Construction

It's been a busy, and long weekend, doing some construction and tidying in the garage/workshop. When the biomass boiler was installed, it required taking down an internal wall in the garage (next to the old boiler), which included the door into the workshop. Since then, the new boiler has largely blocked the access into the workshop from the garage: it's been manageable, but far from ideal.

The first task, then, was to take the old door and frame, and re-install them in the partition wall. It's only a chipboard wall, with timber supports, so I cut a suitable aperture, affixed studs, and put in the frame and door. Slightly inelegant, perhaps, but it's worked pretty well. It's nice to have unimpeded access to the workshop once more!

This necessitated moving the workbench along the room (out of the way of the new doorway), and so while I dealt with the door, Liz did a mammoth tidying job in the workshop, which has got, frankly, out of hand. This continued into today, while I started to rebuild the breeze-block wall that had come down, and started to construct an insulated boiler room within the workshop (to reduce heat loss from the boiler and accumulator tank).

The wall is about 60% done, but I needed a break from the job. There'll still be a gap, as I'm not going to completely rebuild the wall, but that will be filled with a stud wall. We're still looking forward to converting the garage into a second sitting room, and I want to make that stud wall easier to remove, should access to the side of the boiler space be needed.

My boiler room sub-section of the workshop is going to comprise a big door in front of the boiler and tank, which will be heavily insulated. I'm also going to massively increase the amount of insulation on the tank and pipework, to conserve the energy put into the thermal store, which will be easier with the confined space. I reckon constructing the rest of the boiler door, and the wall, will probably be another day's work, sometime over the next couple of weekends.