Bracing ourselves for the end

A major milestone has been reached in our renovation project. Today some of the Gib board arrived and the interior walls are finally being lined. This has not turned out to be as easy as we first thought it would be. Extra costs are piling up, because we're working with house framing a century old, applying 21st century products. There isn't enough framing in the walls to glue and screw the modern plasterboard to. So, we've had to buy un-budgetted for framing timber and build in new framing and put in new nogs.





Because we took 2 walls out, we have to use a certain amount of Braceline, which requires special brackets to be used to hold together the framing, special (more expensive) screws to fit the Braceline to the framing, and many of them fitted at regular intervals. Braceline also has to be fitted in a solid wall to ceiling uncut piece. The Council inspector (who is coming back in 3 days) needs to see this, so we've had to cut out some of the scotia. We'll put it back after and will have to bog the cut marks:

Actually you're not supposed to cut pieces out like in the picture above. Cutting a slot for the beam is technically not correct. The part of this piece that is counted as bracing is only the width between the windows. It's been cut like this - flowing around the window, to move the joint (where pieces of Gib will meet) away from the corners of the window which leads to cracks.

In this next photo, a piece of Braceline is going up on the wall between the lounge and kitchen. We couldn't fit the required amount around the exterior walls. More will go up on the wall between the bathroom and third bedroom.

It's a huge relief to see this progress. When the rooms start to look like rooms someone will soon be able to live in. To know that maybe only 2 more months of our weekends will be needed to finish the inside. To think that maybe next school holidays we might actually be able to spend some fun time with our daughter instead of her going to the school holiday programme (which she actually wanted to go to and really enjoyed, but that's not the point - we want to bring her up, we want to be the ones having fun with her).