{"id":20606,"date":"2023-03-06T17:34:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T16:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=20606"},"modified":"2023-03-06T18:45:35","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T17:45:35","slug":"here-we-go-again-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/here-we-go-again-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Here we go again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadly, more problems. I just don’t get the thinking of my builder. Are they just hiring the cheapest possible sub-contractors available or is there actually such a severe sub-contractor shortage that they are hiring anyone off the street with the relevant tool in their hand and calling themself a ‘ma\u00e7on’ or plasterer, or whatever?<\/p>\n

After the two plasterboard workers did sterling work putting the walls and ceilings up in my house, along has come someone with the job of finishing the work off but who has instead sabotaged a lot of what they did. And would obviously have done even more damage if they’d had more time.<\/p>\n

The theory behind dry-lining is very simple. Instead of building walls and ceilings and then plastering them by hand, which takes time and a lot of the kind of expertise that is almost unavailable these days, sheets of plasterboard are mounted on wood or metal frames and then finished off ready for decoration. It’s quick and it’s cheap and although it’s nice to have solid walls inside houses, nowadays almost all new-builds have partition walling like mine.<\/p>\n

But the finishing is the key to getting a good final result. All of the joints between the sheets have to be made to ‘disappear’ as must all of the nails or whatever fixings have been used, and you do need certain basic skills to do that.<\/p>\n

Dealing with the fixings is relatively easy. When the sheets are put up, the aim is to ensure that all of the heads of the fixings are hammered in to just below the surface of the board. Making them ‘disappear’ is then just a matter of carefully applying a scraping of plaster over them to fill the depression and cover the heads and a skilled worker can do that in moments such that the final result will need only a light rubbing down at the most before being painted over without a trace.<\/p>\n

Dealing with the joints is a bit more challenging. Usually the first step is to run some plaster into the gap and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, it makes it easier for the gap to be bridged and secondly it removes the air that’s in the gap, which is very important whatever ‘gap-bridging’ method is used. <\/p>\n

Many amateurs think that all you need to do is trowel or scrape plaster into the gap and that’s it, but it’s not. Due to differential expansion, a simple joint like that will eventually crack ruining the appearance of the surrounding surface, but there’s also another consideration. When you trowel plaster into the gap ‘right up to the top’ the air that was in the gap and was compressed when the plaster was applied will then expand again causing a ridge along the joint.<\/p>\n

So how is this relevant? It’s because the nitwit who was sent to finish off my job apparently had absolutely no idea what he was doing. All the fixing heads that he’s ‘covered’ are either still depressed below the board surface or only partially covered, so will have to be redone, or are covered with plaster and sticking up proud of the surface. But that’s the least of the problems which magnify hugely when you come to the joints between the sheets.<\/p>\n

Firstly he hasn’t filled the joints before applying a bridging tape but instead has just applied the tape straight over the gaps without any preparation. This means that every tape has a ridge up its centre which will be impossible to disguise. Secondly, he’s used totally the wrong type of tape.<\/p>\n

For dry-lining it’s best to apply a thin mesh tape over the filled joint using a light skim of plaster then when that’s more or less dry, you go over it again but this time with a much wider tool. By doing that a joint can be made to blend into the surface and to all intents become invisible, such that it can be painted over and not be seen. And to make it worse, the plasterboard sheets that were used had depressed edges making it even easier to ‘lose’ the thickness of the tape in the depression.<\/p>\n

But even that is not all. Plasterboard sheets all start off with a perfect finish and although some minor blemishes may occur during the erection work, that’s only to be expected and they can usually be easily repaired. But what the ‘finisher’ has to avoid doing is (a) themself causing any damage and (b) leaving indentations or unevenness in the plasterwork that they do.<\/p>\n

The worker concerned was guilty of all of the above plus the taping that he has done is not only incomplete, as it doesn’t extend up the full height of the walls, but much of it also dry and hanging off the walls because it was never properly attached in the first place. <\/p>\n

Here are some shots that I’ve shared with my builder showing not the full extent of what’s been perpetrated but just some examples of the shoddiness of the work involved.<\/p>\n

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So what does this mean? Well, more delay inevitably. Nothing more can be done, except electrical work, until all of the myriad of faults have been rectified. The reason for this is that the levelling floor screed can’t be poured until the walls are all finished as their feet will be submerged in the screed itself.<\/p>\n

What I also fail to understand is how, after all that has gone before with problems that have had to be rectified by the builder, something like this can happen again. As I’ve said before, all I’m asking for is the house that the builder contracted to build, no more, no less. I will not accept work that is not up to the proper standard and done properly and to be honest, I’m getting a bit tired of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadly, more problems. I just don’t get the thinking of my builder. Are they just hiring the cheapest possible sub-contractors available or is there actually such a severe sub-contractor shortage that they are hiring anyone off the street with the relevant tool in their hand and calling themself a ‘ma\u00e7on’ or plasterer, or whatever? After … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20606"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20623,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606\/revisions\/20623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}