Roof with a View



The view through a Velux



This morning - roofers arriving. The tall ladder to the left is their lift.



The battens going on the roof



Cor blimey it was like Euston Station on that scaffolding today. Roofers on one side, R and a mate on the other and the timber frame erectors in the middle. The last filling in gaps where the roof panels met the walls. Quite big, see-the-trees-through-them gaps - now sorted.
Very professional roofers whizzing around in a rather dizzying way up and down the slopes. They have a natty device which looks like a ladder which carries tiles up. R is putting up bargeboards (the diagonal bits of wood at the edges) and fascias (the horizontal bits of wood at the edges).

I have a problem with roofs - they are complicated and fiddly, with many bits of wood stuck on apparently at random. Luckily R is quite good at fiddly things - he usually sorts them out by doing a drawing. We had a dispute about the eaves - he wanted false rafters, which are bits of wood which stick down to look like real rafters (they can't be real rafters on account of we have a panelised roof made in the factory so no rafters as such), and I don't like false anything. After a lot of wrangling we settled on false rafters as long as we could put little ledges between them for the birds to nest on. So he calls them false rafters and I call them real built-in nestboxes.

Windows are coming in September - boo! But they have to come from Lithuania. Plenty to do in the meantime I guess. We can't render till they are in and we can't do the insulation, which is blown in by machines. But we can get the battening up for the render board to go onto, also the all-important taping of the joints inside for airtightness (that word again). And the roof and the kalash and the electrics and plumbing and the guttering.........

Craning up the walls

The roof panels arriving

The house with the walls up, and the roof panels on the left

Manoeuvring the roof panels

The ridge beam being craned on. See the shape of the house.

A beam and a half!


This is R's wall, which is practically perfect and is exercising ze little grey cells!


Monday morning - the erectors were here at 7.30 and raring to go. The crane arrived simultaneously and an hour or so later the wall panels for the first floor came. The erectors had to sort out a certain amount of sogginess before they started but after that they roared along. Although I think some of the top panels were a bit tight for them and took a bit of sorting. By 3ish in the afternoon the gable ends were up and the low walls along the two long edges.

The lorry in the meantime had gone back to the factory to pick up half of the roof. It had to stand around for a couple of hours waiting for the guys to finish up top.

And then........ this enormous ridge beam went up. Really spectacular. All of a sudden you could see the shape of the house. Magic. I thought I should get a little tree and nail it to the end like the old barnraisers on the prairies.

The flappy stuff at the top is going to be wrapped around the first floor to stop air getting through.


R in the entrance to the kitchen


Looking towards the settee from the cooker.




On the roof. Next week, this will read: In the bedroom.


Through the front door.

Here are more photos. The erectors came yesterday - Monday - and finished off most of the first floor floor so the ground floor is mostly covered in. The scaffolding is all round the house and I strolled around it today feeling like the lord of all I surveyed. Have not yet summoned up the courage to get to the top. Tomorrow.

The erectors have gone back to the yard to make the roof panels, which are turning out to be quite complex, so they'll be coming back on Monday with the crane to put up both the first floor walls and the gable ends and the roof. Hooray.

Oh boy, oh boy - a real house stands outside our caravan. There's a ground floor and ground floor external walls and ground floor internal walls and even a ceiling over part of it, which also means a first floor floor. We borrowed the builders' ladder yesterday evening and went up onto the first floor floor which makes a very nice flat roof, and surveyed the neighbouring gardens and fields. Lovely.

The timber frame putter-uppers, or erectors as is the technical term, are a great bunch of blokes. Very cheerful, very happy to help. Drink enormous quantities of what my mother calls 'mill tea'. They worked yesterday and the day before around the scaffolders, who are building practically a whole other house around the house ready for the erectors to do the first floor walls and the roof, and for the roofers to put the tiles on and the Veluxes in, and for us to put up render board and the plasterer to render it. Then we can take down the scaffolding - we have booked it for 12 weeks.
So we have, from the bottom up - foundations made of concrete poured into the ground, concrete blocks, damp proof membrane, a laminated (glulam) wood plank all the way round, very thick walls made of wood studs sheathed in eco-friendly panels made of something like sawdust pressed (very hard) to make a solid panel, another wood plank lying down, another wood plank standing up all the way round to hold the first floor floorjoists in position, a layer of solid waterproof chipboard which is the first floor.

We don't have a staircase so to get to our lovely first floor /flat rooftop we borrowed the builders' ladder and sat up there.

I ordered the windows yesterday - what a palaver. A delightful palaver of course but you wouldn't believe how many variables there are. First we sent the company a list of window sizes, then we decided how many panes per window, which ones would open, whether they opened inwards or outwards, and how many panes of glass (3), then whether to have trickle vents - not necessary if we have whole house ventilation but essential if we don't, then we decide on the paint colour, colour of handles, colour of a natty little metal strip which is a drip tray at the bottom of the frame, whether to have metal or timber external sills, whereabouts in the thickness of the wall the window goes, which windows need toughened glass, which need obscured glass. And so on. Long phone calls. Hopefully mostly sorted by now but we have scheduled a polite argument about paint colours tomorrow.

