New Porch (Porsche)

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 Posted by Mark on Friday, 15 May 2015

 

The progress of our building works has taken a small setback when Ross Spence, the builder that we have given the work to, fell ill before he started. Thankfully it is nothing too serious and he should be back on track soon. In the meantime it gave me the opportunity to finish off the inside of our porch. This needed stripping out, insulating, plaster boarding and then decorating. I am pleased to announce that it is now finished! We are now on the search for some bits of furniture for it but no hurry there.

I must confess to being pretty pleased with myself as I am no plasterer and up here it is more common rather than a full skim of plaster they use a technique known as ‘Tape and Fill’ . Apparently a lot of new builds use this technique as well. So I went to YouTube to watch some videos of how to do this and having decided that there was no way I could approach the skill of these professional guys but that the job in principle didn’t look too difficult I set off in search of the various items I would need.

For those of you unfamiliar with ‘Tape and Fill’ I shall explain: The plasterboard sheets have tapered edges about 6cm wide, when two sheets are put together there is a 12 cm ‘valley’. The idea is to fill this with a plaster compound or as the Americans call it on those videos ‘mud’ then you take the ‘tape’ which is a paper tape and smooth it along the join. This stops any cracks forming along the join after it is filled. The key thing here is to press the tape well down so that is sits in the valley and is not proud at any point, also make sure that the tape is stuck all over to the ‘mud’ ( two things that I did not get 100% right! ) . Once this has all dried you make up the filling compound ( like plaster of Paris ) and smooth it along the ‘valley’. You need a very wide smoothing tool for this that will fully bridge the valley and you should end up with a fully filled join that is flush with the main surface of the plasterboard. Let this harden and then sand it lightly if needed, then you are good to paint, preferably using rollers.

I am grateful to the decorating shop in Kirkwall called George Bain , that not only sells Dulux paint ( my preferred choice ) but will also sell you small quantities of the tape and filler for such jobs and are very helpful.

My next job? Mowing the lawn!

 

Thanks for sharing