Window Cills

The en-suite bathroom and new sitting room both need interior window cills to sit on top of the wall inside the mullions. The picture below shows the small window in the bathroom. The mullion sits atop the stone exterior wall, which is backed by a wall constructed from heavy-weight concrete blocks. The white strip is plastic with an insulation block bonded to it's underside and is the "cavity closure". Inboard of this is the lightweight celcon internal wall which is then rendered and plastered. You can just about make out the top mesh of the stainless steel angle bead used to terminate the plaster :

My window cill sits on top of this, butted up to the mullion, to make it all look nice and tidy. The total depth is too much for the standard window boards available from my local builders merchant so the first step is to make up a wider plank. I use the standard window board, plane off the lip on the rear edge then dowel and glue it to another strip of identical thickness timber. A pair of sash cramps hold it all together while the glue dries :

The problem with this particular window is that the plasterer did not get his plaster edging particularly level. With the left hand side of the cill sitting flush, there is a 10mm gap on the right :

Jan was not happy with my proposal to fill this with polyfilla, plaster, wood fillets or anything I can get my hands on, feeling sure it would result in cracks and mess. Fortunately the plaster closure stands slightly higher than the top of the wall, so I was able to take a grooving plane to the underside of the cill and let it sit lower on the left. Much better now :

With a freshly sharpened plane and an electric sander the joint between the two pieces is tidied up to give a nice flat finish :

Another for the larger bathroom window :

And another (not quite finished yet) for the sitting room :

This last one is actually made of oak (all the others are softwood) designed to match the beam casing in the ceiling. This time, I had a local joinery shop make up the joint between the planks, just to make sure it was a top notch finish. They use machine tools to cut some form of finger joint throughout the length of the butted edges, hence do not need the dowels. Once joined, I assume they are able to pass the whole thing through the thicknesser machine thus giving a near invisible join. My joins aren't too bad, but you wouldn't describe them as invisible !

These cills now just need to be fixed in place....