Week Twenty - Progress with the Roof

The gable ends have been reinforced with steel plates according to the engineer’s design. I think it’s about stopping the roof timbers spreading under the weight of the roof tiles and wind loading. But hey, what do I know.

The underside of the rafter feet need painting. It will be a lot easier to do from the scaffold than from a ladder. So I spent many a happy hour in the sunshine painting the feet - and my nose, and my specs, and my T shirt, and my jeans, and my hands - with Sadolin Classic. Lovely stuff.

Unpainted -

& painted rafter feet

We're still producing loads of rubbish, mainly celotex offcuts. Wonder if we could sell it on eBay. Perhaps not. 

by the skip load

Another week and yet more celotex on the roof

The guys have moved round to the other side of the barn and started putting celotex on west  roof.

The builders put the vertical battens down roof ready for the roofers to come along and fix their own, horizontal battens. The roof tillers bring their own battens because they don’t seem to trust anybody else’s. Not sure why not. Maybe something to do with the quality of the wood, or perhaps they like them fixed just so.

Have a think about the fixings needed for those battens running up the slope of the roof. The battens themselves are 25mm thick and they're sitting on a 100mm thick layer of celotex. If the fixing has to penetrate let's say 25mm into the rafter below the celotex, that means the fixing has to be 25+100+25mm long, at least. That's 150mm or 6 inches. Amazing.

The rafter feet on the east side are all done, and now they are setting out rafter feet on west side. There are no straight lines in the barn structure. No right angles, nothing is vertical, nothing is horizontal. Bit of a nightmare at times, but all adds to the charm of the thing.

In the back garden Pandora is nestling among the flowers. Or should that be weeds.

A question was raised this week about the window over the West door

The plans show a pair of doors with a large window above, up to the wall plate supporting the roof. A number of concerns spring to mind. There's currently a load of timber there - two horizontal beams and 7 or eight vertical studs. The guys have already boarded it over with OSB. And if we remove those beams and studs, what will be supporting the wall plate at the top? Need to talk to our engineer methinks. 

We've started to look for suppliers of weather boarding. We need a couple of hundred sauare metres of it. About 1000m run of feather edge boards. Do we use oak boards or some sort of softwood? Oak is considerably more expensive but doesn't need treating or painting. If we go softwood, do we buy it already stained or do we get it in unpainted and do it ourselves? We're advised that painting that much boarding is seriously messy and takes ages. We'll see what prices we're quoted before making our mind up.

We have also been enquiring about  sand blasting the frame. The existing timbers have, over the years, acquired a patina of dust, dirt, limewash in places. And the badly woormed pieces have a crumbly layer of wood on the outside which can be removed by sandblasting. So we're praying for a saharan sand storm to make its' way up over Europe to clean our woodwork for us. Failing that, there's guy in Norfolk who has got all the gear. Maybe that would be quicker.

And finally

Week Nineteen – Unlocking the Birdcage

The injection DPC took place this week. Took him about a day to do the sections of original brickwork.

The icing on the cake. The celotex makes the barn look like a Christmas cake. At least it’s not a gingerbread house in the middle of a deep dark forest ... gulp. Mind you, we’ve had our fair share of dragons to slay. I’m tempted to speculate on how a barn conversion is like a Hero’s Journey. It’s got all the main ingredients – the challenge, the unknown territory, the hidden dangers, the helpful mentors along the way. Just looking forward to the triumphant return. I can feel a blockbuster trilogy coming on. Barn Wars. The Planners Strike Back. Return of Chippy.

Sherpa Tensing pays us a visit

The fascia boards, painted black are being mounted on the rafter feet.

The barge boards at the gable ends of the barn are mounted on something which is called a ladder, for obvious reasons.

To achieve the designed U-value we're installing a double layer of 100mm celotex.

Despite the drought in the spring and early summer, the farmer has managed to get some crop from our field. Maybe he’ll be able to cut again in the autumn when we’ve had a bit more rain.

