More Ceiling

Following on from my previous "serious" post, here is a picture that attempts to show the problem with fitting this last bit of ceiling in the hallway :

The stud wall containing the louvre door is built just forward of the joist above it, thus leaving nothing for me to attach the end of the ceiling to. The plasterer reckons you can get away with a 6" floating edge overhang with 12.5 mm plasterboard, but this is a lot more than that. The joist is set back about 3" from the face of the stud wall, so I can't really just attach a longitudinal timber strip. In the end, I put in a series of noggins perpendicular to the joists and made sure I knew where to put the plasterboard screws !

The end result, in a rather blurry picture featuring Buzz Lightyear, is this :

That is it - ceilings done. There are no more.....

Just revisiting that first picture, note the use of the twin "scissor" style noggins that they used to use between joists to stop them twisting. Even in those days it would surely have been easier to implement the noggins in the way they do now - using just an offcut of the joist at 90 degrees, as described in my 1st September entry. I reckon they knew that the modern way would lead to creaking, and went to the trouble of cutting the angles and careful measuring and fitting. That is workmanship and attention to detail, sadly lacking these days. I am beginning to wish I had done it that way, but I'm not taking it all down again now !

This weekend we also made a start on dry-lining the hall wall opposite the front door. This is mainly to cover up the central heating pipes which would otherwise have to be boxed in. We are using plasterboard on a timber framework screwed to the wall. These two pictures show the pipes and the bottom two framework members that were fitted today. There are two low down on the wall, interspersed with the pipework, on order that there is something substantial onto which we can attach the skirting board.

You can clearly see where the old staircase used to go, though this is not the original staircase for the house. In fact, what we are doing here is dry lining the original outside wall of the 2 up, 2 down cottage that this place started out as. If you look carefully at the stonework in these two pictures you can see the cut quoins that were once the outside corner of the house. We reckon our hallway extension was added in the 1920's or 1930's. We are not the first to embark on a project here (though probably the first to blog it).