applying the sealant. This was a much bigger and more time consuming job than I had expected. It was also pretty messy. I am getting better but there is still room for me to improve my sealant application. Big thanks to my plumber, Len, for putting me onto a produce called Silicone Clean up by Red Back, it did what it says and cleaned up that last little bit of excess silicone that is usually hard to remove.

Putting in the foam backing rod

Sealant around windows

About a week or two before Christmas there had been a week of heavy rain at Culburra. We noticed some unusual black marks on the southern side of a number of walls. the marks were less than 1m off the ground and we assumed that it was dirt splashed up from the gutters overflowing in heavy rain. But when I tried to wash it off it would not wash off and then I noticed some of the same marks on the upper outside wall of the front bedroom this wall is the only section on the house without eaves and although it faces south east at this time of year it does get some sun and gets plenty of ventilation. Could this be mould? I though that the lime in the render would prevent any mould. We are yet to work out what the marks are and what has caused them. It is just a little distressing to have such problems on a house that is not quite finished.

Close up of southern wall of main room

Patch of black marks

Black marks on upper wall section

A few more cracks have also appeared in the render. Interestingly the places the render has cracked do not coincide with areas where there was cracking in the hemp walls or the walls were less well built. The high level cracks are most likely caused by a change in the thickness of the hemp wall. The roof beams were cut down at the eaves so that they were not so thick, but this meant on the inside we could only hemp up to the bottom of the full beams but on the outside we hand to hemp another half a beam higher to reach to bottom of the cut down beams. My belief is that this change is a cause of the cracking and if this is the case the hemp wall must also have cracked to cause the render to crack, but the hemp walls had more than 12 months to dry out before being rendered. Another problem I am trying to find the cause of.

Cracks in render just under eaves

More cracks in render

 On the up side we now have a beautiful house to enjoy. Next project building the shed, using all the left over building materials.

Finished house

With decks to enjoy

A Spate of Problems

We had been off site for some time when we returned it was clear that something had gone wrong on the most recently rendered walls. The walls were very patchy and had much larger cracks than any of the hairline cracks we had before. The walls were also not as smooth and in parts almost looked pitted. Having put so much work into every aspect of the house I cannot leave those walls as they are, even if it means putting another coat of render on them myself. The only cause I can think of is that the render had too much water in it. As the weather has got warmer the render has been getting more and more water in it and it may have come to a tipping point where this has caused a significant difference in how it has dried and the finished result. We will have to go back and do an area using a less wet mix and see if the finish goes back to that of the earlier walls that were done. The flow on effect is that the rendering of the internal walls will not be finished before Christmas, so the floor will not be able to be completed and we will not be able to live inside. I am disappointed by this, but would much rather a well finished house than some patchy cracked walls just for the sake of a bit of time. 

Patchy render finish

Big cracks and pitted texture to render

Our neighbours are building a large shed and needed to run stormwater from there to the front of their block. They suggested that we connect the overflow from our water tank through their block to the street rather than having to do a pit in the backyard for the stormwater as, due to the slope of the land and that we are a battle axe block, we cannot run our stormwater to the street through our block. I advised our plumber of this and because we did not need to get a pit in the backyard any more I arranged for the excavators to come in and level the block. Our neighbours were advised by Council that they could not just allow the stormwater to go through their block without an easement. This was not an option so now we need to do pit in the backyard again and I have now got my sequencing all wrong by getting the excavators in to do the levels before the plumber put in the stormwater pit. We will also have to try and keep the tank half full so we don’t end up with an overly soggy patch in the backyard every time we get a downpour. 

The first rangehood we bought was larger than the size described in the brochure, so we had to return it, frustratingly the appliance store would only give us an exchange voucher and not a refund. Limited to what was on offer at the appliance store we bought another rangehood. It fitted the cupboard but was slightly higher than the previous one. Cutting out the hemp with a cold chisel to make room for the exhaust for the rangehood was easy until I found that I hit a stud and a noggin. The noggin had been put in so that I was able to hang the kitchen cupboards from the frame. 

I am making the the ducting for the exhaust from the rangehood from 150mm plumbing pipe since I need a 90 degree elbow and otherwise it is a very short run straight out the wall. The pipe just hit the bottom part of the noggin and once side of the stud. Not wanting to reduce the strength of the stud too much I decided to angle the ducting so that I just had to take off the corner of the stud. This was not as easy as it first seemed.

To add to my woes or perhaps because my thinking had been clouded by my woes, in trying to put in the exhaust for the rangehood I drilled through an electrical cable. An electrical cable that ran straight through a stud, with the cable cut halfway through the stud. The cable was for the power point for the rangehood and thankfully the power point circuit was turned off. In my defence the cable looked like it went through lower than it did, but I should have been more careful and consulted the photographs of the frame and wiring like I did when choosing how and where to attach the kitchen cupboards. I went through the now usual method of problem solving: tears, anger, then solution.  I moved the power point. I chipped out a bit more wall until the cut cable was long enough to attach to a power point. I then chased in the longer part of the cable so that it too came out at the same place. A beautiful solution, except that the power point is now on the opposite side of the rangehood to the power cord, but it will all be inside a cupboard so no one will see this. 

 

Cut power cord

Duct hole and moved power point

The upset and disappointment of all these disasters was washed away by the hot water of a long shower; the first in the house where the hot water came out of a tap and not a kettle. While we had been off site the plumbers came around and installed the regulator for the gas bottles. We hooked up a barbecue LPG bottle temporarily while we waited for delivery of the full size bottles. The power points for the house are not yet functional so we put an extension cord from the meter box to the instantaneous gas hot water unit and with gas and power connected finally had that true sign of an advanced civilisation – hot water on tap. The Methven Satinjet water saving shower head gave such a luxurious evenly spread flow of water it served to confirm the severe shortcomings of the water saving shower heads we have put up with for the last 10 years.