Next project waiting

50mm beech boards ready for processing...

The tracksaw is the right job

Napkin holder

Simple napkin holder to use up some bits and pieces of oak

Sliding Barn Door

A gate for the balcony

Now that Fiona is walking and generally exploring everything, it became very much necessary to put some kind of a gate in place on our balcony. The steps up are completely open and are an immediate danger to Fiona and to Tobi as well. Given that summer was coming and that we wanted to be able to sit outside on the balcony without constantly hanging on to Fiona, a gate was the only reasonable solution.

We didn't want to permanently damage the balcony though - so boring holes into steel or (worse) into the external insulation of the house wasn't going to be an option. After a lot of consideration, I decided that a sliding gate could work. I decided to go with larch, because the balcony itself is larch. A (fairly) nearby sawmill has very helpful and friendly staff and I was able to get the larch from them. It needed planing and generally needed to be dimensioned.

I went with a fairly easy model - a frame with fence-style uprights.  The fence is done with mortise and tenon joints and the uprights are fixed with stainless steel screws. Because the gate was threatening to be out of angle - a trapezoid instead of a rectangle - I straightened it with two diagonals. It is now rock solid in all directions. I cut off the tops of the uprights at 45° to allow water to run off - not that there should be much water as it is under the glass roof.

Once the gate was made, the trickiest part was actually installing it. As mentioned, I didn't want to permanently damage the balcony with holes or screws. Glueing wasn't really going to work (and leaves an awful mess), so I went with collar fixings for plumbing. Alone or in small numbers, these wouldn't have been stable enough, but with one on each of the balcony railings, they are secure. A U-Rail with two wheels (with very good bearings) and wheels on a guiding rail on the ground and it was ready to go. The end result is good - the gate slides fairly easily. It is quite heavy, but that was intended. Because Fiona figured out how to slide it open within a week, I had to add a catch made out of a dowel to keep it closed. A few more pictures are below...

Building a new room

I should probably have blogged about the pellet central heating before, but I didn't. I might do it later. For now, it's worth writing a post about the new room I'm building downstairs. You'll have seen from the last post that I had a floor in downstairs and had started work on a workshop. Since then, we decided that we could fence off a piece of the workshop to make a new room out of it. It could be used for ironing or as a spare bedroom. After all, there is a bathroom with shower downstairs too, so it makes sense.

Originally, I thought I'd do it with drywall - quick and easy with slabs. However, I'd have had to screw the bottom timber to the floor and I was almost sure I'd hit one of the cables which are embedded in the concrete. As well as that, the ceiling has arches. It would be a particularly nasty job to have to drywall it. Instead of drywall, I decided to go with Ytong (gas concrete or whatever it is called). That would keep the wall relatively light and it would be easy to cut the curves with a saw.

The first row of blocks need to be set with normal mortar and need to be leveled perfectly. Working with Ytong is easy, but there is no room for mistakes because the mortar that you use makes joints that are only about 2mm. There isn't much room for leveling there. Once the bottom row were leveled and plumb, the rest of the job was fairly easy. There was a lot of cutting involved, but with the Ytong saw, that is quick and easy. The wall is tied into the existing walls on every block with stainless steel wall ties. Before starting, I cut the plaster away and used Tiefengrund (polyfil) on the bricks to make sure that the blocks would stick properly to the wall with the mortar. Now that it's finished, it seems solid enough.

 

A few odd jobs around the place

Following up on the last blog post, I found a whole lot of photos which I had taken but forgotten to upload to Google Photos. There is a short comment on each one by way of description.

