Dirty rotten sub-floor insulation
This was beginning to be the dirtiest, nastiest, hardest job I’d undertaken so far on the house. It was like doing yoga in a confined space with lots of dust and a sprinkling of danger thrown in for good measure. It took forever too, a single bit of sub-floor insulation would take hours and the more elaborate corners and wiggly bits would take even longer. I felt like one of the Borrowers I was spending so much of my time under the floorboards.
The fitting of the damp proof course was tedious and time consuming. The fitting of the plywood was grim and involved pinning sheets of plywood to joists while contorting oneself into teeny spaces – in the dark – and working with a domestic electric screwdriver (it was the only screwdriver short enough for the enclosed spaces) was problematic when working with longer screws. This was then substituted with fastening insulation into a narrowing gap then taping it all in to the DPC and plugging any holes and joins with more tape, both jobs involving precision screwing and taping, all in what can only be described as a cloudy, dark letterbox.
Still it would make the living room muchos warmer in winter and it would be all worth it… I hoped.
Anyway my deadline for finishing all this subterranean work was Friday the 14th of August, on the 14th I was about to take another week on holiday and although I wanted to work on the house I didn’t want to spend it wriggling under floorboards. I’d worked as many late nights as I could during the last week and had managed to complete the first quarter of the floor and a little more of the next section. By the Friday my half-way house of available time for the job was rapidly approaching and this wasn’t reflected in the work I’d done.
Anyway Friday evening and all I had to do were around six more lengths before the half-way subflooring was complete, not too much to ask given that I had an evening and a day free over the weekend.
Friday evening was fortuitous as I got a flier from work, getting home I only wasted a bit of time getting ready and having a cuppa, but despite being knackered from a week at work I was pretty much on the case by 4:30 that afternoon. I decided to tackle some of the naughtier wigglier bits near the French doors and these took ages. So long in fact that I didn’t complete the work on them until midnight, this was barely with any breaks, nothing significant to eat and I retired at one in the morning after a muddy bath and with the promise of a large breakfast as I’d not had the time for a meal.
[doptg id=”43″]
The next day was a day with my lovely daughter so it was Sunday when I next cracked on with some work. This didn’t start too well as I slept in, my gorgeous new bedroom was far too tempting to just relax in and admire my coving work, so I didn’t get a start till far later in the morning than I’d intended. Anyway I may have started late but I pressed on for the full day without barely a stop. I stopped for a snack for lunch and that was my only break, while I worked I spent my time listening to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo movie reviews on a loop and Arsenal beating Chelsea in the Charity Shield.
Everything on this sub-floor takes time and I got to the final strip at about six in the afternoon. This was to be the hardest bit and I didn’t count on it taking over four hours. The trouble with this bit was that I couldn’t fit this last portion from underneath as I had done on all the previous sections. This needed to be tackled from above and I needed a cunning plan in order to complete the floor.
Cunning plan:
- Take lots of measurements to get the sizes of the insulation and plywood spot-on.
- Find some bolts and some slender wooden strips to act as battens
- Cut the insulation pop-on size to fit the insulation gap in the floor, cut the plywood around 100mm bigger than the hole (both top to bottom and side to side). The idea being to sit the insulation on top of the plywood this time, the plywood supporting the insulation and hanging on bolts suspended from the battens that are to be fixed to the sides of the joists above. A sandwich being formed between the battens and the plywood, the bolts pulling it all together.
- Fix everything into place… just not in situ, do it as that sandwich of materials, once assembled then drill ten holes through the plywood, through the insulation and then through the battens using a drill bit a bit bigger than the bolts require.
- Take it all apart again and put the plywood on the bottom, then tape doubles-sided DPC tape around the edges of the wood to form a frame of tape (this is to form a seal once the plywood is pulled up against the underside of the floor). Pop the bolts through the holes and then re-drilling where the tape had covered the holes. Fix the bolts in place using gaffer-tape over the bolt heads so they won’t drop out when you turn the board upside down.
- Fit the insulation to the plywood, place the bolts through the holes into the insulation, then press the insulation down onto the plywood and DPC tape, which should catch the insulation around its edges, improving the seal.
- Drop this through the hole in the floor – this took some doing and some wiggly contortioning too.
- Put the battens in place next to the joists and methodically pull the bolts through the holes in the battens, this is fiddly and takes some teasing to stop the bolts dropping through into the void under the floor – good old gaffer tape worked though. Once through then fix nuts to the end of the bolts, fix the battens to the joists and slowly tighten the nuts up with a socket set, this will bring the plywood neatly up against the bottom of the installed flooring, the insulation fitting perfectly-ish into the gap, the DPC tape on the plywood flattening out against the bottom of the existing flooring, making an air-tight gap and hey-presto we have a completed floor. Only thing to do now is to botch any gaps in the insulation with scrap insulation strips and tape up the seams and bodges when finished.
Now that made no sense at all, did it 🙂
Anyway it worked and by ten thirty that night I was heading off for a bath and some food before a well-deserved night’s sleep and before a 6:21 start the next morning for work.
Hey ho..
Just watched an episode of Homes Under the Hammer, an unlikely philosopher called Bev declared that it’s not about the money for him it’s about the self-esteem renovating brings to him. I must agree, the satisfaction is fantastic, I do however wish I had more cash to do more work though.
Cash = Esteem = Satisfaction