The gypsum plates swap Monday, 12-Jul-21 21:39:13 CEST

Another gypsum week Monday, 26-Jul-21 21:56:52 CEST

Sunday, 18-Jul-21 22:00:15 CEST

One stack of gypsum removed from the living room

This week we moved one of the stacks of gypsum plates to the first floor.

Tuesday 12 July

The electric winch arrived! It took two days. Impressive that it is possible to order something and get it two days later. These packages were not extra heavy, so this was easy.

On the package, it says electric hoist. I use to say winch, but perhaps the correct word is hoist, I don’t know. After some search, I found that the two systems can look similar, but a hoist has an active break. A winch does not have that. The break holds the load when the motor is not running.

Can you imagine I have not even considered this feature when I ordered the hoist? Now I am pleased we got the system with an active break.

Here it is unpacked. The yellow extension cord was not part of the package. I bought that separately because the machine’s cord is really short, so we need to connect it high up on the scaffold.

We mounted the support bracket for the hoist. It was a bit challenging to get the machine on the bracket because it was heavy. I held the machine in the correct place, and my wife screwed on the bolts.

We tried it, and it works. It has two modes. The maximum weight is 600 kilo in one mode, and in another mode, it is 400 kilo. We let the hoist be on 400 kilos. It was already late. We were not going to hoist anything, but I prepared straps for the gypsum plates. It is inconvenient because you need two persons loading the plate and two persons unloading a plate. The thing is that we need to remove at least one of the stairs in the staircase to make room for working with the hoist. It will not be easy to run up and down the stairs.

We hope to get help with this from friends. We will see how that goes.

Wednesday 13 July

Our electrician had been to our new house and prepared holes for outlets in the workshop. He also added an outlet in the northeast bedroom that had been missed. This is great. I hope he will be back and put up cables to the holes. When that is done, we can close these walls on the other side. Obviously, this is work based on the that we have the correct plates on the correct floor, so we have things to do with the hoist.

My wife started estimating how many plates need to go where but I am a bit reluctant. It is obviously good to figure out where the plates will need to go, but we will miss cutting a couple of plates, etc. There are so many ways it can go wrong when preparing gypsum.

Today we finished putting up support beams in the wall between the bedrooms and the hall on the first floor. The house is constructed with building elements based on OSB plates and in between beams. The OSB has a width of 122 centimeters, and the gypsum plates are 120 centimeters wide. We need to have a beam in the seam between plates, but how do you do that when there is no beam? We solved that today. At the top, we still need a horizontal beam for the upper edge of the gypsum. When that is mounted between the existing beams, we can figure out where the vertical seams of the plate will be. We need to make sure that next to a door, we create a flag to avoid the wall from cracking. With the horizontal beam in place, it is just a question of setting up the vertical in-between. We placed beams in the hall, and when that was finished, we worked on the wall in the hobby room on the first floor.

The hobby room got the pipe from the wood stove running through. For the rest, it is the same principle. Horizontal beams and from that vertical beams where a seam of a gypsum plate will be. We must do this work anyway, so why not do it while we don’t have any gypsum plates.

There is one of those metal brackets on this wall as well. This bracket is painted red. It had screws in it, but the heads were sticking out very much. I sunk the holes so that the screws were in line with the brackets. Much better.

When we were done with this, it was a bit of time left for pottering around in the garden. I found that the grapevine had developed new leaves! And not just one or two leaves but many leaves.

I moved the grapevine plant on 29 March. On 23 May, I noted that the plant was doing fine. On 9 June, I started to be concerned about the plant. I started to give it more water. Then I started reading about the grapevine, and somewhere I read it don’t like to get too wet conditions. Then I gave up on the plant. It had to be on its own. Now today, I noticed these leaves! It is not dead just yet, but I am so glad to see these leaves. It is incredible how quickly they came. In a couple of days, they sprouted seamlessly out of nothing.

The weather forecast predicts a lot of rain tomorrow. I have no idea how that will go.

Thursday 14 July

Today was a regular day working from home. I prepared a smoothie as I usually do with berries that my wife had harvested from our bushes in our old garden. These are redcurrant berries. It is delicious and healthy too to eat smoothie. We just smash up some fruits and then have them for breakfast.

