Building Work (Weeks 8 & 9) – Plasterboard, Niches and Corbels

So I’m getting lazy and lumping two weeks into one post.  It’s also going to be quite a short one as, although work has been happening at the house – it’s not stuff that makes for interesting photographs for example – pipes!

Pipes and back of barbican basinThese are the pipes going upstairs for the central heating, the hot and cold water (I think) and the waste for the shower and the basin (that’s the back of the Barbican basin)

At the start of week 8 a whole load of blue (moisture resistant) plasterboard appeared and my open plan house started to get segregated up.  

Here’s the downstairs loo.

Boxed in WC Boxed in WC with propped up Barbican basin

After visiting all the tile shops again and getting many tile samples delivered, I found the tiles I wanted and called up to ask for a delivery price to the Isle of Man – £130. Yeah, so instead I decided to go for some discontinued ones that one of the showrooms had priced at £10/m2. I had to decide the tiles now because I’m having a shower niche put in and Dave (the builder / joiner) said it should be perfectly lined up with the tiles, so perfectly that I had to decide how many mm of grout I was going to have – arrgh, decisions! The tiles are 248mm by 398mm and ideally I wanted them laid vertically but I measured out all the surfaces and it just wouldn’t have worked as well as horizontally (ironically the tiles I actually wanted were large format 100mm by 300mm matt flat metro style tiles which would have been laid horizontally). Anyway, for the niche, I was just going to have it one tile high (and accept I was not going to be able to buy the ‘bulk saver’ shampoo bottles) but by the time it was tiled inside, it would have been quite a bit smaller and so might not have fitted even the regular shampoo bottles, Dave suggested making it two tiles high and putting in a shelf – which sounded great until I then couldn’t decide if it should be positioned a tile higher or a tile lower. So he suggested three tiles! At this point I probably didn’t need to shout ‘yeah, let’s go wild!’ – but at least a decision was made and three it is!

Here we go, carefully modelled by some shower gel left by the previous tenants and a foam gun.

Shower niche

N.B. I opted for the moisture resistant plasterboard (painted with waterproofing sealant) rather than the uber waterproof stuff – as the niche is likely to be the point of failure anyway.

The rest of the bathroom got boxed out at the same time. The previous bath was an imperial bath (1675mm) which had been channelled into the wall to fit in the space (which was 1650mm). The one 1650mm bath I liked was made of steel and therefore the tap-holes (which I needed as you can’t wall mount taps in a solid wall) had to be drilled by the manufacturer into the enamel – which meant the lead time and the cost were pretty excessive. So, as the walls were in a terrible state after I’d removed all the tiles, it was decided to box it all out to make it 1600mm wide (a slightly more standard bath size). I didn’t really take any decent photos of this (it’s pretty hard now the room isn’t open plan) but here you can see the boxing in around two of the windows (as well as the new pipes for the basin and bath).

boxed in bathroom

In Week 9 the brickies returned and the extension started to grow. On Friday, I got there after work to see they’d got creative and put some little corbels in to emulate the ones at the soffits 🙂

Extension half up

Rear Corbel

Looks ace, doesn’t it?

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