After deliberating for many years, we finally decided to start the garage conversion.
John Duane of JD Projects was contracted to perform the work in association with myself, John being a plaster by trade and more recently undertaking more general building work, I would be performing the electrical, plumbing work and be an additional pair of hands for most of the rest of the work.
Unfortunately I did not take any pictures of how full of ‘stuff’ the garage was prior to clearing, but trust me when I say it was pretty full.
Here are a couple of pictures just before work started, one of the front
and one of the rear
Tuesday 5th April
The first task was to cover the exterior walls with a damp proof membrane, as these walls were prone to damp and water ingress.
The membrane came from Perma-Guard and was the 3mm Perma-Seal membrane, this is attached to the walls using special plugs and sealing washers.
The rear wall was also covered.
I finished the day by running the remainder of the electrical wires for the lights
and some of the sockets.
Wednesday 6th April
A layer of wide tape is used to cover the joins before fixing the battens to the wall to hold the insulation and plasterboard.
Each batten is 5″x2″ and is held in place with 5 x 200mm screws, each with two of the rubber washers to close the gap behind the batten.
The black cables you see in the above picture are for the various satellite dishes on the side of the house.
One is from the 16 way distribution unit in the loft that are fed from the quattro LNB on a 60cm dish that faces the Astra satellites at 28.2 degrees East (mainly for Sky)
One is fed via a 4 way DiSEqC switch that has the following connections:
- an additional Astra 28.2 feed from the 16 way distribution box
- Eutelsat Hot Bird at 13 degrees East as primary focus on a 60cm dish
- Astra at 19.2 degrees east as a secondary focus on the same 60cm dish
The third is a feed from a 90cm trackable dish that can pick up most of the satellites viewable from a London location.
The final cable is for the 24″ actuator on the 90cm dish that will be powered by a SuperJack V-Box II positioner.
We managed 14 of these before running out of Rawl plugs and calling it a day.
Thursday 7th April
Now it was the turn of the ceiling to receive first one layer of plasterboard.
Then the Cinema room area received a second layer, with each board first being covered with Green Glue for additional sound insulation.
