Acrow props in place!

 



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Downstairs floors, insulation, underfloor heating and screed

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Now that the upstairs we liveable, it was time to start on the downstairs. First we had to remove the remaining screed from the back of the house. Then lay insulation. We put 125mm of insulation in the front rooms to bring it to roughly the same height as the back. Next we had to put down a later of polythene and a foam expansion strip around the outside to allow for the screed to expand when heated by the underfloor pipes. Then we lay the 16mm Thermrite (pex-al-pex) underfloor heating pipes and clipped down onto the insulation. We had 7 zones in total. The one big mistake we made was not too pressurise the system. We were told we only needed to fill the pipes with water. This is not correct, its important to pressurise the system up to about 6 bar and then let it drop and sit at 1.5 bar, otherwise the screed will crack. Because we didn't do this we had to cancel the screed delivery and go back into the queue. It meant that we had to move out for a month as we couldn't live in ...
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Window shopping or rather shopping for windows!

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 I now have 4 different quotes for windows. And they all give different information. It is extremely hard to know if you are comparing apples with apples or apples with pears. So I decided it was time for a spreadsheet! I listed the window companies: Kloeber, Eximia, Green Building Store and Vindor and their quotation prices. I compared them across various areas: airtightness, U-value, water tightness, acoustic rating, security rating. I had this information for some but not others so I could decide if I wanted to go back and ask this. Some quotes allowed for 2 different colours internally and externally. Initially we asked for alu-clad but this is about 20% more expensive than timber so we had to revise our expectations. It turned out one of the quotes didn't even include cills and was a similar price so we ruled that one out. All quotes initially were for supply only. But after consideration, we realised that fitting a first floor window that weighed 650kg wasn't a simple tas...
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Insulation

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 I will be so pleased to see the back of the damp, moudly, mouse-poo strewn fibre glass insulation. I bagged up the last of the stuff and took to the recycling unit. Sadly I do not think it is recyclable. We have been thinking about sustainability as we go along the renovation project. I thought insulation would be a problem area for sustainability. Are we going to have to make some "green trade-offs"? We opted for 150mm Quinn Therm PIR boards on the new roof between the joists and a further 25mm sheet over the joists. And on the old roof which has a non breathable membrane and up to now zero ventilation (hence the damp, moudly fibreglass), we have put 50mm with a gap behind for air to circulate, and 100mm over the joists. We will also add ventilation holes in the gable ends and in the soffits. And we are going to tape the outermost sheet of PIR with airtightness tape. " PIR (polyisocyanurate) insulation is a popular insulation board commonly used on homes across the cou...
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