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.