Enhanced Transcribe:
Hello everybody is Dr Ro here with Colin, say hi Col.
Hi.
We are here live on site. I am with Colin because a lot has happened since we did a live together. So we are going to do some filming on this and you’ll see these dripping out as educational pieces over the next month.
But we are live on site and Colin felt he wanted to talk you through a few important things that just happened recently in the view of where we are at with the house, maybe a quick overview of where we’ve got to.
We are going to talk about the outside of the property and what’s just happened here in the ceiling, so tell us where we at Col.
So we are now watertight on the property and things are happening internally, so the work is progressing and the first fix is almost done now and the boarding is going on. We are on the very good stretch of the project.
We will start to see the finishes going on in due course. At the moment we are standing outside on the balcony all the roofs are completed and we are now preparing for the water tightness with the external insulation.
If I just pan the camera around so you can see, you might remember from previously when we were here it was a shell wasn’t it?
That’s right yeah.
Let’s tackle what you want to talk about here which is the outside ceiling.
Yes so now in fact I don’t know if you can pan to the floor the weatherproofing is now on the flat roof, so this is now what is a balcony to the master bedroom. So this looks over into the garden and as you come back we’ve now got a brand-new, external doors and windows in. Which are absolutely beautiful and will finish off the exterior and then beyond that now we need to weathertight the building.
And then here we’ve got the membrane.
Give that the name again so they can hear it.
It’s called tiebeck and you put this on the outside of the building this will create a watertight seal and what we’ve got is this is coming into what is a timber frame and then we’ve got our window. Then the external insulation.
Explain what’s behind this because this is part of the old building isn’t it?
Yes so this level we have a timber frame structure, this is a funny property it had a cavity wall on the ground floor, then we had timber frame upstairs. The existing building only had a very thin wall structure so there was actually only 125mil thick of insulation and then a weatherboard, timber weatherboard on the outside. So the insulation was not very good on this property before.
So what we’ve done is we’ve retained the timber structure that’s 100mil insulation and then we are adding 100% of external insulation on top of this breather membrane. The u-value will get to about .16 which is incredible really. That’s extremely highly u-value and u-value is the thermal retention inside the building, it’s how we calculate building structure to make sure that it’s thermally meeting regulations.
Now on this point here one of the reasons it’s gone on fairly early is because we are literally facing south but there’s the driving rain.
That’s right, the weather has actually helped up a lot of the project in some areas but now we are watertight we can crack on with the inside. This will connect the external material ready for the insulation to go on and what that means is that the outside can come when the weather is drying up which it is, the insulation will be put in tow, three weeks’ time and the outside of the building will actually be on its way to completion.
Col so just some tips for people looking at doing renovations which do involve outside works. How quickly should this be considered? Is this a last-minute thing or should it be pre-planned before?
This is really useful to have for instance if you take off your roof, we did it on the slate roof behind you there they took the roof off we got the timber frame in and then we put the tiebeck a similar product over the roof. That keeps the water out; it’s great without the slate finish going on there. So this is a great product to get on when you can if you are doing external work.
Obviously this needs to go with the builder with what you’re putting outside, so the external insulation has to have the breather membrane.
That’s why that needs to go on there.
Col you wanted to talk about this detail over here, let’s have a look at what’s going on here. This is a really important part and again the whole point I’m sharing this with you is if you are looking at a project, for a lot of the time people are so obsessed with the inside of the renovation and they actually forget the outside works.
Water can be your enemy. That’s how I see it, so we want to keep all the water out. It doesn’t matter what happens internally to the outside water if it is not kept a way that will affect all the work you’ve been doing on the inside. So for us on this property we’ve got the water tightness completed now.
If I step back so you can see the feature here, so there’s the flow of the roof going into the external and the rendering is yet to go on, but you can see that now.
Here we have our zinc roof coming down. It’s meeting the vertical structure where the installation is going to go. So we have our dressing underneath this you can’t see it but we’ve got it going down that will give us the depth we need for the insulation to come at this point.
The junction is really crucial because you want to make sure it looks aesthetically pleasing, but you do not have any water coming into the property. So the way the slate comes down to the zinc and the way the zinc meets the insulation is very important.
This was a detail we really had to get right so if you want to show us, I’ll put the camera there and you can talk it through.
So you can see the slate coming down the nice trim of the slate there is actually just touching above the zinc, so that junction means that the zinc will go underneath the slate and create a drip, drip onto the zinc and then it will run away. Then we have at the corner here we have this corner where the insulation externally is going to go onto the existing structure.
How that comes down to meet here with a little gap at the bottom is vital. But behind here, which I can’t show you because it’s all sealed. We’ve got an up stand on top of the zinc, which is right sealed. That means that any water coming down will run straight on to here, there will be no risk of any water coming from behind.
The main thing with these things is details upfront before you start work, don’t hash it out on site.
Yeah some things you have to do on site it’s inevitable.
But in terms of the basic principles getting your drawings out and then working it through with the builder.
What we did here is we had three trades. In fact it was a carpenter, it was the zinc roof installer and the slate roof installer all in one.
As well as actually the rendering specialist.
That’s right so we were talking about this junction, how we were going to seal this because existing structure to new structure is always difficult, how do you get that right and we all had a conversation about what’s the best way to get that connecting, to make sure it looks good and it’s watertight.
So key tips here talk to the builder early, focus on details that you might normally overlook because the last thing you want to have done is not have anticipated this. I remember two, three weeks before coming out and he was here doing other stuff and saying I want to make sure you don’t miss these details.
I get a little bit obsessed with…
Water! No water getting into the house .
The thing is once it’s in, you might think you can dry it out and surface water does dry out but if it’s in the bones it takes a lot longer to dry out and what we were trying to avoid here was if we are going to put insulation on the inside, we’ve got all natural products inside the house, we didn’t want water starting to damage that and then that takes ages to try or be replaced.
We actually have been through that house and we found some of the old insulation was quite dark in places and mouldy because it hadn’t been looked after previously.
Great stuff, we are going to take a look inside the house and you’ll start to see some other videos coming out over the coming weeks.
Colin thanks very much for your help.
No worries.
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