What next, ceilings!?

One of the things to happen in the madness last week was the delivery of the ceilings.

For as long as I can remember we've planned to use Miniature Orb for the ceilings, in a plain zinc (i.e. silver) finish. This is basically corrugated iron, but itty bitty corrugations about an inch or so apart. Nice stuff.

However, we've had a nagging doubt for a while whether or not this would be too "industrial" to suit the building, and whether it would darken the rooms too much and we'd tire of it.

Then the other week we were at Peter's place, and had a look at one of his bedrooms where he's used it - and we decided that no, we're not that keen. It turns out also that he's used classic-cream Colourbond corrugated iron as the ceiling to his living area, and we really quite liked that. Peter suggested we shouldn't use it as it's difficult apparently to keep clean (cobwebs and the like) but we've decided to use it anyway.

Unfortunately the truckie couldn't get his truck in a safe spot to unload up near the house, so he left it down near the stairs with me hoping I could carry it up.

Too long, isn't it...? I had to lug all 500kg of it up the driveway and around the building in 30ºC heat. Lovely.

But with the tin finally here I needed to crack on with installing the battens to which it will all screw. For this I'm using leftover 25mm steel top hats we had surplus from the Hebel install - there's almost, but not quite enough to do the whole of the upstairs ceilings. I will have to use timber battens for one room (which will be about 10mm thicker) but you'll never be able to spot it.

First of the battens in place at 900mm centres

Knowing that this job was coming, a few months ago I looked at the cost of hiring a plasterboard sheet lifter. I've used one of these before when plastering the ceiling of our place in Melbourne, and it's an invaluable tool. I've seen plasterers raise plasterboard to the ceiling manually before, but there's no possible way I could do that by myself (and probably not with assistance either) so I was always going to use a sheet lifter.

But it turns out that for the cost of two days' hire, I could buy one on eBay and have it delivered!

Here with the first sheet loaded ready to move into position.

Up.

She.

Goes!

A few rows of screws in (not all of them yet - I'm working to a deadline to get the ceilings up before Nenad comes to install the lighting on the 16th) and voila!

Then the next sheet:

.. and the next:

.. and the .. ok, you get the picture :)

There's a little fiddly manoeuvring to get the sheets into place, as they're only about 15mm shorter than the space into which they fit.. but the sheet lifter just makes that fiddly and not outright impossible. Especially as I'm doing this job solo :)

If only they went up as quickly as they seem to in the photos... to install all the 4.9m lengths in the living area took all day. It certainly looks the goods though!! :)

Poor exposure from the phone camera...

It's amazing how much brighter the room feels with a light coloured ceiling. I'm pleased we didn't use the Mini Orb - while it's definitely an architectural feature I can't help feeling it would have brought the feel of the room down a little bit. But I suppose we'll never know :)