I'll put some more pictures up tomorrow.

Tuesday afternoon

Later Tuesday morning

Tuesday morning!

Monday night

TOMORROWS THE DAY!

The frame's coming......

Will it fit together?

Will it look right?

Will it stand up straight?

Will our base be the right size?

Aaaarrrgggh!!!!

8.30pm and R's off out to tidy up the concrete under the ground floor panels as the Building Control officer is coming tomorrow and I have a cleaning date with a load of damp proof membrane, now covered in bits of concrete and mud.

Sometimes I lose the plot and forget that we will have a genuine house at the end of this, and be able to get all our favourite things out of boxes and put them in the house, and have our friends to stay, and enjoy a Fortune Creating house.

At the moment the best thing is just to put one foot in front of the other and go and fire up the hosepipe.

Lots of photos tomorrow!

At last, I have worked out how to convert PDF pictures into something that Blogspot recognises - so here is a (more or less) idea of what it will look like. The big window on the ground floor is where the dining table goes - that's the south side. To its right is the kitchen and to its left is a living room area. The window at the front beyond the front door is the meditation room and behind that at the back of the house is another living room, possibly a bit posher with piano and long Georgian-style windows. All the bedrooms have both Velux roof windows and windows in the gable ends.

There's another new blog after this one.

The view from the kitchen window yesterday!

After the bricklayers had built the walls they put a damp proof membrane (black) on top of it and then the soleplate (wood), which the frame site on top of, on top of that.


R emptying water out of a big hole he dug for some unspecified reason.


I'm not doing a good job of getting blogs out more frequently - sorry Dad! There has now been quite a lot of development, both on the ground and in our heads in terms of planning - the pictures above show the development of the work. To meet the Building Regs we have had to do the following:
put down weedkiller
1. fill up holes with broken bricks
2. cover the ground with sand, which is not level but slopes very gradually off to one corner - so that any water which lands on it will run off
3. cover the sand with a thick plastic sheet
4. cover the plastic sheet with concrete

This picture shows the three stages. Centre is the sand laid, left is the plastic sheeting on top of the sand and right is the concrete on top of the sheeting.


The concrete lorry arrived and got stuck in the ground. He couldn't get right up to the furthest bay so we had to devise a Heath Robinson-style chute with a bit of board and a piece of plastic sheeting:

After that we had to call the local farmer to get him out. A lovely bright red tractor arrived but as you only get an hour or so to spread the concrete out before it sets, there were no photos of this: I was up to my steel-toe-capped boots in concrete with a rake. Quite a satisfying job actually....




Being as how the whole thing is going to be covered with the ground floor panels and after that with a house, we consider all this palaver to be a bit unnecessary, but Building Control officers fulfil the role of God in this situation (as I think I have said before), so we do as we are told.

I spent last Friday and Saturday at the AECB conference where environmentally friendly builders congregate in a heap once a year to push the boundaries of collective building consciousness. It was in Durham which is one of my favourite places and it meant that I got to see my mum and dad too. And, I think I have finally got airtightness sorted after a lot of talking to a lot of people. There was a bloke there who had built a very airtight house in Herefordshire explaining with PowerPoint the minutiae of how he did it. He used a lot of products by a company called ProClima and it looks like we can do almost all of the airtightness detailing after the frame has been put up. A great deal of taping and masticking required but it can all be done at our own speed after the erection. ProClima products were also on display there and I found out some interesting things about air to water heat exchangers which may be the way we go for both water heating and, should we need it, space heating.

Saturday morning:
R is putting the drains in at the moment - just the bits that he can't do after the ground floor panels have been put down. A lot of digging and taking levels and pulling his hair out whilst calculating falls of 1 in 60. Luckily the weather is good - not raining and not too hot.

I am working on the precise specification for, and costing of, the airtightness schedule and also finishing the requirements for the Building Control officer. He is not really interested in airtightness but is very keen on vapour control. I have discovered that these are two separate things: originally I thought that as long as the house was airtight it would automatically be okay as far as vapour penetration of the outer walls went. I now know that they are two separate sets of calculations and I need to make sure both are right. The Building Regs need to know that vapour will not pass from the inside of our house into the walls and condense into water before it reaches the outside. Most modern houses do not, in theory, allow vapour to get into the walls at all. In our system, called the breathing wall system, we allow the vapour in, in a controlled way, and make sure that it does not condense until after it reaches the outside. There have been thousands of houses built to this system but it is still something that Building Control officers need a bit of help to get their heads around. Our BCO is a young chap who is quite open to new ideas, so we are lucky in that regard. We still have three choices for making the outer walls sufficiently airtight and if you wants the technical details, let me know.

The frame is coming on Tuesday!!!

The roofer came round today and will be ready to go in four weeks time. The windows will be ordered on Monday.

Once that is all done, we can start work ourselves on the inside. The other major work on the outside is the rendering and we have chosen a bloke to do that. Most of the rest we will do ourselves. The ground and first floors will be in and walkable on, although we'll get someone to make and install a staircase. So that R can get on with the build full-time, I am planning to work full-time to support us both, at least for a few months.

Onwards and upwards - the pictures should start getting a bit more interesting, anyway.