Squaredy

I agree of course the more insulation the better, but none of our house has floor insulation, so I am not going to make the garden room the best insulated part of the property! It will be the driest part I am sure. What I would love to do for the floor is fit end grain cobbles, which I have produced in the past - pic below. I am not fitting cobbles because it just makes it a much more complicated project as you need a perfectly flat screed on the slab. My plan is to just float the slab by hand and then carpet it, leaving the middle free for the table. When the table is installed it will need a few shims to get it perfectly level, so this will be good enough. I will install an electric heater and possibly a dehumidifier, nothing else. Most of the year it will be warm enough for an active sport like snooker or darts, just need the heater for the odd miserable winter evening.

Here is the poplar cut and sitting in the sun drying - three cubic metres or so. At the moment the boards are amazingly heavy - maybe about the same as green oak, even though the logs were sitting in my yard for nearly two years - they are saturated. This is enough 3" pop for the walls and enough 1.5" for the roof. I know I will still have to kiln it but this weather is giving it a great start.

If you can make it up to a full timber lorry load with something else I could make you an offer. I take Lime, Alder, Birch, Holm Oak, Oak Beech and others. In fact I will take any hardwood really except Ash at present.

Getting a fully dried post of that size may prove tricky as it will have needed 6 maybe 7 years drying. No sawmill wants to sit on stock for that long. You might have more luck trying reclamation yards or similar. And then I suspect you will need to pay a joiner to plane it square and do the curve for you.

I am not suggesting we should not try to take care and social distance, but there need to be clear rules which people can believe in. To suggest it is fine for golfers to play 18 holes a day whilst a fisherman, walker, metal detectorist, beechcomber, bird watcher, forest forager etc all have to stay at home is ridiculous.

Lockdown in Wales seems to have been de facto abandoned. The golf club just by me is open again from this morning. The lockdown rules in Wales state you should not drive for exercise, yet all the golfers are driving to golf. The Welsh goverment could easily have stopped this - just announce that you are not allowed to drive to a golf club and that it will be enforced. After all unlike beauty spots there are only so many golf clubs. Unless I have missed something there has been no attempt to stop it, so by default they have approved re-opening golf clubs. I am not whingeing, just personally I am not going to be a total mug. If it is OK for golfers to drive here and play 18 holes of golf whilst social distancing, then I will also take my family to different places like coast path, forests etc and have a walk and also social distance.

If you were in my area I would make you an offer. Hopefully someone near will give you a shout.

Fair enough then it has not totally failed. Certainly not been a spectacular success though. As far as I can see the UK is doing just about as bad as any country in the world in terms of deaths per capita. Let's see what happens as we ease the lockdown.

I agree with almost all of what you say. In your first line however you say UK lockdown has worked as it has flattened the curve so stopping our NHS being overwhelmed. My point in this thread is that we have a much higher death rate than Sweden who had and still have no lockdown. So did the lockdown which has cost vast amounts of anguish and possibly millions of jobs stop the NHS from being overwhelmed? Or has it made no real difference? Sweden are managing far better than us with just recommendations not sanctions (apart from banning gatherings over 50).

Yes we don't know when or if we will get a vaccine, as highlighted by these conflicting two headlines just posted by the Metro. UK leading race to find coronavirus vaccine 'as early as September' METRO.CO.UK 'The speed at which it’s happening is astonishing as vaccines normally take five to 10 years.' 'We may never find a successful coronavirus vaccine,' minister admits METRO.CO.UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma said the only way to 'definitively conquer this disease' is with a successful vaccine. Mind you maybe that says as much about our press as about this pandemic...

UK is possibly experiencing the highest death rate from Covid 19 in the world. 34,500 deaths from a population of 66 million. Sweden have a death rate way lower per head of population (367 per million - UK 517 per million) and have no lockdown. Is our lockdown actually helping? Would we be better off advising people to take sensible steps and avoid mass gatherings like they do in Sweden, or are we just too stupid in the UK to actually be sensible? Is the lockdown causing more health problems than it solves? E.g. bowel cancer screening (2nd biggest cancer killer in UK) has all been paused. My mum would be dead now if it were not for her bowel cancer being spotted early in 2012. Feel for the poor guys who submitted a sample to bowel cancer screening and have been advised they need further investigation, but that is also now on hold. Bowel cancer must be caught early, so delay can be lethal.

