Now You See It, Now You Don’t

It may have taken us a while but we’ve finally boxed in the steel beam between our kitchen and dining room.

For longer than I’d like to admit it’s a job that’s been on our to-do list but like so, so many projects around here it took us a bit of time to get round to doing it.

Although it really wasn’t a difficult project to tackle it was one of those projects that ended up taking a lot longer than we’d expected and all in all it took us about three full days to finish.

The whole room feels completely different now that the steel is finally boxed in, plastered and painted and yet again it’s a project where we can’t help saying “why didn’t we do it much sooner”.

We had the steel beam signed off before we even started to box it in and actually, boxing in the beam wasn’t overly difficult to do.

First of all, we added a load of noggings to the beam. Then we added additional strips of wood to the noggins so that we had a surface to be able to screw the plasterboard that covers the underside of the steel too.

When boxing in a steel beam it’s important to add two layers of plasterboard to provide adequate fire protection and to comply with building regulations.

So, after adding the first layer of plasterboard we then added a second layer staggering the joints so that they are in different positions to the joints of the first layer.

After boxing in the steel, we then also added plasterboard to the brick walls, around the door and we also decided to try to temporarily tidy up the wall in the kitchen (it’ll be removed as part of the extension).

After spending almost two days attaching plasterboard to the steel beam and walls it was time to start plastering. Plastering really isn’t my favourite of home improvement jobs, but needs must and although it’s not something I enjoy doing, it is a great feeling when it is done.

It always feels like a huge jump in progress and everywhere instantly looks more finished.

Then after waiting for the plaster to dry we could finally get out our paintbrushes. We always use the same method for painting newly plastered walls (you can read more about our method here).

Then, just 7 short days (okay, 7 very long and tiring days) later, we finally had our finished dining room!

Although we generally enjoy tackling DIY projects I have to admit that this was a job that I really didn’t like doing. It seemed never-ending, it was messy, we had visitors over the weekend that we had decided to do the project and the sun was shining which inevitably meant that we would have much rather spent time lounging around in the garden.

I guess not all home improvement projects can be fun and even if we don’t always enjoy them while we’re doing them (there’s often a lot of shouting and arguing involved) it’s always a great feeling when we complete them and can stand back and see something that’s not only finished but also something that we achieved ourselves.

What home improvement jobs do you enjoy most? Do you have any that DIY jobs that you hate? Have you ever boxed in a steel beam?

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