Garden Room Workshop: Part 13. Utilities transcript

all righty let's get this show back on the road in the last video I finished installing all the windows and doors and in this video I'll cover connecting utilities if you want to jump straight to that then I'll leave the timestamp on the screen now because first I had a couple of tasks that needed doing I've pretty much decided now that I want laminate flooring but I wanted to see what the plywood would look like varnished as that was my original plan as a workshop so I gave it a good mop a sanding down and applied two coats of varnish and I thought it looked pretty good it's certainly a lot easier to clean the next task was to frame the shower room walls I decided to change the layout of the shower room slightly to make it smaller and less intrusive to the main room but still able to fit a large shower in I bought a 1200 by 760 millimeter shower tray with the most important factor being where the waste drain was most seemed to come with the waste in one corner which would have been over a joist whereas the one I selected would sit just above the floor installation which can easily be cut out without disturbing the floor joists once I had the shower tray I could frame around it it looks like wicks have taken down the web page about the different types of timber but internal walls are a great place to use CL s timber which tends to be straighter and cheaper than the Cox thing timber used for the outer walls so save on taking up too much floor space I selected 63 by 38 millimeter CLS however my plumber pointed out there as the walls will be carrying tiles it should be as sturdy as possible so I probably should have used the 38 by 89 millimeter size instead i rectified this though by adding more nuggins and mini studs the general principles of the stud wall are no different from the outer walls other than holding up the roof so they don't need thick headers above the doors one thing to remember is that it's difficult to raise a wall inside as it hits the ceiling on the way up so I instead out of the bottom and top plates to the floor and ceiling respectively and then put the studs in in between the longer wall attaches to each roof joist but for the smaller wall I made it easy on myself by having it directly under a roof joist if I had wanted the wall somewhere between the joists I would have had to add a few extra noggins to connect the top plate too however I did have to attach a couple of pea Timber either side of the joist to attach the ceiling plasterboard to in the future the bottom plate of this one doesn't sit above a joist so instead I toenail into the plywood floor to secure it the last thing was the door lining these come ready-made and extend from the stud work by 12.5 millimeters on either side so that they are flush with the plaster board unfortunately I bought the ones for the widest Els so needed to rip them down to the right size on the table saw you could see that the top has two cutouts one on each side and you just flip it around depending on the width of the door you were choosing and then just cut off the excess I attach this to the door frame and I'll install the stops when I come to fit the door the last thing to prepare for utilities was to upgrade the consume unit in the house and also disconnect the cable which I took out of my garage way back in part one this wasn't going to be thick enough for the garden rooms needs which we'll explore later on so the summer went by without work as I needed to save money for the next steps and because I'd be making a huge mess of the garden which my housemates probably wouldn't be too pleased about the main reason I located the shower room where it is is due to the slope of the land so this is where I have most access under my garden room to attach utilities of course if you have a concrete slab foundations or won't be able to access the underneath then you may want to make getting utilities in the first thing you do opening for a shower room does complicate matters a lot and adds quite a lot of cost to the build so you know do think carefully when deciding the one bonus for me is that the drain where my waste would flow into is luckily much lower than the building and has enough fall so that gravity will do all the work if this isn't the case for you then you'll require a macerator waste pump which is basically a pump that pumps water uphill for all the next steps I all of the awesomeness which is the mini digger I hired mine from SELCO but your local builder merchants will probably be the cheapest option they come in various sizes and mine had to be less than a meter wide to get through the back gate the first task was locating the pipe which happened to be under my patio and testing it to make sure it was flowing into the right drain then the trench could be dug which is where Ben came in I found been on my builder comm and he understood exactly what I was trying to achieve now of course I did have to try out the digger for myself and promptly made a fool of myself so yeah best left to the expert [Music] there doesn't seem to be a set rule about how deep the trench needs to be but about 45 centimeters deep and wide is sufficient P shingle needs to be poured under the pipe to a depth of around five to ten centimeters to protect the pipe for underground pipes you always have to use the orange-brown kind the standard is 110 millimeters in diameter and there are lots of different connections and bends available we then tapped into the existing pipe using PVC - clay adapters and installed a rotting point to be able to clear any blockages at this juncture there is an angle Bend just as it enters the pipe to force the flow in the right direction and this is also where the greatest vertical drop is to help propel the waste water before it hits the existing pipe if you're doing this you may need to get your water company to come and check the connections that have been done properly and there are no leaks for the rest of the pipe we use socket ended waste pipes with the socket facing uphill to help with the flow of water and use silicon lubricant when connecting them together a gradient of around one in eighty is sufficient