Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Plasterboarding
It's been three days of solid plasterboarding (plaque de plâtre or placo for short) and even though the piles of placo are getting smaller there still seems an awful lot to do. All of the outside walls upstairs are finished and most of the stairwell along with the start of some rooms leading off the top of the stairs. Caroline has been pointing the exposed stonework in the stairwells with a traditional lime mortar. With the placo in place round the stairwell it's looks really good.
The main problem has been the sloping ceilings and exposed trusses (beams) that are not square, parallel or regular, so just about every board so far has needed at least two or three cuts with slight trimming and adjustments. To make calculating all the angles a little easier we've made two large adjustable 'protractors', a couple of bits of wood about 60cm long bolted at the end with a wing nut. It means we can transfer the angle from the wall to the board easily and accurately; essential when you haven't got a known square or level edge.
One of the other things that slows you down is the constant attention to providing a good fixing point for things that are going to be attached to the walls. For example in the bathroom you need to calculate the position and height of the sink then adjust any uprights etc, and ensure that a strong batten is secured behind the wall to screw the sink into. You just keep stopping and starting all the time and lose the flow.
For all the walls we are using a metal studding system. On the ceiling and floor are screwed metal U shaped channels called rails. The vertical metal studs, montant, slide between the top and bottom rails and are placed loosley to allow for adjustment at 60cm intervals (a placo board is 1.2m wide). The placo is screwed via self-tapping screws into the montant and the rail securing everything. Insulation (bought as a roll 60cm wide) is simply slotted between the uprights.
In the photo you can see the montant and the rail with grey coiled electrical conduit (gaine) hanging down to be enclosed in the partition walls for some of the switches and sockets. The green placo (it's normally grey) is special moisture resistant for use in bathrooms etc.
All the internal doors you buy come with the frame already around the door ready for fitting. The frame has a rebate the width of the montant and it so just slots in. Fitting a door is simplicity itself. You just push one side of the frame up against a vertical montant, slide another up from the other side and then screw through the two montants into the door frame and as long as the montant is plumb it's finished.
Things should start to get much easier and quicker with the new internal walls because 'everything' is square, horizontal and vertical with the ceiling height engineered to be 2.5 meters high (the same as a plasterboard). Just a straight parallel cut on the board for the correct width.
I think we are going to be placo'ing for quite a few days yet.
| 9:53:34 PM
Plasterboarding