I know it would be good to do so, but trying to keep it simple. The building must be dry, but as long as I can avoid the worst of the heat and cold that will be fine. The finished building will not have a TV or computer in, so not for lounging around in - snooker is a very active sport as we all know

Thanks guys for the input again. I was aware of fibre added to the mix, but didn't realise it was really strong enough. The slab will have no vehicles or major weight on, I just felt due to size it might be sensible to reinforce. Would be much easier not to bother with the steel.

Maybe I can use this on top of the concrete. Damp Proof Membrane 5L WWW.TOOLSTATION.COM Water based rubberised bitumen emulsion for internal and external use. Can be used on walls and floors to prevent... Anyone done that? Then perhaps followed by screed I guess? Or even just floorboards etc straight on top.

Well I am struggling to prove you wrong, Cardiff really does have most rain. Finally us Newport people can be smug about something when compared to our more glamorous neighbours....we get 20% less rainfall than those posh Cardiffifians....

I always knew Google was crooked! Actually I very much doubt Cardiff is the wettest city. Let me have a look....

Such an urban myth....I have just put my sprinkler on in my front garden, partly for the garden, but mainly for the house as in the hot summer of 2018 this corner of my house subsided and I can see big cracks opening up in the soil again!

Thank you for the input so far. My research and experience suggest to me that normal concrete is permeable to a degree. Certainly not dry enough for my purpose without some sort of waterproofing or membrane. It will be a simple reinforced raft foundation with a simple wooden structure sitting on top. Probably 150mm deep, but maybe getting nearer to 200mm in places. About 6 cubic metres in total. I agree about the shuttering I will make sure this is good, I do know how much easier it is when this is done right.

Us Arbtalkers seem to know about most things, so anyone advise me on waterproof concrete? I will be putting a reinforced concrete slab down later this year for a garden room and I do not want to use a plastic membrane - I know from experience that the edges and corners are just a nightmare to do properly. Anyone got experience of actually laying waterproof concrete? I will be buying in ready-mixed concrete so I will ask local suppliers what they suggest. But maybe some of you guys have experience of doing this?

Most insulators work I believe by trapping air. On this basis I would expect Poplar to be an excellent insulator, but with the advantage that it is not plastic based, so much nicer to handle and install and ultimately highly sustainable. The image below is Poplar viewed through an electron microscope. Slight gaps will not be a big issue (I hope) as they will be caulked like a boat hull, so allowing slight movement.

I still have the brochures I sent for in the early eighties when I was at secondary school, I got the brochures from all the UK manufacturers I could find and pored over them for hours. I have no idea why really, I had no money or space but there we are! Keep an eye on this thread Steve, you are not too far from me and I daresay there will be invitation evenings for wood people eventually....

Ah but Jonathon this is Wales not damp Scotland! I will kiln it if necessary before installation, and then leave a little gap like a boatbuilder planking a boat, to allow for a little movement. But the plan is it will be quite a controlled climate in there - after all it will have a snooker table in! If I need to run a de-humidifier during damp cold weather I will. I will update this thread as work progresses...might be this side of Christmas....might not!

Well the outer skin will be Doug Fir cladding with a breathable membrane under. The bottom line is I have to keep the building dry for the purposes of Snooker table etc. With a proper membrane in concrete slab and other details I don't think this will be a problem. I have discovered that the cheapest good quality second hand snooker tables these days are full size ones. I have to have a chat with the neighbour this weekend and see if he is happy for me to go right up to the boundary. If he is OK with that it will be full size. Dream come true...

Oh yeah, still going. Comes through the post not a paper boy, but is a nice little thing for our boys to get each week and not screen based.

When this is over or sort of over I am going to have a Chinese takeaway. They all seem to be closed around here. All other takeaways are open - surely it isn't due to bad feeling towards Chinese?