Week Seventeen - braces and birds

Reinforcing rods across the tops of the trusses. We're a bit concerned about visual impact, but then again it's all part of the character of a barn conversion.

 

The barn was until some time ago a working agricultural building with its own electricity supply and meter. As part of the conversion we'll be having to get the electricity company to come and move the meter. At the moment we have a temporary builders supply rigged up from the existing overhead connection to the meter.

View of the studs on the west side from inside the barn. They look terrific, don't they.

More studs

South projection roof rafters exposed. Insulating about to commence.

Steel bracing to hold the corner joints together. Our engineer is having a great time dreaming up bits of metalwork. And our friendly local steel fabrication company is also very happy.

More bracing

Lest we run away with the idea that steel bracing is a recent innovation, here are some bits of old metal removed from the frame.Gotta be worth something on Ebay, no? I can just see these bits turning up on an antiques TV show. What do you think this one is? An instrument of torture, a piece of Victorian surgical equipment or a weapon? Answers on a postcard please to ...

The central east projection and door window - we've decidied to keep the studs and cross pieces there. We'll put a window in front. Should look great.

From the inside -

From the outside -

We've now got window openings in the OSB cladding. Beginning to look residential. Be ages before the weatherboarding and window frames go in, but still, it's progress.

Window openings inside from the inside -

We'll be keeping frame studs and diagonals across the window openings wherever possible. Might look a bit strange but that's what you get with a barn.

Door opening on the north end into the utility room, or what will be the utility room. You can see the blockwork on the  inside and the facing on the outside. Obviously the blockwork will be insulated and plastered in due course.

Found a bird's nest with young in the frame. Unfortunately it was just where they were about to start stripping the boarding off and nailing on the OSB.Looks like a thrush of some sort. Much heartache and searching on the internet for duration of time in the nest till the fledgling fly. Eventually decide couldn't wait. One suggestion was to put the nest in a nearby tree but it didn't seem likely that they would survive. So decided to move the nest, chicks and all, to another place in the barn where the stripping and boarding were finished. And hope that mummy find her chicks.

And she did. Phew!

Some people who do barn conversions chose to live on site. We couldn't face overwintering in a caravan or a mobile home, and it didn't seem to be that cost effective either. So we've rented a small house not too far from the site. Around 8 o'clock we drive to site to talk to the builders and get our shopping list for the day. Here's a view of St Mary’s as we see from the road, you can also just see it from barn.

Been a good year for poppies at the side of the road

And finally

Week Sixteen - Dem studs, dem studs, dem dry studs

Insulation of the north projection roof is done - 2 layers - one between the rafters and one above the rafters. Vertical battens are nailed in place for the tilers to come along and attach their horizontal battens to hang the tiles on to.

The weather boarding on the southern projection has been removed exposing the studs which make up the frame.

Went flying again this weekend and got my passenger to take a few aerial shots of the barn. It's surprisingly difficult to get a good picture. Maybe I could do with a better camera? A camcorder in still mode is perhaps not the best thing I could use, although it's OK for my other photos, no?

In the back garden our statue stands waiting patiently. She doesn't seem to mind being left alone all these months.

The facing brickwork at the at the north end looks great.

If you have a close look at the bricks near the corner you'll see what I'm told are called queen closers, one on each course of bricks on alternate sides of the corner.  Dictionary.com defines a queen closer, or closure, as a brick of normal length and thickness but of half normal width, used to complete a course or to space regular bricks, or a brick of half the usual length, for completing a course or for spacing regular bricks. But no doubt you already knew that, having looked it up on Wikipedia following our last discussion on the matter. Discovered a new bond the other day - rat trap bond. It's essentially the same as the flemish bond, which we already know and love, but the bricks are are standing on their side instead of lying on their back.  That is to say, instead of seeing headers and stretchers you see rowlocks and shiners. Right?

The fascia boards bought in last week need staining black before they get put up. Suffolk timber barns, and probably elsewhere too, are usually black. That's because in the 19th century every town had a gas works and black pitch was a by product of the process they used. So farmers could get it cheap to paint on their barns as a wood preservative. Prior to that timber frame barns were timber coloured.  Nowadays the view is that the traditional colour for a barn is black. Depends on your historical perspective I guess. Reminds me of a comment allegedly made by a recent Chinese leader when asked if he thought the French Revoloution had been good for France. He paused for a moment and said 'It's too soon to tell.'

At the north end, now that the plinth is done, the cladding can come off. Amazing sight seeing all that timber frame exposed to the light. Bit like seeing a skeleton. At one level it makes you feel a bit queezy, at another level it has a certain fascination, like a strapless gown. What's holding it up? How does it all hang together. What's connected to what, what supports what. How does it all work. And that sparks thoughts about the skill of the people who put it all together in the first place. Bit humbling really.

More celotex going on the roof. It's not glass, it's the reflective foil on the outside of the insulation boards.

