Casing the door frame

The engineer had a look around the place on March 18th, to get a first impression. One of the things I asked him was how to support the wall opening which will eventually be the door to our bedroom. You can see in the picture to the left that the joist on the left is bearing down directly on the opening while the joist on the right is also a bit dodgy. Cracks had already appeared in the wall over the opening, so I was interested in a temporary and a permanent solution for this.

I suggested concrete lentils, like you'd use for windows or doors. The engineer said that this more than likely would not suffice. He suggested casing the opening with concrete (with steel rods in it).

First of all, we needed to support the ceiling properly in order to take the weight of the joist enough to allow us the take away the bit of wall that was sagging under the weight of the joist. We used a timber frame to support it.

Once the ceiling was propped and we were fairly sure the house wouldn't fall down, we took down the wall, up to 30cm each side of the gap. The idea was to build a casing using the stiff chipboard that was lying around the place. A timber frame (in a 'u' shape) inserted into the gap supports the case on the bottom.

Whenever the weather gets a bit warmer, we are going to fill the casing with concrete. I checked up on procuring steel rods. The BayWa in Velden has them. The available dimensions are 9mm, 12mm, 16mm and 20mm. I rang the engineer earlier on today to ask him which of the steel rod dimensions would be the best. He is still busy calculating, so he'll get back to me with an answer early next week. Otherwise, I'll go with the 20mm rods as they are not substantially more expensive than the other ones anyway.

Woodworm better get their hats and coats

75kg of Disodium Octaborate Tetrahydrate is coming to get you! If I was a woodworm, I'd be considering a hasty exit across the border.

Insulation confetti

I didn't get much done today but I did get started on the insulation under the floors in the bedroom area. I bought 8 cubic metres of the stuff from a woman who had taken it out of a house in Bodenkichen (about 25 km away).

Rather than taking up the whole floor and having to go to extreme trouble trying to level things up again I decided to take up only every third floorboard - just enough so I could reach the middle of the remaining boards to spread the beads. Today I got all of the big bedroom done and just one half of Eileen's room. There are a few pictures below.

Kitchen ideas

We went to Biller yesterday (with Eileen) to see if you could get some inspiration for a kitchen. It was Verkaufsoffener Sonntag, which means a Sunday where the shops were allowed to open for business. There are usually a couple of these each year. The local government gets to decide if and when a Verkaufsoffener Sonntag happens. We got to Biller at about 10:15 and it was relatively quiet - which was good. It turned out that the selling (including sales advice) was only from 13:00 but that didn't bother us much anyway, as were were there to look around, not to buy.

When we got up on the top floor, where the kitchen area is, we saw a kitchen called 'Lucy' from vito-kuechen.de. It turns out that the Vito mark is owned by the Begros GmbH group. This group is a purchaser for many of the big (non Ikea) furniture shops in Germany - including Biller. After a bit of research later (the Internet is great for things like that), I am almost sure that the Begros group bought the Lucy kitchen from Nobilia, a big name among kitchen makers.

Anyway, below is a smartphone photo (which is why it is a bit blurred I imagine) of the Lucy kitchen. I need to have a look at the dimensions of our kitchen to see what would need to be doctored. I'd imagine it could go in pretty much exactly as you see in the photo, but mirrored - i.e. the L-Shape would need to be in the other direction. The long edge is 4,3 metres. The longest wall in our kitchen would be long enough but there are two windows in it. The other wall (the Feuermauer) is about 4 metres - so it wouldn't fit exactly, but with a bit of planning it could.

Finished the subfloor

Uli and I finished the subfloor in the kitchen/bath/living room area today. We had already done most of this, but the difficult part was still left to be done. It was difficult because the OSB boards had to be laid directly on the old floorboards, rather than on the laser leveled joists. That means that each board needed to be leveled in itself and leveled with the rest of the floor. We used timber shims to level the boards. In some places it there was over a centimetre between the old floor and the underside of the OSB board.

What this means is that we can now plan the walls. I'm not sure yet if we should do this with breeze blocks or with drywall. If we do go for drywall, I'd rather a stud wall with OSB cladding (probably 16mm OSB or maybe less). The slabs could be fixed to the OSB boards. The advantage is that it would be more stable, it would be easier to take care of soundproofing and later we can hammer nails anywhere at all, rather than having to go and look for the studs.

Until the civil engineer comes there isn't really much point in planning anything though. By the way, the rolls of pipes in the photo below are for network cables. You don't want to pull network cables around the place behind joists and plaster without these pipes.