week 33: 3.5 tonnes of floor...

Wooden flooring arrived on Monday. All 3.5 tonnes of it or 400 pieces however you want to cut it. Luckily I managed to get Simon Veale from Totnes Swimming Club to help out for the day with his machine. He did a great job unloading the flooring on two large palettes and putting right onto the terrace and then helping lift the 80 packs into the house!

Simon and machine seen below moving palletes around the site which was a real help to have a reorg of the site. Amazing what he could do with the telehandler machine in terms of delicate and accurate manovering of palettes etc. 

Probably rather stupidly I took the decision to microbevel each of the 400 boards. Initially I planned to use a router but due to the tonuge and grover section this proved impossible without lots of faff so I and later Pablo used a block plane and glass paper. What a job. We reckoned we could do a pack (5 pieces in 10 minutes if you really focussed) . So thats 800 minutes or 13 hours plus of bevelling. But then I had to put two coats of different products onto both boards. I probably needed my head read but it seemed like a good idea at the time to achieve:

1. A 260mm wide very clean grained engineered floor

2. With a microbel on every edge to emphasise the feeling of planks

3. With a white ciranova unico extra white oil finish

4. With an Osmo Raw top coat for wear protection.  

Here it is staked up in the downstairs bedroom. the planks out of the packs at this stage have been bevelled. The dhumidifier was on the whole time to try and keep the sealed room as dry as possible given at this stage the front door is permanently open.

 The plasterers have been back - this time applying the lime render base coat to the back and sides of the house. Great to get the wood fibre finally covered up. The orange is a mesh that is embedded in the render for strength. These guys drink 8 cups of coffee a day!

Below showing the finished render with downpipes and hoppers in place thanks to Tommy and Michael.