Today, we started on the next three rafters, the corner Hip Rafters that goes in the main corners of the house. They are the Great Room “PA” corner, the Utility Room “EH” corner, and the Bedroom 3 “HI” corner. They should be all the same length from the wall up to the steel I-Beam and their bracket, at 5430 mm. We measured them as follows:
- PA – 5400 mm – short by 30mm
- EH – 5380 mm – short by 50mm
- HI – 5450 mm – over by 20mm
This is not bad considering the nature of our steel I-Beam being plonked down in the middle of the house when we only had short concrete stub walls at the time!
We carried on measuring around on the other bracket to corner distances, as follows:
- IJ – 5780 mm
- LM – also 5780 mm
- NM – 5275 mm
- P11 rafter – 3520 mm
We then brought into our workshop 8 sheets of plywood boards and sliced them up into sixteen pieces of 433 mm wide strips. We then got a piece of the polystyrene foam board and hot melted this down into 2 x 217 mm wide strips, generating 7 strips ready for filling the internal space inside the rafters.
Plywood-and-foam-for-beams-PA-EH-and-HI
At this point, the rain came hammering down and we couldn’t go outside to fetch the LVL timber we needed, until about an hour later when the rain stopped.
We now have all the parts ready, to make three hip rafters tomorrow while the rain is forecast to hammer down!!