… that we were going to have a nice day. And so while I was in the verandah making coffee I hung the washing outside to dry in the wind (it’s still not dry since Monday evening).
However … you’ve guessed it. That was the Kiss Of Death and within 15 minutes it was teeming down with rain again, just like always.
So where did I get up to today?
All of the plasterboard is on the outer wall, and I’ve also fitted it at the head of the stairs. That meant cutting and fitting a set of counter-battens of course, as well as putting a second layer of that space-blanket insulation on the outer wall. This house will be the best-insulated in the whole of the world – and quite right too. No money ever spent on insulation is wasted, as I have said before. And that’s even more relevant as fuel bills rocket up to the roof.
Once that was out of the way, I trimmed off the floor in the attic so that it’s now flush with the beam that I fitted in 2009 (and I can’t think why I didn’t do that years ago) and I’ve faced off the beam with some of the pine shelving that I’ve been using to make the risers for the staircase. And in fact it looks quite neat.
I wish that I could say the same about the plasterboarding though. It’s a total mess and there are at least two pieces that need to be taken off to find out what on earth is going on underneath them. Both of them 10mm; both of them screwed to the same counter-batten – so why is the top one about 5mm proud of the bottom one?
Apart from seeing loads of places where I really should have done so much better with these stairs, I won’t ever build another staircase on outiggers and cantilevers like this one. Itwas by far and away the quickest way to build it when I was in a desperate hurry to move into this room back in late autumn 2009, but fitting the insulation, the counter-battens and the plasterboard has been an absolute nightmare. If I had realised that it was going to be as difficult as this, I would have ripped out the staircase last week, plasterboarded the walls in one go (probably have taken me an hour) and done the stairs another way.
But still, you live and learn.
I find the best way to get laundry dry when it won’t hang dry normally is to set a fan blowing on it. Not a hot fan – just a fan. That blows the moisture off it fairly quickly so it dries without getting smelly (which it will if it’s left wet for more than a day or so).