Hey friends,

I'm not back in the office/studio just yet so I write to you from the living room once again while Abi watches the Love Island final. If only cancel-culture could extend to that show.

🖥️ Studio

I have however made good progress. We left off last week with the breathable membrane down creating little hammocks for the insulation.

On pulling up floorboards, Mike got in touch to recommend a nail puller if I ever need to take up T&G floorboards again which may well be a better alternative to cutting through the tongues.

Next job was insulating. There's loft insulation, cavity wall insulation but no floor insulation. Well there's Rockwool Flexi but it's hard to find. I went with 100mm thermal cavity Rockwool figuring that it's all much of a muchness.

I was chatting to my mate Steve about this and he reckons even the Rockwool acoustic insulation is almost identical to the thermal and they label it differently for marketing/sales purposes the same way Nurofen sell migraine, flu, and back pain pills separately but the ingredients are almost identical. Zero research done here though, so don't take my word for it, I might well be wrong.

I've seen actual wool (from a sheep, not fibreglass) recommended for floor insulation too.

I then laid a DPM down as a vapour barrier (the whole makeup is like an upside-down cold roof). I would have gone for a VB but this DPM was such a close fit to the size of the room, and cheap, that is was the better choice. The thicker membrane and black colour did make the joists almost invisible though so I had to play the game of not standing on hot lava.

I then re-laid the floorboards, this time with 35mm screws so it can be taken up easily and won't creak underfoot. I had to buy one 3m plank to replace a bad section - £12.50 it cost, outrageous.

I painted the skirting and then I could move on to the underlay and laminate.

This time I tried this XPS foam type underlay rather than the fibre underlay I used in the garden room partly because it has slightly better thermal properties but mainly because 1 pack would cover the whole room with very little left over.

The downside is that it's compressible underfoot so rather than laying all the underlay first I did it together with the laminate so I wouldn't have to stand on it. I don't think I really have a preference between them, both are fine. I used aluminium tape to keep it in place.

The laminate is again from Wickes, the Navelli light oak which I've had my eye on since I saw Chris Dean use it in his garden room. Dave then emailed me saying he'd used it all over the ground floor of his house and it's been great so that was the decider. Dave also mentioned that it's often discounted on bank holiday weekends so if you're in the market for some, it might be worth checking this one coming.

I didn't want to wait but did get to use my trade discount instead 😬(I've always used this emoji as a grin but apparently it's a grimace, who knew?)

On the laminate vs solid/engineered oak flooring debate, other than price (3 to 4 times the price of laminate) I'm just not overly keen on real wood for flooring because the oiled stuff stains black if you drop water on it and requires re-oiling and the lacquered version can scuff and scratch. As we've discussed, I'm regularly too lazy to take off my shoes and the idea is to be able to just come in from the garden, grab a camera or battery and go, so laminate fits the bill nicely and it looks pretty good in my opinion. I fancy stone or tile for the rest of the ground floor with underfloor heating but we'll see.

I tried to keep the joint pattern as random as possible while keeping them a minimum of 30cm apart from one row to the next.

My conclusion is that insulating suspended timber floors is a bit of a hassle and, as we've discussed, not something you'd do in anything less than a 10 or 15-year house. Even DIY-ing it I reckon it will take that long to make the money back on lower heating bills (should be nice and toasty in there though) but to pay a company? Forget about it.

All I can say is good luck to the government getting people to do this to combat CO2 emissions. If you already have a nice finished floor down you're not going to rip it up are you? The ill-fated Green Homes grant never did take off and while I personally wished it could have been open to DIYers I'm not sure I'd fully trust buying a house where the owner had gone to town with these things. Wherever you add insulation you introduce an interstitial condensation risk and I see how many people confuse a vapour barrier with a breathable membrane. The older-than-me timber joists in this room were in perfect condition because the system of no insulation does actually work very well, it's just cold. So while it's nice to be the eco-evangelist, for many (not you readers) I'd suggest leaving the floors well alone and focus on loft and wall insulation instead. When I get round to the video I'll show how I had to be careful to keep the air vents open which annoyingly were at the same level as the joists - easy to get wrong.

Oh, there was good news. The cavity walls in this 1985 extension do have insulation which I could see by sticking the camera into the air vents. One less job. Not sure whether there's any in the garage walls though.

One possible job I have been thinking about is replacing the sliding doors as they are metal all the way through so let heat escape faster than more modern aluminium or UPVC doors which have thermal breaks. Ideally they would match whatever we put in the rear extension so the back of the house would look more uniform. If I did it now I could use these doors in the garden room instead. The same could be said of the rear window in the living room. It's a bit of a catch 22; I want to have the workshop done and my tools organised before I do the extension but would need to do the extension first to use the window and doors in the workshop. I think I'll just source some second hand from ebay for the workshop and then try to recoup by selling ours when we do the extension.

