We had a delivery from UK-Mail today and the driver hit our fence post and snapped it off! He appeared to hit the post and break it off as well as flattening a few road cones placed by the fence to warn drivers that it was there! We have contacted UK Mail and will wait to see what they say about it.
Fence-post-snapped-off-by-delivery-driver
Fence-torn by delivery driver
This morning, we analysed the plans to work out the total length of the rubber membrane we would need for the guttering and the valleys in the roof. There are eight valleys in our roof structure (our roof also has twelve hips and five ridges too) and about eighty metres of guttering. This adds up to just over 150metres in total and our supplier has 20metres rolls so we ordered eight rolls!
The afternoon was spent building the fifth Downpipe Channel for the diagonal corner between Bedroom 1 and the Great Room. We didn’t stick the rubber membrane into the previous channels we made yesterday as we realised that we needed to do a test of our glue sticking two layers of the rubber material and we wanted to make sure the glue will cure properly while being sandwiched by these two impermeable surfaces. The glue may need access to the air or moisture to set the chemical reaction going and cure the glue properly.
So we measured and cut the pieces for the fifth channel, took it outside to set it against the real world and proceeded to complete it by late evening to dry and cure overnight.
The last proper channel we will make is for a straight one for the Side Porch which we will do on Saturday and then we can start putting up the Fascia boards.
Very early this morning, and yesterday, we had the delivery of both the Timber and Cement boards to allow us to finish off the construction of the Side Porch and the Conservatory “Dormer” roof structures.
More-timber-delivered
A-few-more-Cement-boards-delivered
This afternoon, we tried and failed to place an order for 10 sheets of 10mm thick full sized (1200mm by 2400mm) cement particle boards off the web. The online store says ‘buy here, spend more than £250 and get delivery free!’. We had an email back from them to refuse our order because our nearest depot didn’t have any in stock and they were unwilling to deliver from other depots what we needed .. .. unless we order a whole palette of 55 sheets!! Also we wanted to have one sheet of 18mm thick so we can see what it is like, how heavy it will be and so on. But they refused this as well, as they claim that it is a minimum order of 10 sheets!! Funny how they quickly changed their rules!!
We have now placed another order from another online supplier who are a little bit more expensive and fingers crossed, they won’t make a fuss!
The second trouble we are having is sourcing a few more lengths of our treated CLS 89mm timber and no one locally holds any full size 4.8 metres lengths. All seems to have plenty of the metric British sized timber (45mm by 95mm ? planed down from 2inch by 4inch) but not the American / Canadian CLS size of 38mm by 89mm. We had designed our house in this size from the beginning years ago and we had found plenty of suppliers of the CLS timber, so long it is ordered in pallet quantities! So we had to make sure that we could finish the job of putting rafters on the front porch and the side porch that needs single length greater than 2.4metres that needs the Bird’s Mouth and Eve sticking out, so it matches the rest of the house already done. We have got 6 lengths left from our old original palette and those will be used for those pieces, and the rest will come from a stock of 2.4metres lengths acquired from our local DIY stores. Well, our nearest branch (B&Q) didn’t have any in stock, nor did their Lowestoft branch either, so we went to Wickes also in Lowestoft, after checking on online to make sure that they had some in stock. We arrived to find the section on display empty of the timber we wanted!! We chased down a store assistant and they checked on their own computers and it also says ’54 in stock’ so they went hunting for the elusive lumber and found it outside in a pack still strapped together from some recent delivery. We had to wait while they get the guy with the fork lift truck to get it, undo it and finally .. we got our 10 lengths!! Phew! That was our afternoon gone!
P.S. We have a delivery Date for the Cement boards!
While Shaun recovers from his back injury, Stephen went and process our old collection of Oak Timber we bought five years ago. It has been in our garden shed all this time, and since we have our new stock of Oak timber, it was time to rationalise the old set and combine them with the new ones.
