Pandaren Strikes

The development of wood working tools over the years has facilitated the availability of a very vast variety of furniture in all the possible designs and sizes to meet any requirement. Some of the smaller items, like a bookcase is available in so large a variety that it really adds to your confusion while you are out there trying to make up your mind on which piece to buy. You get a corner bookcase for any and every imaginable corner of your home, and each offer a practical utility of the available space.

Before you decide to go shopping online for a bookcase, or out in the market, you should know what exactly you are looking for or you make one for yourself to suit your specific requirements.

But, if you never built a piece of furniture all your life, you may feel it’s a crazy idea. Nonetheless, it’s not so difficult a project. If you know how to handle a hammer and can find your way out to a Home Depot or some such department store with a wood working section, you certainly can make a small corner bookcase of your own.

Building furniture is a bit time consuming. You have to go step-by-step for building a bookcase. First you have to carry some research and got to a couple of “HOW TO” sites. Some of the specialized websites give you step by step instructions on piecing together a bookcase from scratch.

Next, you have to go shopping for materials and tools. Keeping the instructions in mind, procure the materials needed for building your bookcase. Now get down to the real work of putting together all of the pieces. Treat it as a wooden puzzle and assemble together all the pieces. Now you are left with just the finishing part. Make use of sandpaper to even out the edges or corners till you get a smooth feeling on touching your creation. Finally you may just stain it or paint it so that it jells with other decor of the room you are going to keep it in.

That’s all, my friend, just a few simple steps, with a minor detail here or there, and you will have a perfect corner bookcase ready for your home. Once you’ve made a couple of them on your own, you’ll begin to enjoy making them and may diversify into making other pieces of furniture too. It may interest you to learn that an amateur woodworker started building bookcases and coffee tables out of his garage. And, now he sells that stuff on eBay for a good price. He makes it, posts it, ships it, and collects the money.

At present Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI) offers two home energy saving programs that qualify the participating house owners to claim reimbursement of the total cost incurred by them for carrying out certain home energy improvements. One such classified improvement is the cavity wall insulation. This system of insulation offers a convenient structural design that supports wall insulation materials.

Cavity Walls

Cavity walls are external walls of a building. These have an air gap that might be housed within the structure of the wall itself (example- Hollow block walls) or between two solid walls (or between two partitions having a narrow air gap separating them).The houses that were constructed from1932 to 1982 widely used this technique.

For most of the houses constructed after 1982, it would be reasonable to conclude that its construction followed the technique of wall cavity, though it may or may not have incorporated an insulation in between.
Almost all houses constructed after 1982 adopted the cavity wall technique with or without the use of insulation.

Why do you need insulation in cavity wall?

An air gap is maintained by wall cavity that provides good means of insulation. Come to think of it, all the means adopted for using insulating materials necessarily involve the creation of air bubbles or air gaps to get the desired results. You should understand that heat flows from the warmer end to the colder end. If the cavity width between two walls goes beyond a specified critical limit, the air within the cavity gets forced to move around because of convection currents that are set up. As a consequence it starts assisting the transfer of heat from the warmer end to the colder end instead of jamming it.

A filling with porous insulating materials helps restrict t air movement within the cavity, thus providing an optimum level of insulation.

But how do you get to know that your house has cavity walls?

It’s almost certain that houses built over the last twenty-five yeas would have cavity walls. In all probability those have provided with insulation also. Likewise, houses constructed fifty years prior to that have a very good likelihood of being with cavity walls, though insulation might be missing.
The pattern of bricks on external walls is a sure tell-tale sign. The following three patterns are followed for lying of bricks.

* Stretcher bond
* Flemish bond
* And, English bond
Amongst these three, only the stretcher bond patterned brick walls will have a wall cavity. In a brick wall with stretcher bond pattern, the bricks are laid flat on their side and in a linear manner known as end to end lying.

Width of the total wall is another sure way of assessing the needful. Because of the built-in cavity, the width is more than the normal 300mm as you might have expected.

One shouldn’t hesitate to get professional advice on the subject as it is a skilled job and only an expert with proper tools and equipments can confirm and advice on the status of air gap and confirm if some insulating material has been used and thus the present state of the wall.

Types of insulation for cavity walls:

Here are the materials that are most often used for the purpose.

* Fiberglass or mineral wool in short strands
* Cellulose loose fill or stabilized cellulose
* Phenolic and other Synthetic foam cavity board – (Used in new constructions only).

The time taken for having cavity wall insulation for an existing house would take around four hours but calls for the services of an expert who has all the necessary special tools needed for the purpose. It requires drilling of holes in the existing external wall at predefined and determined distance. This is followed by the insertion of a special nozzle and then the blowing of small strands of insulating material in the wall cavity. For a new house under construction, one may use phenolic foam rigid board or expanded polystyrene foam boards.