Exposed beams in the ceiling

 

This is kind of what I was talking about with "exposed beams" in the ceilings. Using plastered slabs between the joists would have the huge benefit that we would not need to do much leveling. The joists are horribly uneven, which means we'd have to do a lot of flushing by tacking light timber strips to the bottom of the joists. This way, it would probably be only necessary to do an eyeball leveling of the plastered strip between each pair of joists. I'd nearly go for embedded spot lighting as well. The picture is Eileen's room, by the way.

Down come the ceilings

This weekend I decided to take down all of the ceilings in the bedroom area. That's about 80 square metres. There were two main reasons for taking them down:

•  the engineer who needs to sign the Baubeginnsanzeige wants to see the joists
• fire regulations

Also, the ceiling was not very level - it sank considerably in some places. I thought that this might be due to a rotten joist so I wanted to have a look at the general condition of the timber anyway. Also, the ceiling boards had quite a lot of woodworm, so I wanted to make sure that this was not in the joists as well. That would mean trouble - and more money. The first picture shows one of the first problems I found when I started taking the ceiling down. As you can see, the door opening does not have a lentil supporting above. There is a heavy joist bearing down directly on the wall above the opening. There is considerable signs of lag here - the upper horizontal of the door opening is curved down by about 4-5 cm in the middle. One of the next jobs will be to prop the joist on either side of the wall and put in a proper lentil to support the weight.

When I took down the ceiling in Eileen's room, I found that the joists were in quite good condition. The boards were riddled with woodworm and the joists showed light signs of worm - but it looks as if the woodworm don't really go for the type of timber the joists are made of. When the boards were all gone, I thought that what would make a fantastic ceiling would be to leave the joists open and to hang a plastered ceiling (drywall) between the joists. It would mean that not all of the joists would be visible, but over half of it should be possible. This would also mean the ceiling would not have to be a hundred percent level - the joist would more than likely break up any uneveness that the eye would otherwise pick up. If we go ahead with this idea, we'd have to scrape or sand the joists and varnish them (or wax them - whatever suits). Below is another photo of the ceiling in Eileen's room (the lack of ceiling, more like - what looks like a ceiling is actually the floor of the attic).

One surprise I got when taking down the ceiling in Eileen's room was this nest. It isn't inhabited anymore, so I'll remove it next week. Hopefully they won't be back any time soon.

Also, share a thought for Pat the Rat. I found this guy in the ceiling. It looks like he got in as a small rat and stuffed himself on the wheat that was in between the ceiling and the attic floor. He probably got too fat to get back out and died of thirst.

Here come the radiators

Niedermaier GmbH came today to start work on the heating in the bedroom area. If you remember, there is underfloor heating going into the living room (and kitchen/bath) area but the bedroom area is going to have standard radiators because the low ceilings would not really allow for good underfloor heating.

You might also remember, that I had already cut out a 10cm x 12cm slot in the external walls around the whole perimeter of the bedroom area. This was to hold the insulated pipes to the radiators in the bedrooms. I was looking forward to these pipes actually being installed, so I can go and fill up the slots again.

After the first day of work, most of the pipes are actually already in (and are insulated). The radiators had to be fixed in place first, so that the plumber knew how to align the pipes. When the pipes are fixed, the radiators can be removed again for storage. We can then build the wall up again and plaster it. When we're finished with plastering and painting, the radiators can simply be hung again.

Here are a couple of pictures of the radiators after the first day of work. The plumbers will be back tomorrow to finish the radiator piping and to start work on the piping up to the (as yet non-existant) water tank in the attic and the piping over to the party room. By the way, in case you are wondering what the red pipe in the second and third photos is - it is a "blind connection" - we can install radiators downstairs later, but this blind pipe had to be installed now. It goes down through the ceiling in the front room. The pipes downstairs would be installed "aufputz" - i.e. fixed to the wall, not under the plaster.

 

Network Infrastucture

Theoretically, it should be possible to have at least gigabit network like this (all Cat7a)

Next steps

As you might have seen in the last blog post, I started taking down the timber boards that were under the plaster (and reeds) in the bedrooms. The boards were full of woodworm and they were not very level. This would mean hours of work leveling before being able to hang the slabs. As well as that, I wanted to get an idea of what kind of condition the joists underneath were in - especially because the boards had woodworm.

It turned out the joists were in pretty good condition - no evidence of woodworm, and no rot. The joists vary between 11cm x 16cm and 18cm x 16cm. The spacing was not as much as in the living room floor, but it is still pretty wide, at about 95cm (centre to centre).

As part of our heating plan, there is a 1000L tank to be installed in the attic above the bedroom area. The tank diameter is about 1m (including insulation). 1000L on an area of about 1.57 square metres (3.14 * .5) means a mass of a tonne (1000L) on a very small surface area - i.e. considerable downward pressure. I didn't want this tank resting on the 95cm spacing between the joists. As there is a supporting wall running perpendicular to the joists I figured it would be possible to construct a timber support for the tank like in the sketch below. The timber beams would hang from the existing joists using steel joist hangers. They would also rest on the wall in the middle. This would hopefully spread the pressure of the tank over the existing joists and (more importantly), down through the supporting wall.

I had to call Johannes Stuckenberger to order more OSB boards to finish the living room. While on the phone to him, I asked him what he though of my plan to support the water tank. He pointed out that one of the prerequisites of getting the building plan passed by the planning department was that a static engineer has to sign. We might as well wait and see what the engineer has to say then. Here are two pictures of the area where the water tank is proposed:

 

More work on the floor and on the ceilings

After a wasted weekend last week (everybody was sick) Uli and I got back to working on the living room floor today. The western 60 square metres of the floor was relatively easy to lay - as the joists were all laser leveled. Today we had to work on the eastern part - where the bathroom and the kitchen will be. The OSB boards were laid directly on the old floorboards. Those floorboards were not exactly level, so a lot of time was spent making sure that each board was level in itself, and also relatively level in the overall context of the floor. It wasn't easy. We still managed to get quite a bit done. We also started on the last two rows (southward) on the main living room floor.

When Uli had to go playing cards at about 15:00, I went working on the ceilings in the bedrooms. The plaster had been taken down already (I did this last month) but the ceilings were still covered in reeds. These reeds were the base for the plaster. They are held in place by a network of wires. The wires are nailed to the timber ceiling with l-shaped nails. I had to pull all of the nails to get rid of the reeds. It took about two hours to get Eileen's ceiling cleared of nails. Half an hour later the hall was done as well.

That's all for today! Below is a picture of the ceiling in Eileen's room, cleared of nails and reeds.