Sunday 12 August 2012

Completing the walls

(Sorry its been almost a month since the last post. I've not been able to upload pictures. All fixed now though!)

After the electrics were all finished in the last post, I set about completing the walls.

Joining/Taping the walls

Given that there were some fairly large gaps that needed filling (in most part due to my poor cutting of the plasterboard), I opted to go down the standard taping and filling route. Had the walls been a little more level with no gaps between the boards, I'd have probably not bothered.

As you'll know if you've been following the blog, I'm a complete DIY novice, so this was something completely new to me that I was convinced I'd royally screw up! I spent a good few hours researching the best way of doing the taping/filling. This included watching countless guides on youtube too.

When it came down to it though, this information was fairly useless and it's just a case of going for it and seeing what happens. So thats what I did!

The first few bits came out pretty poor, however once I got the hang of it and figured out how much filler you needed, it wasnt too bad.

For the edge of the door and windows, I used a metal corner bar to support the edges (aka "Plasterboard Anglebead" - pictured below). This will ensure that if the corners are nocked, it wont rip the (cut, so very flakey) plasterboard apart. These just tack onto the plasterboard, and were then covered with the tape (I used the mesh-style tape, not the solid paper style tape as this allows the filler to go in-between it) and then used filler to effectively make it part of the wall. The end result is that you cant see any part of the metalwork, and the corners are near perfect smooth 90 degree angles.
Wickes Metal Anglebead used to protect the corners of the walls.

Sanding!

Once the filler had dried, it needed sanding to get it as level as possible with the plasterboard. For this I used an electric sander. A word of warning. This is messy. In fact, its probably the worst and most messy part of my entire build. It took a good 6 hours of solid sanding to get a half decent result. The cleanup work afterwards took another good hour!

Final Result

The end result of the joint and taped walls was ok. It wasnt perfect, but then I never expected to get it perfect, this being my first time doing it.

To help smooth the walls even more, I used a 1200 grade lining paper, which made the walls MUCH better, with only a sight line visible on either side of the wall where there was filler.

Walls done, just putting up the lining paper!

Windowsill


One thing I did need to do was get a windowsill put in. I initially planned to just go and buy a length of windowsill from Wickes and cut it to size, however given its extortiantly high price, I decided to first attempt to make my own. I already had a huge amount of leftover wood from the shed build, so used a spare roof plank and cut it down to the correct length, then used an electric plainer to flatten the surface, and to create a curved edge (and to remove the tongue/groove that was on the edges). Once it was plained to a rough size and shape, I finished off the edges and corners by manually sanding them. The end result was pretty much exactly what I'd have paid £15 for at Wickes, and it only took 10 minutes to make...result!
My home-made windowsill in place!


In the next article I'll detail the interior finish!

(Note: more photos from this post are on the flickr set!)

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