Tuesday and Wednesday

On Tuesday we spent a whole fours hours researching different types of cladding. The types that we researched were timber, concrete and a hardiflex product. Then if we had enough time we could research a fourth type of cladding and I decided to research this special concrete product produced by The Concrete Company, this stuff is awesome. You can ask for any type of colour and style you want. I saw some examples and it looks really good. The things that I had to research on the different types of cladding was the make up of the product, how to install it, what materials we had to use to install it and we had to find the MSDA sheet for the product. After lunch Paul taught us how to figure out how to work out the gross and net wall area and then from there how to work out how much materials and the cost of the job is going to be. He taught us how to work out both timber and sheet cladding. Sheet cladding is a little bit more involved because you have to work out the most efficent way to apply the sheet so you are cost effective.

Wednesday we went over the research from the day before so that we knew exactlly how we were going to use it properly. Then we went outside and started to clad our timber wall frames. We were devided up into three groups. Dan and rhys, Me and Rob and Greg and Mike. The other two groups did the timber cladding and me and Rob Did the hardiflex sheeting. I believe that me and Rob worked well with each other and we got alot done. Our work was quite neat but the only thing that Paul could pike on was that we didn't know what the correct spacings between the nails were. With sheeting I learnt that you need to put alfoil between the sheets to help water proofing and then you put a cover batton on top of that to help make it more presentable. With the timber cladding you need to first cover the whole wall with a aluminium sheet to help water proof and insulate thw wall. I did not know that until yesterday so there you go.