grommets
More airtightness around the windows and doors… and some grommets!
We have now more or less completed the airtightness around the doors and windows so here are some photos from the last few weeks showing some more details of this in several interesting situations...
Because of the profile of our window frames there is a small space left between the inner sash (or equivalent piece of frame in a fixed unit as shown here) and the internal structural frame. We filled this small gap with some wood fibre insulation (of course!)...
We made sure this gap was completely filled all round the frame. The second image shows the joint in the membrane I talked about moving away from the corner in an earlier post. It was easier to tape if it didn't coincide with the corner.
On a different window (third photo) you can see the next piece of membrane fitted which overlaps the one from below so the taped join between the two can be done on the flat bit of structure and not in the corner... In this photo you can also just see the pencil line I drew for myself on the window frame to position the edge of the tape later so that I know none of it will show once the reveals are completed. I tried to minimise the number of joins / overlaps in the membrane around the frame perimeter but due to the size of the windows sometimes this wasn't possible, as you can see in the fourth photo below.
A piece of Profil tape cut to length and the first release strip being pulled back...
On the wider structural frame I added two rows of staples to make sure there was no part of the membrane that was fixed less frequently than 100mm.
In some places the brackets protruded slightly inwards beyond the frame edge which led to some wrinkles in the membrane. At this position the window head is right up on the underside of the first floor rim beam so the membrane coming down from the floor above was cut and stapled into place first before another piece was added to the window frame to bridge the gap.
The two images below show one of the three patio style doors ready to be taped, and then the taping in progress. We didn't take the membrane around the doors right down to the floor as there is a piece of DA-S roll to connect the airtight wall board with the concrete floor (more on this in a later post!).
At the front door there is a cable for the fingerprint scanner that has to come inside the airtightness layer. We used a Kaflex cable grommet for this job. The grommet is then stuck to the membrane via it's self-adhesive backing..
