Building, part 2

After an amazing fun day building the frame, with loads of help from our friends, the next bit of the build was frustrating and a bit rushed, as we struggled to get a skin on the building before the weather turned bad. Sheathing board is very soft and malleable, and our stuff was also tongue and groove fitting, so there were plenty of frustrating moments as we tried to fit a bashed tongue into a dented groove without snapping the board, or our patience. We were able to cover the roof from the inside in one very long evening's work.

Those metal posts were part of the fence around the substation, and we started with some vague idea of keeping them, but later gave up and chopped them off with an angle grinder. It was very noisy and fun.

We still had to fit the outside rails to the roof, which meant tangling with the undergrowth.

By this point it was really starting to look like a building. Not very weatherproof at the front though.

 With some help from Jerome and Dee we fitted a waterproof breather membrane, which should stop any rain from getting into the actual shell of the building. There are different grades of this material. Some types are designed to replace roofing felt and hardly breathe at all, and some are designed to allow water vapour to escape, just like your fancy Gore-Tex jacket.

We didn't realise this and ended up having to return some, as it would have made our walls about as breathable as a carrier bag. There needs to be some way for water vapour to escape from every building without condensing inside it (or worse, inside the walls) and it took some head scratching to work out what order things went together in. The order we decided on was, from inside to out, plywood > insulation/wall timber > sheathing board > breather membrane > battens > wood cladding. If we got this wrong, please don't tell us.

At this stage we still hadn't ordered the roof due to dithering over what colour to get, so we decided to start lining the building. First the insulation went in.

The slabs of insulation fitted into the walls snugly, but the ceiling was more problematic due to gravity's influence and the slightly erratic spacing of our joists. As a temporary fix, we cut some long ribbons of spare breather membrane and used them to hold the insulation in place until we came to screw the boards over it.

The next stage was fitting the plywood boards that lined the structure. After a while it was hard to stop seeing faces in these.

One thing about using ply: it's quite hard to cut large sheets of material accurately enough to avoid gaps between them. And now I can also understand why things like skirting boards exist.