But the problem was that this old heap was very cheap and very roughly sawn with all the original bark and waney edges. It was a jumble of different widths and different lengths. So the first job was to pull out all the pieces that didn’t have the waney edges, about 20 planks out of 60!
Then, using a long metal guide, the power circular saw was used to cut a straight line to make a narrower plank and finally smaller pieces were sawn off to make batten style pieces that could come to be useful later on. All these Oak pieces were of the 26mm thickness and most were 1.8 to 2 metres long and about half was over 150mm wide and the rest was less then that.
We started early today about 9am as there was a forecast of rain coming at around lunch time so we thought we would get as much as we can on sorting and counting the Oak Timber. We had three more packs to go, one small one and two large ones!
So there we were, measuring and hauling one layer at a time, around to the storage rack and we carried on .. and on .. and on .. and on .. waiting for the rain to come! It went past lunch time .. and we still worked .. and worked .. and finally we actually got ALL the rest of the Oak timber all classified and quantified and moved to our now very populated storage rack!!
Oak-Rack-Full-Front
Oak-Rack-Full-Back
The oak delivery had 600 pieces varying from 90 to 320 mm wide and 25 to 55 mm thick, with a total weight of over 5 tons.
Today, Monday, we resumed the task of quantifying our Oak timber and moving each plank around to our made-for-purpose storage rack.
We did some sorting on Saturday but only for the morning before the rain came at lunch time.
And this afternoon, instead of carrying on with this task, we decided to get our odd “N” rafter up and installed. We will carry on with the Oak Timber in the morning if the weather is kind to us again like today!
This afternoon, in the middle of our lunch hour (about 1:30pm), the Oak Timber arrived!! There were ten packs in total, in four stacks on the back of the lorry. Also, on the back of the lorry, was a fork-lift truck which came down two steep ramps off the end! We were lucky that the driver was confident to reverse the lorry back down our Loke and avoided causing major traffic hold-ups on the A143 Beccles Road !
Oak-Deilvery-First-Pallet-Unloading-
Oak-Deilvery-The-Forklift
The forklift the moved the packs to the cleared area by the Storage hut.
Oak-Deilvery-All-Delivered
Oak-Deilvery-First-3-packs-onto-rack
We finalised and double checked our Oak Timber quantity and got a final quote from the timber merchant today.
The major difficulty we have is that the large quantity of the Oak timber, amassing to 6 cubic metres or about 5 tons of timber, needed some means of being off-loaded from the delivery truck and we don’t have an on-site forklift truck and also we are down at the end of an unadopted narrow lane too.
So we are having to pay for the hire of an lorry with all-terrain forklift vehicle, being transported alongside the Oak, from the merchants themselves. It is about £500 but that is less than 10% of the total order which is not so bad, and just something we have to accept as part of our building project’s overheads.
The timber will take about 2 weeks to come and we will do some site management and re-arrange piles of insulation boards and move them into the house and make a cleared area, ready to receive the Oak.
The last few days, while Shaun recovers from a Back Muscles Twinge injury, we have been surveying for all the Oak timber we would need for the external features of the house (and garage). We do need to do this task anyway soon, as we are nearing the completion of building the roof structure and the next job would be to install the facia and guttering before we can proceed to lay down the roof boards (because the first line of boards overlaps the facia edge).
The main external features we have to survey are gutters, windows, doors, corners, conservatory and garage. Each has a collection of different dimensions (like thickness, width and length) and we needed to do a survey and quantify what we will need and make up an order to a timber merchant who often have “rules” like minimum order pack sizes for any given thickness or length.
The list below is the approximate quantities in cubic metres as follows: (Note: the timber merchants prices this way, so just imagine a solid block of wood 1 metre wide, 1 metre high and 1 metre deep – yes big!)
All this adds up to a grand total of 5 cubic metres of Oak Timber!
We would split the order into two parts so we don’t have large quantity of oak lying about before they were used.