To take any slope in the concrete base away from the walls, I managed to snag some large 300x600mm floor tiles in Wickes. Tiles usually cost £30-£80 per square metre. At those kind of prices, we'd be spending about £200 (or more) just to put a skirt around building. However, thanks to Wickes end-of-line special offers, a three metre square section plus fixing adhesive and grout cost less than twenty quid!
Admittedly, the tile cutter to make them usable cost another thirty. But I'm calling that an investment - as it'll be perfect for cutting PCBs in future.
cutting tiles with a rotary tile cutter is messy business! We dry-fit the tiles then (once again) the rain - and snow - made it difficult to carry on, so we'll stick these down when it dries up again.
Conscious of keeping costs from spiralling out of control, we went along to meet Cat who runs Freegle and just so happened to be clearing out one of the large council buildings in Hove. Although most of the furniture and equipment was spoken for, there were hundreds of shelves on the walls - all built from metal brackets and lengths of conti-board. Perfect for making shelving inside the bungalow!
As we got the boards back to the bungalow, there was the slight problem of having no walls in place, which was going to hold up putting the shelves up.
plenty of insulation should keep the workshop nice and cosy even in the dead of winter!
We worked out it would cost us about £200 in plasterboard - just for raw materials - to clad the inside. And that was just the walls. The ceiling would cost more. And then the whole lot would probably need skim-coating.
And all for a workshop - not a new living room or an extension on the house, but a workshop at the bottom of the garden. At first I thought OSB2 walls would be fine with a coat of paint. But it was then pointed out that it'd be a bugger for trapping dust and dirt. And it's heavy. And, at twenty quid a sheet, expensive too. What we needed was some cheap, easy-to-handle, easy-to-clean, not-so-heavy substrate we could simply screw over the interior of the carcass.
Something like contiboard....
We set about cutting the strips to length, and fixed them horizontally across the uprights in the walls. Although they're a bit rough-and-ready, with some trim on the edges (around the windows and on the external/internal corners where two walls meet) they'll be just fine.
Nasty vertical joins can be hidden behind either rack-mounted shelves, or under trunking used to carry the electrics (I didn't like the idea of the wires being embedded inside the walls as I didn't know whether the rockwool might react with the outer sheathing; plus having the wiring on the outside of the walls means it's less likely I'll drive a screw through it, when putting another shelf up in future!)
With all but a few lengths of conti-board used up, we're going to have to find something else to use for shelves in future....
The walls are still pretty grebby - they're going to need a good going over with a bucket of sugar soap - and they'll still look pretty ropey until we can get some trim on to hide all the nasty joins; but a whole load of (free) contiboard turned out to be just the thing to get it looking less like a wooden hut and more like a workshop!
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