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How to Grout Tiles

Cindy and I spent a large percentage of the past weekend crouching awkwardly and teetering on ladders while we grouted the tiles in the south container of the container house project. It seemed a good opportunity to write a DIY on how to grout tiles. It’s probably the easiest part of tiling, but as always, it’s nice to have a few tips to get best results. You don’t want your grout cracking and falling out as time passes.

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Tips For Tiling With Marble Design Tiles

Chances are that if you can afford to install real marble tiles in your house, you’ll be paying someone else to do the hard work. Therefore, the concept for this article was based on installing standard ceramic/porcelain, digitally printed, marble design tiles. However, actual marble is such an interesting material (I recently discovered) and quite tricky to work with, so we decided to include some information on real marble tiles, just because.

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Types of Water Pipe. What to Use When

I have been helping Kevin fit water pipes for the north wing of our container house. In doing so I realised that there are actually so many different types of water pipe one can use for the plumbing in one’s house. How does one know what to use when? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of pipe? I asked Kevin for some insight into the world of plumbing pipes.

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Beautiful Solid Wood Counter Tops

One of Louis’ speciality woodworking skills is in the making of solid wood counter tops. So, of course, we have to include this in our container home. It makes an interesting, warmer alternative to granite tops, and is especially of interest if you find stone too cold. It takes quite some time to turn rough planks into a finished product, but is well worth the effort.

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Our First Bathroom; Tiling Fibre Cement Boards

Lockdown has meant that we can work on finishing the South container for Louis and Gwen. And that means working on their private bathroom! it has been awesome watching the bathroom progress as each day passes. But it also meant that we had to work out the best way for tiling fibre cement boards. There is a correct way and then there’s our lockdown way…

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How to Fit PVC Ceilings

All our electrics start off at the main distribution board and then spread out to smaller distribution boards in other areas of the house. This allows us to isolate any electrical fault and fix it, should the need arise. We didn’t want to do too much living around the main DB, so have built a tiny laundry room around the main distribution board. We will, in time, be using this little room to experiment with several ideas we have on finishes. But in the meantime, it’s a good opportunity to show you how to fit PVC Ceilings.

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Repair a Leaking Metal Roof

You may recall that we had some issues with our roof installation and as a result, we have many small holes in our new roof. Winter is approaching fast, so it was becoming a bit urgent that we spent some time to patch up the holes before the rain starts. You can use our method to repair a leaking metal roof of your own, as long as the holes are small and your sheet-metal plates are not too rusty (in which case it is best to replace).

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Shadecloth DIY

I believe that the best way to get through a lockdown, is to keep busy. Thankfully, we have just the thing to keep us busy for South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdown period – The Container House Project. Therefore, if you see “Lockdown” in red on the header picture, you’ll know that the contents of that blog post is on something we accomplished while staying safe at home. And the first thing we did was fit some shadecloth to the side of the carport we recently erected. So with no further ado, herewith our shadecloth DIY.

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Space Saving Ideas

One of the things I really struggle with, and has been a bit of a challenge while living on a building site, is when your things don’t have their own space. I like my stuff to have a “home”, so that I know exactly where to find it when I need it. Therefore, I’m really attracted to space saving ideas; those quirky designs that give a home to the things in your house.

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