Week Two – Be your own Quantity Surveyor

Big changes this week.  To make an omelette you start by breaking eggs - lots of eggs got broken this week. It started with the buttresses on the southwest section of plinth wall

They were removed, and and with them out of the way work could begin taking down the plinth wall the buttresses had been holding up.

Then, to take some weight off the timber frame of the barn, about half of the tiles (clay pantiles) were stripped off the roof. This was done “carefully”, as required in the planning permission, so as to preserve as many as possible for the re-build.

What seemed like acres of polythene sheeting (procured by your friendly local procurement manager/quantity surveyor) were battened into place.

With the southwest part of the timber frame safely jacked up on acrows, that section of plinth could be “carefully taken down” as also required by the planning permission. This exposed the depth of the celebrated Chalk Floor.

Many of the bricks from the demolished walls are of no further use except as hardcore, 

but some can be cleaned up and re-used elsewhere on the barn.

Having removed the section of plinth they set about digging the trench for the foundation of the new wall,

And starting to dig holes for underpinning the foundations along the south wall

We bought the concrete for the foundations (grade C30 of course ...) from a Company that does the mixing on site. That way you only pay for what you need – about 4.6 cubic metres in the first instance. It’s a great system, the only down side being that the stuff has to be barrowed from the wagon to the trench.

At about 27 barrows per cubic metre, you can work out how many trips back and forth the guys had to make. And once the last barrowload has been dumped in the trench you whip out your credit card and pay the delivery guy. Feels odd, paying for cubic metres of concrete like it’s part of your weekly shop.

The roof, the floor and the walls will need insulating. So we're in the market for Celotex - shed loads of it. Or should that be lorry loads of it. Articulated lorry loads of it. It's amazing the variation in price that's out there. Spent many a happy hour surfing and ringing around to find a good deal. Nearly said the best deal. And therein lies part of the problem - how do you know when you've found the best? When do you stop looking?

And how much do you need? – which is where we put our quantity surveyor hat on. We looked at the design for the roof construction - 2 layers of 100mm Celotex, one on top of the rafters plus one inside, between the rafters. Focussing just on roof for now (walls and floor will need further shed loads, but they can wait for now) we measure the area of the roof from scale drawings and a bit of nifty trigonometry, double it, and Bob’s yer father’s brother. What keeps me awake at night is that we may have get a decimal point in the wrong place. We could end up ordering either 10 times as much as we need, or possibly just a tenth. Not sure which would be worse.

During the week our Builder asked us to get some basic stuff - cement, sand, bricks, blocks, and some tile batten - 2 by 1 lengths of wood. Now (humour me here) there are seventeen rows of tiles, and the main roof is 22 metres long. Double it for 2 sides of the roof. You also need battens which run up the roof. And then there’s projections, each of which has a roof approximately 4m by 4m. Our builder suggested 5 bundles at 200m per bundle for starters. That seemed OK to me till I realized I was ordering a thousand metres of wood. That’s a kilometre. Never had to order anything like that before. And that’s just the start. Gulp.

The guys set about digging out the soil which over the years had heaped up against the N wall. This will help reduce the load on the N plinth wall and diminish the risk of damp - the ground floor at that end of the building is partly underground due to the slight slope of the site. At least the digger is singing for its supper. More of a banquet actually.

And finally, a couple shots of the barn showing what has changed since last week