I really love the view of the fields from the scaffold with the wood beyond. Pretty as a picture.

More of the cladding coming off - this time the west wall

The question is, what to do with all that cladding? Good thing we're having a wood burning stove installed. Kindling for years to come I suspect.

Once the cladding is off, OSB is nailed to the frame. OSB - Oriented Strand Board. Never heard of it, myself. It's like MDF or chipboard but a lot more durable and weather resistant. The OSB stiffens the frame as well as giving some substance to the wall structure.

With the tiles off and the black polythene sheeting rolled back you get a fantastic view of the roof timbers,  the rafters, purlins and new ceiling joists.

OSB on the south gable end.

The underpinning and repairs to the frame are finished so no further need for acrows and needles. Which means we have a pile of redundant railway sleepers and lumps of green oak. Have to have a look at a knitting website to see if I can find a pattern calling for 2 metre long wooden needles. A seriously chunky Arran sweater perhaps?

Waste celotex. There seems to be an incredible amount of waste inherent in the building process.

We're still struggling with the schedule, or lack of it. On a commercial site there'd be a project manager of some sort who'd have the responsibility of drawing up, and monitoring progress against, the schedule. This would make it easier to ensure that resources - men, materials, tools, designs, permissions, you name it  - are all in place as and when needed. Typically somebody needs to be asking at each stage, maybe each day, what's happening next, do we have all the resources we need for that? Since we're doing the project management and are on a very steep learning curve (which is a polite way of saying we don't have a clue) there's the continual worry that the guys are going to be standing around waiting for the nails to turn up next Tuesday. Fortunately that hasn't happened yet but we seem to be in fire fighting mode much of the time. The builder is great, answering our naive questions, prompting, explaining the process, suggesting sources of materials. But he has his own job to do and sometimes we miss things and find ourselves driving around to pick stuff up which is urgently needed.

The upstairs windows on the plan are shown right under the wall plate. Unfortunately that would mean the tops of the windows would be under the fascia boards fixed to the rafter feet and carrying the gutters. Gonna have to think about that one.

Since the central part of the barn will remain double height, there is a problem with how to get services (electricity, plumbing, ventilation) from one end of the building to the other. We eventually decided upon a high level ceiling, about a metre below the ridge, creating a triangular cross-section tunnel under the apex of the roof. This still leaves a drop of 6 metres from ceiling to floor which we reckoned was ample, and has the added advantage of hiding the new purlins.

Another snag which hit us this week was the height door at south end. Because of an earlier decision about the finished floor level in that area, the head of the existing opening is only high enough to allow a 6 foot door instead of the more usual 6 foot six. (I'll discuss units of distance later ...) Lifting the head of the door would mean more surgery to the frame - chopping tenons on the ends of the transom, reducing the studs above and re-cutting their tenons. Not a huge amount of work but we decided we could live with a 6 foot door.  We might put a picture of a duck over the door ... geddit?

Concerns about the tension in the trusses holding the sides of the building together, and discussions with our engineer, led to the design and commissioning of reinforcement brackets to fix steel rods running across the top of each of the three trusses. It's not pretty but it means the walls won't splay outward when the roof is put back on.

And finally

Week Fifteen - Restoration's end

We called week 3 the 'end of the beginning'. This week is more or less the end of the repair and restoration phase and marks the point at which new things have started to happen to the barn. Up till now we’ve been making good the original structure. We could stop now and the barn would be more or less as it was when it was first built and would probably stand for another 200 years. (We’d have to put the tiles back on the roof first, though.)

Here's a scaffold flower. As well as the familiar scaffolding on the outside of the building we also have a birdcage, an internal scaffold which enables them to get at the underside of the roof as well as supporting the frame while they pull out and replace load-bearing timbers.

Celotex - we ordered a heap of the stuff for the roof, walls and floor. Standardising on a single thickness, 100mm everywhere (apart from the inside of the plinth) seemed like a good idea. Actually it's not celotex but something called ecoversal made by ecotherm. The builder's supplier assured me it was the same thing and certainly the u-values listed on the ecotherm website are the same. And if it's on a website it must be true, no?

Some more Roman numerals chiselled into the timbers. Get everywhere these romans don't they.

Another truss, another scarf joint, this time up in the roof at the north end of the barn.

The Planners allowed us to have a skylight at the north end of the building where it faces away from the road. So here's the hole in the roof for a for Velux skylight to slot into.

A big mile stone passed. Repairs to the roof are pretty much done and installation of the celotex between the rafters has started. The 8 foot by 4 foot boards have to be cut to size and shape. With all the sun we've been getting lately the guys are getting fried, hit by radiation both sides, direct and reflected off the foil backing of the boards. They're  a bit like chickens in a rotisserie - they don’t seem to mind though.

The sections of plinth on the east side have all now been done

North end plinth facing almost complete – a strip of damp proof course to protect wet mortar if it rains

And finally