This smoothie came out with an intense deep pink color. It looked nice, and it tasted fantastic. There is not much that is better than berries harvested from the own garden.

Our daughter was supposed to get an operation on her knee today, so we had to pick her up. At first, we thought she would get dismissed from the hospital already during the day, but later we heard she could go home in the evening. We took care of the sheep, gave them their food supplement. It had been a rainy day. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, it has rained so much that houses are evacuated. We got 6 millimeters of rain.

Our sheep stayed more in their tiny shed, so I had to clean it and give them new dry hay. Bea stuck her nose into the fresh hay and just smelled on it for a really long moment. She clearly enjoyed me talking to her and picking sticks from her fur. Hannah and Bea like people taking care of them. Selma likes it too, but you can sit next to Selma and give her attention, and then she bleats almost in your face anyway. It is loud when being close to the sheep. Hannah and Bea, don’t bleat into your face. They got access to dandelion leaves right now. Somehow they get a brown chin from eating dandelion leaves.

With the sheep looked after, we started to drive to our daughter. Since we had not had any dinner, we stopped halfway at a restaurant, and then while eating, we got in contact with our daughter again. The doctor had decided she would stay overnight. With that, we went home, and the mission was not completed.

Now in the evening, it looks like she will be dismissed tomorrow morning. We will go and pick her up.

Friday 16 July

It is Friday! I worked for a while in the morning until we got the message that we could go and pick up our daughter. The clinic was located in an industrial area. It could have been in any office. They only let one person in, so I stayed outside to enjoy their parking lot.

I spent my time on the parking lot creating a mobile phone stand using the rests of an electric cable. Our car has a built-in navigation system with a large screen, but the data is outdated. I updated it once, but it was costly. Now I decided we will not update the built-in navigation anymore since we are walking around with perfectly functional navigation systems in mobile phones. You need to put the phone somewhere on the dashboard, and there are holders for that you can buy. The thing is, I have not bought any just yet. Am I lazy, or am I economical? I think neither, actually. I am busy with other things. Building a house, for example.

Now I am sitting waiting in a parking lot, and the mobile stand is finished; what should I do next? Blog about it, of course! Now they are coming, I can see them from a distance. Our daughter had severe pain from the operation. It will take some time for the pain to fade away, so we had to go to the pharmacy with a shopping list of painkillers. It took some figuring out how to get into the car without causing more pain, but she could sit in a front seat. I had to drive with the patient on board as if we had a package of eggs on the car’s roof, but it went well. We got the grocery from the pharmacy, and then we drove home. When we came home, I had a couple of hours left with regular work that I could do.

After the regular work, we went to look after our sheep, and they were happy to see us. We gave our ladies their food supplementary, and then we checked their current area. It is starting to come to an end, their current area. During the weekend we will need to move them to a new place. I started to cut rapeseed growing at the next fencing area. The rapeseed is about a meter high, and below it, there is new fresh grass growing that we sowed this spring. To make the grass more accessible for the sheep, I cut the rapeseed above the grass level. When working on that, I found a new resident of our pond area!

May I present our toad! It was sitting still for a while. Long enough, I could make a portrait photo. I let it be and minded my own business. When it figured I was more interested in doing other things, it jumped away to more safe regions.

After this short but intense checkup on our new house, we went to our old home, had dinner, and looked after our patient.

The last couple of days, it has rained a lot not far away from us. I created a limerick about this.

The curly doodle thingy between the verses, I draw just like that!

Saturday 17 July

Our patient was not happy this morning. The project of walking down the stairs was abandoned in an early stage due to too much pain. We delivered the breakfast to her bed instead. There were a few things to arrange better; she got a little table next to her bed.

We arrived two hours later than usual, at our new house. We were going to get help from friends today to move up gypsum plates to the first floor. We were going to use the hoist for the first time. Our friends arrived, and we explained the plan, and then we all started. It was working fabulously! They fetched a plate downstairs and placed it in the staircase. Then we lowered the cable, and they hung the plate in the straps of the hoist. Then we lifted the plate to the first floor with the hoist. There my wife and I took the plate to the side. While we were doing that, our friends were already fetching the next plate.