but you can go up to one in 140 if you don't have a lot of slope to work with at the other end Ben concreted in an inspection chamber both for access and due to the change of direction of the pipe with a flexible connection off that to allow for some wiggle room for easier plumbing in of the shower WC and sink and this area will later be hidden by decking we then pour in some soapy water into the inspection chamber and checked it was coming out okay and it was we then put another 15 centimeters of pea shingle around and on top of the waste pipe again to protect it and then Bend swiftly recovered it so that is the first trench done Trench to this trench is to carry the water and electrics the rules are a little hazy but I have found this schematic which shows the advised depths of the various utilities generally utilities and waste are kept in separate trenches and the endpoint of this trench had to be near the house anyway so it made sense to take a second first up was water we used a roll of 25 millimeter mdpe pipe which will connect out later this generally goes the deepest at about 750 millimetres below ground level to be below the frost line as you really don't want your pipe freezing in winter next was the armored cable this came on a reel and a good way to unravel it is to put a pole through the middle hole stand on it and then let the other person put it through the trench I'll talk more about the cable and electrics in a little bit once these were in and put to each side of the trench we added sand which will highlight that there are cables underneath should a future owner of the house go digging about in the garden the last thing to put in this trench was a conduit to carry a fiber-optic cable so I can have good internet connection in the garden room now you can get an armored kind of fiber-optic cable that goes straight in the ground but a better option is to lay conduit to run a normal one through and then also functions to future-proof the garden room in case I want to add a TV cable or phone lines a later date now someone did tell me that the electric current in the armed cable can disrupt the internet connection in the fiber-optic cable if they're too close together but then someone else told me that was utter nonsense pretty typical of the building industry anyway we took precaution and laid some earth over the pipe and cable before laying down the conduit again more sand was laid on top before filling it in now the third trench back in part 11 I installed gutter trim but we have to work out where the rain water will go you're not able unless you apply for it to allow rainwater runoff from an outbuilding to go down the sewers so I couldn't just connect the guttering to the waste pipe an option is to have a water bar which works well for smaller roofs and as long as you think about where the surplus will go it's a good simple solution my roof is pretty large though and therefore collects quite a lot of rain and I don't have space for a water button so I had to have a soak away a soak away is essentially a hole in the ground that fills up during a rainstorm and allows water to percolate into the ground over time so it makes sense that the size of the soak away is in proportion to the size of the roof now because of the overhangs my roof is bigger than the footprint of the building and it comes in and around 40 meters squared you can use this table to work out how big a soak away you'll need but going for a 1 meter cubed is advisable as this is what is stipulated for most extensions a soak away should be 5 meters from any building including the one that you've built and 2.5 meters from any boundary now you can't get fancy and by specialized soakaway crates and cover them with geotextile membrane to stop the earth filling them in over time but we went for a simpler method once the hole was dug we ran the hose in it for about 10 minutes to ensure the water was draining away and then we placed broken up concrete in it and filled the spaces with gravel I placed a few flat pieces on top and covered these with a membrane before putting the soil back on top we made sure the pipe had a good slope on it and are connected up to the guttering once the cladding is on so that was all the trench is done and been started flattening out the garden because the ground will compress over time it wise to leave the trenches a few inches above the rest of the ground as it will flatten out over a few weeks now if all this trench digging looks like hard work the good news is that you might not have to dig any of them if you don't have a shower room you won't need a waste pipe or water and if you go for a water bar you won't need a soak wave but everyone needs electrics but because the cable is armored it doesn't necessarily need to be underground on the house end if we follow the cables on the other side of the wall it's clipped on this is perfectly fine you can clip it to a fence or even just have it on the ground though mind it when you're mowing so the cables travel past my shed and then turns into the house and come out under my stairs where my consumer unit is and these will be connected up later so how did I know what size cable to go for well electrics really aren't my strength but in the next video I'll be doing my absolute best to explore what my electrician did and the things that you should be thinking about so I haven't been entirely absent these last few months I've conversed with hundreds of you over email and have continued to build out the website one section that I think is going to be an amazing resource is the your build section because I can talk about all the various options available in these videos but I can only really show you one way the way I'm building mine so we have three so far graham's Adams and Nick's congrats to you guys for finishing and thank you very much for sharing with everyone you can see pictures of all the stages of their build and then I've done a mini interview with each of them below so hopefully this would be a great inspiration and a sort of Hall of Fame to give you motivation to get to the end keep taking photos everyone and I'll do my best to get part 14 uploaded shortly see you then