DIY Project Diary – Week 7

Not much progress this week. We demolished the useless built in cabinet between the bedroom and hall – it opened up the whole floor. This cabinet was built like a mini-room – it had proper stud-partition walls – with insulation and everything. No wonder there was no space left inside it for anything much!..

I so wish we could have left it as a big open space – but it’s not allowed. According to building regs for a three storey house like ours there has to be a protected escape route between the bedrooms and the front door. So the bedroom cannot be an open space on the top floor – it has to be protected by 30-minute fire-resistant walls. So we’ve reconstructed a fireproof wall – again a stud-partition covered with fireproof plasterboard. This didn’t take long – but there was dust everywhere.

Then we spent a whole day in B&Q. We’ve invested in new wood-working and other power tools such as a circular saw, a Scorpion saw, a jigsaw, a nail gun, a floor sander, a circular disk sander etc… making us feel very enthusiastic. We bought all the flooring (untreated pine). We were going to buy the wood panelling too – but those tongue and groove panels looked very traditional. I wanted something different – wooden panelling with a modern twist. So I considered using wooden floorboards – but they are too thick and it would cost a fortune to clad the whole room. Using weathering boards would be too rough (and cheap looking). So what about MDF – I thought??? We bought a sheet to experiment.

The MDF is 6mm thick and we cut it into 120mm high strips and to the full length (2.4m). We then attached these (with glue and the new nail-gun) onto vertical battens (30mm) – allowing a small gap between them. As we put each one up, we tapped 3mm diameter nails along the upper edge into plasterboard for the next one up to rest on and to create even gaps. When the glue dried we pulled the nails out. At first everything went fine. But when we got to the 10 th row I noticed that the strips were not quite straight – they were curving at one end. This created a weird (rather funky actually) wavy effect on the wall – but this wasn’t the modern twist that I was after! We’ve realised that a 2.4m long sheet of bendy MDF is rather tricky to cut absolutely precisely with a hand-held circular saw. As we only have two workbenches to work on – this is causing us quite a problem. On top of this, we’re doing the sawing in the garden –as I really don’t want MDF dust all over the house. But the weather doesn’t help – five minutes sunshine, five minutes shower, five minutes Siberian wind… I thought April was done with!

Anyway, we have bought 2 more sheets of MDF so we have to make sure that we cut them accurately. We have wasted quite a lot of material already – although we can use some of these to cover the cabinets, the headboard and the storage boxes, we must make sure that the strips are straight. Perhaps we should also buy a bench saw!!! We’ll be doing this all week – despite that we have other projects to work on.

I’ll be back next week!!!