After 16 plates, we decided to take a break. We had coffee and chatted about things you chat about after hoisting 16 gypsum plates. When we were almost done with our break, friends arrived of our friends. With that, it was better to stop hoisting plates for today. We decided to hoist more plates tomorrow.

Now when we had 16 plates, we could as well start using them. So we decided to prepare the southeast bedroom for mounting the newly hoisted plates in the ceiling. It rarely works like that when building a house. You cannot just go and do a task. You have to do a couple of do-it-before processes. So also here. We had to finish the electric cable installation in the ceiling, and we had to make the gypsum lift ready. The electric cable came from the wall, but our electrician had made it enter the ceiling at a place that would be outside the gypsum plate. No worries, I drilled new holes for the cables, and then the cable came out at the correct place.

It was fantastic weather today. Not too warm and not too cold. The sun was shining on our solar panels. We worked on making the ceiling ready for gypsum plates in the southeast bedroom.

We also adjusted the hoist motor position. From the session today, we concluded that it would be better if the hoist was higher up. To do that, we had to move it also horizontally. We placed it slightly higher up on the scaffold to get so now the gypsum plates can be hoisted just a nudge higher up. We will see how it works tomorrow.

When all the indoor activities were finished, we went outside to move the sheep to a new area. This new area is making use of the grass around our pond. It goes to the edge of our plot and behind the sea container. I continued to cut the rapeseed plants to improve access to the grass. I am curious to see how this works. My gut feeling says that they got plenty of grass to eat in this new area. Much more than they had in the previous area. I even made a bold prediction that they will stay here for two weeks. That might not come true, but it would be great if it did.

It was a marvelous evening. There was a BBQ party going on at a neighbor plot. We could go there to say hello to future neighbors, but we were exhausted by today’s activities. If we had lived here, We would have attended, but we had to go to our old home and get something to eat, and we had to look after the patient as well.

Sunday 18 July

Today we got up in a slightly more ordered fashion. Our daughter had slept well. She got up from her bed and down the stairs to eat breakfast together with us. That was a considerable improvement. She still got a lot of pain and was not so happy about that but looking at the achievements, it was a considerable step forward.

We came to the new house a lot earlier today. Our friends had a little thing to fix before they could come and help us, so we decided to use that time for putting up gypsum plates in the southeast bedroom. Now we had plates on the first floor, so it was just about using them.

This time we had decided to put up the top gypsum plate first. We did that in the bedroom, but we had not anticipated that order when we put up the beams on the wall. To get things right, we need to measure the distance of the beams and make up a good idea of how the plates will be screwed onto the ceiling. To get a proper fit, we had to remove one centimeter of the board. When that was done, we put the plate on the lift and hoisted it up against the ceiling.

When we had mounted two plates to the ceiling, our friends arrived. The work began. They moved plates from the stack on the ground floor and placed them in the straps of the hoist. Then the plate was hoisted to the first floor, where we took it to the new stack on the first floor.

It was such a wonderful feeling when the stack on the ground floor was empty. Now we could get a feeling for the actual proportions of the living room for the first time. There is a stack of isolation in one corner, making a slight dent into the true feeling of the room. For the rest, this is it; this is the size. It was fine.

It will also be necessary to move plates from the first floor down to the ground floor, but we figured we should do that another time. We cannot move the plates from the stack in the hobby room so quickly to the hall with the staircase, so the work will be tedious and irritating. The waiting time for the team on the ground floor will be much longer. It is better to prepare the hoisting by moving the plates on beforehand to the hall on the first floor. When that is done, it is a quicker operation to get the plates ready to get hoisted.

When our friends had left, I took out the scythe cutting the rapeseed of the area next to the driveway. This is to prepare for grazing in perhaps one or two weeks. There is grass growing below the rapeseed, and it will now get more light and grow better in the following weeks or so. That will be perfect for our sheep. When the rapeseed was cut, we collected it into a heap. Now we got six heaps of compost at different places. I hope that when they shrunk, we can put some together.

We gave the vegetable garden water today. It has not rained for three days. Perhaps the vegetable garden is a little more sensitive to drought? The garden is doing really well at the moment.

This was a good week for our house. It was a little nerving with our patient and her pain, but it will be better; we already know that. I am happy that we moved one stack up to the first floor and that the hoist is working beautifully!