Finishing, Packing & Levelling the Interior Wall Frames!
This week I’ve spent doing all of the finishing jobs to get the interior wall framing straight and ready for the walls to be put up! It’s been such a fiddly and time consuming job, lesson learned…take more time to get the framing straight from the beginning! If you read last weeks blog post I talked about the front wall frame and how it took a bit of extra time to get it straight given the uneven container walls it was going up against, but it’s definitely quicker than fixing up frames that have been drilled in unevenly!
I decided to pack out the walls using plastic packers & string line! I started on the kitchen back wall…the villaboard had been drilled in already but it was so uneven I couldn’t have put up the walls with it like it was! I nailed a string line from one end of the wall to the other 5 lines high, I used tiny nails and I taped the ends to make sure the string line stayed flat on the wall and then used the packers to fill in all of the gaps along the line! The packers come in an assorted size box so it’s just a matter of getting the right combination at each spot so it sits just under the string line without quite touching it! I used 30mm clout nails to fix them in but I learnt after nailing in about 5 or 6 of these in that nails don’t stay in villaboard! At this point I’m pulling my hair out and driving back to Bunnings to figure out what I needed to fix these packers to my wall! Mostly the advice was…you can’t nail to villaboard and to use screws to go through to the metal…no way I was doing that again! But it’s true you can’t nail to villaboard! One of the girls at my local Bunnings has been really good helping me problem solve some of the unusual “thinking outside the box” jobs and she suggested still using the clout nails but fastening it with liquid nails and using gaffer tape to hold it in place while the liquid nails dry! Perfect! Worked so well! A little liquid nails in between each packer and then some on the back, the clout nail put it in place and the tape held it up while it dried! Tape came off a day later and the packers are solid on the wall! I used a spirit level to check the wall was straight with the packers on and they all were nice and straight!
I don’t know if this method will work with every type of wall cladding, I’m using a wall cladding called Regency Pine Lining, it’s a tongue n groove cladding the same as I had on my front walls before and we’ve put up a few testers to see if the packers have worked to make them even and they have! Oh…also I’ll make sure that every packer is nailed into the cladding when it goes up, I’d hate for over time the glue to come away and the packer fall into the wall leaving a void where the wall could potentially bow! If you’re wondering why I’ve taped up the edges and join lines and screw holes on the villaboard, purely to keep it sealed and neat, probably unnecessary, just my choice on how I wanted to finish it!
The bedroom walls were next! The front wall frame in the bedrooms were perfect because they were done along with the rest of the front walls!
The bedroom on the right hand side wasn’t too bad with what we had already done but I did decide to take a few timbers down on the interior wall and put up a smaller timber that fit nicely to hold the cladding straight! This room is being clad all the way floor to ceiling on it’s interior wall but only half way on the back wall and window wall. The back wall was easy, two timber frames horizontally and they are nice and even and leave ample room for the insulation. The window wall was a little tricky, I wanted to maximise the space in this room but still have insulation in that window wall. I’ve kept the framing to a minimum with small timbers screwed into the container grooves to maximise the room for insulation, I’ve used extra bits of board to even up the frame on both sides as the side will go right the way to the ceiling to cover the gaps in the corners and I’m going to pop in some packers along the small timbers once I’ve got that first side board up so I can even them all up properly!
The bedroom on the left hand side was all ok with what we had already done on the window wall and the back wall, both are straight and will allow room for insulation! This room is being completely clad floor to ceiling on all the walls. The interior wall in this room was so uneven and because it was previously unclad we’d not really noticed how uneven it was! Fixing this wall straight was a lot more painful than it looks! String line, tape, packers, extra timbers drilled in, measuring from wall to wall, spirit levels every way, an extra upright timber on the end of the frame…it is now straight! No glue needed for these packers as the clout nails went into the timbers no problem, I did use bigger 50mm clouts for most of the packers on this wall.
The bathroom tiling is coming along! Finishing off the top of the tiles where they meet up with the ceiling has been something we’ve had to throw around different ideas on how to do! We’ve got one wall that’s wavey container ceiling, another that finishes up on the hump and another that finishes in the groove. We’ve been throwing around some ideas on how to finish it so it looks fabulous! We’ll check out how the different options look this week and decide!
Once the bathroom is finished we’ll be ready to put up the insulation and wall cladding!
In the meantime, this coming week I’m doing some finishing off work on the exterior back wall, it’s messy and patchy with silicone after all the screws that have been taken out and put back in, and the service conduit and pipes could do with a tidy up! I’ll let you know how we go next week!
I’ve added in photos again this week of the products & tools I used and have talked about on this post!
Heaps to come so keep watching!
Thanks for reading!
Jen 🏡
