Week 17 - More roof tiling

Sunday - a very hot day for roofing! After finishing off all the valleys it was time to get the ridge tiles all in place.  We're using a dry ridge system instead of bedding all the ridge tiles in with mortar, it is simpler and neater to install but more importantly it vents the roof space and allows you to meet the building regs with a lower spec roofing felt which is significantly cheaper. The product didn't really do a grat job of joining the ridge tiles together and required a fair bit of fettling to get it looking right. Below, Kai sticking the ridge felt to the top tiles.

  

The ridge tiles in place on the projecting roof. It looks really neat and should look even better once all the verges are grouted in.

  

 

 

The finished roof - view from the field:

 And view from the road:

We have quite a lot of tiles left over because the supplier delivered half a pallet too many. We have a small projecting roof over the front door to build and tile, and then the spares will have to be sent back...

We'll be glad if we never have to see a tile ever again, in all it's taken 4 long days to tile the roof spread over a couple of weeks and we've been hampered a bit by the weather. It's the sort of monotonous job that is best done quickly with 3-4 people, that way you can have a couple on the roof and a couple on the scaffolding which saves all the moving around up there.

Week 16 - Roof tiling and windows

A huge thanks to Colin, who was back to help out on Monday and Tuesday. After finishing off battening the front of the roof, Monday's job was to 'bump' the stacks of tiles up onto the scaffolding and distribute the piles across the roof. We hired a 'Bumpa Hoist' which is a nifty conveyor belt for tiles. Colin loading at the bottom and Kai unloading at the top. The machine has three settings - fast, very fast, or aaaaaarrrgggghhhhh! Colin showed no mercy loading the bottom, leaving Kai running around the roof whilst the machine spat tiles off the end of the belt. Needless to say at the end of the day Kai was 'beat'.

We had seven pallets of tiles in total. Each pallet is nearly a tonne, and Colin+Kai took thirty minutes to get each pallet up there.

 

Below, the tiles all bumped. This helps to get the roof to settle under the load. If you start laying tiles while the roof is not equally loaded, it might all go a funny shape...

Starting to lay the tiles. Not all of them have to be nailed - just every fifth row, and the the edge tiles. We're choosing to nail all the edge tiles and one adjacent for peace of mind. That's only about two thousand nails...

Put to the test!

The valley areas are annoying to say the least. It slows you down to about half the speed, having to mark out and cut each valley tile. You have to be quite accurate getting the cut at the correct angle, otherwise it looks rubbish from a distance.

There were heavy showers on Saturday so Kai worked inside fitting the windows. It wasn't long ago we were doing the same thing whilst renovating a Victorian terraced house - and boy that was a lot harder. Newbuild = straight lines, right angles, precise measurements, secure fixings. Five windows and one set of French doors took Kai about 6 hours to fit and glaze.

It's a lot quieter inside the house now that the windows are in, they block out most of the road noise from the front.

 

Much better weather on Sunday so it was back to laying roof tiles. One or two more good days next week should complete the tiling, but there are an awful lot of small finishing details to be done - grouting edges, soffits and fascia boards, rainwater goods....

 

Week 15 - Roof felting and battening

We spent Thursday and Friday finishing off the gables, cutting blocks to fit the angle of the roof took ages. Many thanks to Steve for coming to help out! 

The finished gable ends look really neat now. The white plastic stuff in the cavity is called a fire sock, it's filled with mineral wool and designed to stop fire spreading into the roof space.

 

'./

After working out what spacing is required for the tiles, we started felting and battening. Battens are required at 100mm centres for plain tiles (a bit like slates) which means an awful lot of nails and hammering, and aching hands for Kai at the end of it... Next time we'd go for large format interlocking tiles which cover a lot more area and need a lot less battening! They wouldn't look nearly as nice as plain tiles will though.

One side all finished, ready to get loaded up with tiles.

 

 

The windows arrived on Friday morning, and we had just enough time to fix and glaze the big French doors which will lead from the kitchen out to the decking.

 

Week 14 - Roof structure

This week the trusses arrived, so we spent Saturday getting the roof structure up and braced. A huge thanks to Kai's dad, Colin, for helping out. It was a mammoth task getting the trusses up onto the roof by hand! Like the floor joists, they are incredibly floppy individually, and getting the temporary bracing fixed was very difficult to do safely. The roof gets much more rigid as you add in the permanent bracing, and in the end it feels nice and secure to walk around up there.

We spent quite a long time making sure the trusses all lined up in every plane, so that the tiled roof will look flat from whichever angle you look at it. It was especially tricky getting the projecting roof to meet the main roof,getting the valleys and the ridge to all line up. Any mistakes here will show up really badly once the battens are on, and would be a lot of work to rectify. It's all too easy to rush it, but it's worth taking the time to get it perfect.

It looks like a proper house now!

 With the cavity closers in position the windows look a lot tidier. The windows and doors will arrive next Friday, and shouldn't take more than a day to fit.

Couldn't do much on Sunday due to the inclement weather, but Kai managed to get the felt support trays and over-fascia vents in on the rear of the roof. Ten years ago plastic products like cavity closers and roof accessories weren't commonly available, and you would have had to make do with bits of timber. The plastics are cheap, very quick and easy to put in, and finish off the edge detail very neatly.

