My house build journey: the DIY bits

My previous articles at

1. My house build journey : Location
2. My house build journey : Design
3. My house build journey : Building permit
4. My house build journey : Technical Consultation
5. My house build journey : Stalled by Bank Bureaucracy
6. My house build journey: Start Message
7. My house build journey: Foundation
8. My house build journey: CLT frame installation (K L trä stomresning), Insulation (Isolering)
9. My house build journey: Roof, windows and the contractor hell problem

Initially I had only planned to do the facade work myself but as the contractors kept eating away my budget the work that I had to do grew a lot. And after witnessing the quality of the work, I realised I could do it myself with a little more attention and care. I was inexperienced but was able to learn on the go of course making some mistakes and redoing some stuff.

Kitchen and Bathroom walls:

The first thing that I started was the service cavity work for the kitchen and bathrooms.

In Sweden there are organisations that research and publish standards on how a particular construction is to be carried out. Sakervatten is one such organisation that deals with all wet room construction details. I had planned to follow those guidelines. There were some small changes done by my architect who designed the plumbing and ventilation. He consulted Sakervatten and suggested me that I can switch from 70mm studs to 45mm studs as I already had a 90mm CLT inner wall and that would also help in saving some space.

As a first step, I started putting up 45mm studs with a horizontal center to center distance of 600mm between them and vertical distance of roughly about 800mm.

This stud work is repeated for all bathrooms and kitchen walls i.e wet rooms

This was good learning with using spirit levels and I seemed to get the hang of it eventually :)