Week Twenty Five - Roof done, floor round one

Two major milestones passed this week - we now have a floor under our feet and a roof over our heads. That is to say, the roofers have put the tiles back on the roof and the last of the oversite concrete has been poured. In a way the oversite is the biggest difference. Although there's still a lot of stuff to go into the floor construction (100mm celotex, underfloor heating pipes, 70mm sand-cement screed, floor finish, be it ceramic tiles, wood or carpet) at least we now have a continuous concrete base all over. No more dirt floor. No more rammed chalk. Just a solid concrete surface to walk on. 
Here's the reinforcement of the sitting room floor - about half of it is over the rammed chalk.

And concrete going down over the reinforcing mesh.

The Planners granted permission for one roof light, and here it is over what will be the back stairs. It's difficult to get your head round just where this bit of roof sits in relation to the interior. But the plans say it's over the back stairs so it must be right.

The capping at the north end of the main roof. Doesn't look much, after all that heart ache. But since it's iroko it should last a good few years. If not, I'll be demanding my money back in fifteen years time.

The insulation we've put in means that the roof is a bit higher and wider than it used to be. That, plus the fact that some tiles were damaged, or got broken in the removal process, meant we didn't have quite enough tiles when it came to putting it call back on. So we've had to go out and buy some more. It's impossible to get the same tile but, with a bit of hunting around various reclaim yards, we were able to find a pretty close match. They're not exactly the same colour nor exactly the same size but they'll do. The roofer said they were OK so that's good enough for me. Rather than try to mix the bought in reclaimed tiles with our own, it was easier to do one complete projection roof using the 'new' tiles. You can just see the difference, once it's pointed out, but it's not bad.

The west roof done. Great, isn't it?

The weatherboarding has arrived. We agonised over hardwood or softwood, painted or unpainted. In the end we went for a good quality softwood, painted. It seemed a reasonable compromise of cost and time. With my amateur quantity surveyor hat on I had to calculate how much we needed to clad the barn. Hope I got it right ...

The sloping site and the rammed chalk in the middle of the barn mean there are steps down at both ends of the barn.

Now that the ground floor oversite is done, attention is turning towards construction of the first floor. That means ordering joists, joist hangers and steel beams. The steels arrived this week. More learning curves to clamber up. What's a joist hanger? Someone who hangs joists? And what have the joists done that's so terrible they deserve hanging? We shall see.

We're building up a heap of hardcore. All those smashed tiles - breaks your heart, especially when you know how much a reclaimed tile costs. Ah well. It's only money. Could be worse ... couldn't it?

And finally