Barley in the field behind the barn is growing nicely, at least to my eye. No doubt the farmer will tell you a different story.

We’ve had so little rain since the project started that a puddle is a thing of interest. How sad is that?

This week we passed another Big Milestone. The internal scaffold – the birdcage – came down.
Now you see it

Now you don’t.

The inside of the barn now looks fantastic. Cavernous, cathedral-like, capacious, chasmal, commodious. I could go on, but I’d need to consult a thesaurus. 

Trusses and braces and braces seen from below. Still not too sure how they'll look when the walls and the ceilings are all plastered and painted.

The outside scaffold remains and we’re looking forward to dropping that too – but not holding our breath.

A big issue this week has been what kind of doors do we want internally. We've learned the difference between framed, ledged and braced doors. Barns often have ledged doors - simple planks, tongue and groove like floor boards, vertically, and 3 horizontal bits of wood on the back of the door to hold it together. You can't put a normal handle on such a door but instead have to use a Suffolk latch - those thumb latches you see on garden gates. I think they look great - on garden a gate. Ledged and braced means they've got diagonals on the back making up that characteristic Z shape. And framed means, not surprisingly, there's a frame around the edge of the door (not to be confused with the door frame, door lining, door stop, or architrave, of which more anon.) The issue is, in order to have a normal door handle you have to have enough thickness of door at the place where the door handle and lock are situated. You either have to stick a block of wood at the appropriate place on a ledged or ledged and braced door, or you have to go for a framed door. And then there's the question of what kind of wood. Oak, softwood, engineered wood, veneered. Which leads to the ugly question of cost. Do you go for something that looks OK and is cheap or for the real thing, solid oak, which costs an arm and a leg. And we're going to need 16 of them. Doors, that is.

And finally ,

Week Eighteen - Keeping the moisture out and the heat in

The re-built sections of plinth have a modern physical DPC (damp proof course) built into them. The remaining sections of the original plinth clearly have no DPC whatsoever. We've had to deal with that by hiring a firm to come and provide what they call injection DPC. It seems to consist of drilling loads of holes along both sides of the wall just above the ground and squirting in some sort of resin that soaks into the brickwork. As it sets, it provides an impermeable barrier to the moisture rising up from the ground under capillary action. (Or maybe it's the hydrostatic pressure from the water in the ground which forces the damp up the walls.) Whatever. Here a trench has been dug next to an internal wall to expose the foundation, ready for the injection DPC guy to come along and do his stuff.

More bracing over one of the trusses holding the east and west walls together.

This time of year the stream at the bottom of the garden is dry. Actually, the stream is a boundary between the land around the barn and our field. I call it the 'land around the barn', rather than a garden, because part of it is still agricultural land, like the field on the other side of the stream. The planning permission we have includes 'change of use' for some of the land, from agricultural to residential. We're not allowed to use the land still classified as agricultural for any other purpose, such as an extended garden. So we won't  be putting flowerbeds, swings and sandpits on the field. It has to remain a field and be used for some sort of agricultural purpose such as growing a crop or raising animals. Interesting, huh?

We've had to hire a series of skips for the the rubbish – mainly celotex offcuts.

Here is just a tiny proportion of the celotex offcuts which are being thrown away. Heartbreaking, but necessary if we don't want to disappear under a pile of rubbish.

Putting some of the waste celotex to good use, at least temporarily - we used some to mark out the location of the walls around the downstairs shower room/cloakroom. It's amazingly difficult to visualize without some props.

Believe it or not, some of the celotex actually ends up on the roof.

On top of, and between, the rafters.

The neigbouring barley field will soon ready for harvest. Not much growth in our field due to the lack of rain.  I'm not complaining. It's an ill drought that brings no man good.

They're getting through it, so we've ordered a bit more celotex ...

Meanwhile, on the roof rafter feet are kicking out in style.

They've started putting the celotex on the outside of the walls, on the OSB. Here's a rather nice mitred joint of two 100mm celotex boards at one of the many corners.

And finally