Here are the tasks still to do in this room:

• floor trim (I decided to leave the skirting in place after-all)
• door threshold
• re-fit radiator
• pipe covers and sleeves
• shelving
• lights
• curtains
• acoustic panels
• trim and paint the door
• buy a rug (because the laminate won't help with the acoustics)

I reckon it's these little things that I don't account for when setting out on a new project and make the whole process take longer than I expect.

Anyway, it has been nice to focus on just one project this week. However with the summer fading 😭but the next 10 days looking fine I think I'll switch to the final project I want done this season which is the garage roof.

I've made a Sketchup of the garage but I think I need to get the roof off before I can work out exactly how many joists I need, OSB quantities etc so that's the first task. I haven't dared look at timber prices yet.

🎥 Video

Here's this week's video. It's basically just me painting with no explanation but I got a video out, so good for me. At least you know the random things I was thinking about whilst painting. Speaking of which....

What Sort Of DIY-er Are You?

Half-baked thoughts time!

As with the last painting job, doing the skirting allowed my mind to wander again. Since I was finding the painting so boring I thought about what kind of DIY I do like, because clearly it's not decorating.

When I set out to build the first garden room I thought I wanted to do woodworking so it was to be a workshop and that's why I named it Garden Room Workshop but as I said in one video somewhere, the 'Workshop' element morphed into meaning a meeting at which a group of people engage in intensive discussion and activity on a particular subject or project, according to the dictionary. Convenient.

As time has gone on though I realised that while wood is my favourite material to work with, I don't think I want to be carving out bowls or laboriously sanding things to a mirror shine. Instead I like big, visually impactful things like landscaping, constructing walls and roofs, fencing, tree houses, maybe a big table. Better yet if they're outdoor projects. I was far more interested in building the garden room than having the finished article. It was about the journey, not the destination. Deep.

If I can put together a cohesive thought-process, I plan to explore this some more in next week's newsletter to answer why these things are fun for me while painting isn't, despite all being classed as DIY.

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The other, related thought I had was about how, especially for the large projects like a garden room or an extension, we should all play to our strengths, which will be different for each of us.

My strengths lie in problem solving, seeing the big picture and the detail simultaneously and being able to create a 3D model in my mind. (Did you know some people don't have a mind's eye at all and can't conjure up any images?!)

So when I went about building the garden room, I had some very loose plans and figured everything else out as I went along, ordering material as I needed it. My weaknesses include a lack of organisation, tidiness and I'm pretty sure a serious deficit in time perception (it's 2am right now, I thought it was around 12). I could go on with this list and would like to be more open but since this goes out to the interwebs, my hands are tied as a future employer might find it.

Anyway, someone who has the complete opposite skillset from me would probably excel figuring everything out in advance, would come alive organising deliveries and perhaps even create a schedule of works.

For next year's workshop I plan to go to war with my weaknesses and do just that. Perhaps I'll cut all the wall timbers on one day, put together and erect the next etc. We'll see if it works out. The monotony might be too much for me to bear.

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Since we're talking about strengths and weaknesses, here's a random fact about me - I'm a 'super-recogniser'. Sounds cool right? Like I should have a cape or something, but it just means I can nearly always recognise a face I've seen before, even if briefly, so I help out with online research on the matter for the University of Greenwich. If that resonates, you can take a test here to see if you're one too. I'll be Batman and you Robin - oh that reminds me, I need to introduce you to my side-kick, maybe next week.

It's an utterly useless skill mind but on the other end of the spectrum are those that are face-blind and can't even recognise their partners, but like the lack of a mind's eye, they seem to get along in life just fine. It's funny how different we all are.

Exercise or Back-Breaking?

The other random thing I was thinking about was when does labouring change from good exercise to damaging your body?

When I mentioned plastering a few of you got in touch to say that you'd taken a course and can now plaster competently, which I'm considering. One (sorry, I can't find your email) quit their job years ago along with a mate planning to be self-employed plasterers but quickly realised that their backs would be shot after a decade or two and went back to the office.

So we know that doing some DIY or physical activity is a good thing but where is the crossover? Is it just a lack of rest days or is it repeating the same movement (in the case of plastering anyway) over and over again which leads to the wear and tear? If anyone knows anything conclusive I'd be interested to find out.

👋

In my last piece of news, Abi has finally chosen a make-up dresser for the bedroom which is now in the way of my side of the bed.

Neither of us is particularly happy with it. So there's that. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♀️

Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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P.p.s. You can find all previous newsletters here.