Week 13 - Superstructure complete

 

We were hindered slightly by the bad weather this week, with strong winds and heavy rain making life difficult for the builders. The plastic covering on the first floor is pretty slippery when wet! Transferring materials up to the first floor was also heavy-going for the builders.

 

We now have something the shape of a house! We asked the builders just to 'rough out' the blockwork for the gable ends. When the trusses are up we'll have a more accurate guide to be able to cut the last blocks to shape and complete the gable walls ourselves.

 

So that's it, superstructure complete in just 2 weeks. We're mighty impressed with the speed and accuracy of the blockies, as is the building inspector who has signed off all the work without comment.

The roof trusses arrive next week...

Week 12 - Part 2 - First floor walls started

The second half of this week involved a lot more fiddly stuff (window heads and the string course), so everything progressed at a slightly more believable pace.

Thursday evening and the ground floor window heads are in, and inner leaf blockwork built up to the level the joist hangers need to go in. Kai spent Thursday evening fixing the hangers in place ready for Bob to continue block laying the next day.

Friday evening and 3 more courses of inner leaf are up. You need a minimum of 3 courses of blockwork over the hangers to fix them in properly, before you can load them up with joists and flooring. Bob wanted the flooring all finished by end of Saturday so that the space could be used to store piles of blocks ready for the next day's work.
Joists in and temporary bracing and restraint strapping fixed to the top flanges. The joists are manufactured by Steico, they're engineered timber I-joists manufactured from 8mm structural fibreboard webs (hardboard) and pine flange material. They're fine when facing the right way up, but when on their side they're incredibly floppy and you have to be careful not to snap them!

The joists site on the joist hangers, which are built into the inner leaf. Special hangers are required in the zone of the french doors because there won't be blockwork on top to fix them in position.

Noggins fix to the joist ends to add more restraint.
Making a start on the flooring:

Half way through the flooring. It's called Egger Peel Clean flooring, made of 22mm thick chipboard with tongue and groove edges. The flooring gets glued to the joists and at each joint to make the whole floor a lot stiffer. We went with the slightly more expensive 'peel clean' option (a polythene cover that you peel off when you're ready) because it gives you up to 40 days protection against rain, people walking on it and storing materials.

And the flooring is finished. The first area where the glue has already dried has been loaded up with Celcon blocks on plywood boards to distribute the loads.

We propped underneath the longest span to make sure the beams don't deflect too much.
Noggins (cross-pieces) are required under partition lines.
The ground floor spaces are beginning to look more like rooms now.

The stairwell. Two joists are connected together here by special plates because of the loads that will get transferred from the stairs. Travis Perkins (our main supplier for all the materials) have a design service for the complete floor system. It comes as a package with instructions on which joists and hangers go where. The only modifications you have to do are to shave off a few millimetres off the ends of the joists to suit the walls if required.

  

Sunday, the next lift of scaffolding ready for the builders to continue the first floor walls. Too windy to lay any blockwork today - gusting up to 30mph Celcon blocks would just fall over...

Week 12 - Part 1 - Ground floor walls

Wow, what a busy few days! With the arrival of Bob the Builder (yes, he is called Bob), things have started moving at a real pace. Bob and his bricky mate Ryan finished off all of the plinth brickwork in about 5 hours. We reckon these guys are capable of laying a thousand bricks a day, which is probably typical of most brickies working as a 2+1 (2 brick layers and a labourer).

Bob might actually be Father Christmas doing odd jobs during the summer months...

The finished brick plinth.

With the arrival of labourer Andy (or Horse as Bob and Ryan call him), the team blasted through 2 meters of inner leaf in the first propper day. You're allowed to do this many courses of block all at once in Celcon because it's light enough not to squash out the wet mortar lower down.
This photo was taken at lunchtime on Monday, and by the end of the day they had made a start on the outer leaf dense blocks as well. Poor Andy get's worked like a dog trying to keep up with the other two amid constant banter and shouts for "MORE MUCK, MORE BLOCKS". It's all very entertaining.

By Tuesday the outer leafhas caught up. You can just see the Celotex insulation within the cavity. Decorative stone window cills are in and covered to protect them.

Also the internal walls are half way there.

Gaps in the outer leaf for the electricity and gas meter boxes. The builders use compressed concrete bricks for all the fiddly areas in the outer leaf, rather than messing around cutting blocks to size. They lay about 600 blocks in a pretty normal 9hour day which is exceptional, most 2+1s will lay between 300-400 a day. Despite the fact that these guys work quickly, the quality of their work and attention to detail is spot on - or Bob-on as we call it. They think through all the coursing and block lengths, so there's hardly any waste from cut blocks. They're also incredibly tidy and clean up thoroughly at the end of every day.

By half way through Wednesday the internal walls were complete, and Bob's team had run out of work to do until they can work off the scaffolding.
Looking from the kitchen towards the front of the house.

Wednesday evening the scaffolders erected the first 6foot lift. The site is getting very tight on space, and we have deliveries of floor joists and loads more materials in the next couple of days! It's tough keeping up with Bob!

Completed internal walls.