OSB box for the concrete foundation

The concrete foundation finished (65x65cm)

The position of the concrete foundation on the west side of the house

The finished floor (with step)

After painting the same colour as the workshop floor

The other thing that I was busy doing was tidying up the workshop. To get this done on some kind of a permanent basis, I needed storage solutions. Due to lack of those, everything was left on top of a single shelf, or on the floor. I decided to go with a tool wall. To do this I cut MDF board and screwed it to the wall. This was easier said that done because the wall itself was gas blocks. It was easy to drill the holes but it wasn't easy for the screws to get a grip. After a bit of manoeuvring and filling, I managed to get a secure fit. What you can see on the picture to the left is the boards already fixed to the wall. There are four red screw storage boxes attached on rails already. I have another three rows of two smaller boxes and two rows of big boxes ready to go in. That will fill up the space to the left of the steel support. On the right I'm getting ready fixings for saws, bits and chisels.

To make the fixing for the chisels, I used offcuts from the MDF boards. There are nine chisels at the moment, and I decided to leave room for twelve altogether. If I need more, I can make up another fixing fairly quickly. The chisel fixing was actually simple to make. A 15mm forstner bit for the holes and that a quick touch with the table saw for the slots. The only complication was the chunky chisel. The steel shaft was way to thick. The solution was a less secure fixing for it. It won't fall out without a lot of encouragement but it is nowhere near as secure as the rest of the slots. It isn't fixed to the wall yet. I used my new dowel tool (the dark grey and green tool to the top left of the workbench) to attach another bit of MDF as an angle to the chisel holder. Once the glue is dry I can screw it directly to the wall.

Another thing I got done was a drawer for my workbench. I was always looking for things like the small square, the calipers and pencils. That probably has to do with the lack of a working tool wall, but things like the pencils and the small square are used so much, it probably makes sense to keep them in the workbench anyway. I got the plywood from Holz Balk in Vilsbiburg. The sides are 16mm ply and the bottom is poplar plywood, 5mm thick. Once I had everything cut to length, I cut 5mm slots towards the bottom of all the sides. The bottom of the drawer ran nicely into those. The drawer sides are dowelled and glued together. It seems to be a fairly good fit overall. Since taking the picture on the left, the drawer got a coat of linseed oil. It now looks much the same as the rest of the workbench. It sticks a bit when opening or closing, so I'll have to find some way of dealing with the tracking.

Quick update

 It's been awhile since I posted anything. That's not because nothing was done, but rather because nothing was finished. At the start of February I thought I'd get the bathroom floor done downstairs. The aim was to have a solid floor put in, so I can then move the washing machine from the bathroom upstairs to the bathroom downstairs. I can also install a dryer there - I already planned the electrics to take care of that.

I thought I'd pull out the tiles on the floor (it was only half tiled anyway) and then level everything with self-levelling compound. As usual, nothing went as planned. The floor under the tiles was anything but level and it was pocked and cracked in multiple places. I went for the nuclear option and ripped it out. Like in the workshop, the concrete floor was actually just a thin layer on top of bricks, so it was easy to get rid of.

I dug down into the clay and installed a layer of 8cm Geotherm insulation. You can see in the picture to the left that there is a bit of concrete left over in the corner. I didn't want to kango that out because there are water pipes in it and because it is also the foundation of the walls. The concrete is so hard and so deep that I'd almost definitely shake the walls up too much (gas concrete walls) and end up having to rebuild them too. Instead, I'll put the wash machine over there.

Other than the bathroom, I also had to get moving on the heating. I had to figure out where to pour the concrete foundation for the chimney outside. The plumber had already marked a circle on the wall inside, where the chimney would go out through the wall. With the laser it was easy to transfer the vertical height of the centre of the circle to the outside. By measuring back from the window and then out from the window on the outside, it was easy to get the horizontal position on the wall and thus the exact centre of the circle. With the laser, it was then easy to see where the chimney would end up on the wall.

In the picture on the right it looks like the laser is a bit near the top window. In reality it still is a good 40cm from it. The chimney will have to be 10cm out from the wall. This is because it has to be at least 5cm from combustible material. Where the wall meets the roof overhang there is a beam right at the wall, that runs about 5cm outside the wall. I have to go 5cm out from that, so 10cm out from the wall. This means that the chimney might be just visible to the right of the big window, but only if you look from the very left of the room at the most acute angle possible. I can live with that.