Category: Build Progress

Taking advantage of the better weather today, we went to finish off the task of installing a couple of sheets of cement boards to complete the gable triangular section of the wall.

Then we tidied away the remaining spare cement sheets and stored them in our sheet material storage tent. We have six sheets left for future jobs like the rain filtration unit.
After lunch, we sliced and cut two long diagonal 95mm by 45mm thick timber rafters to conclude the framework for this dormer roof structure that will connect to our Conservatory (which will be built in a couple of years). There was quite a complex joint to make to connect to the sloping valley rafters sticking out of the building(as the picture reveals below)

Then these two final pieces were carefully fitted, making slight adjustments until all was good and tight, at which point, they were glued and screwed together. The excess valley beams were sliced flushed afterwards.

This concludes the building of the framework of the whole roof and the next job is to produce the Oak Facia boards that goes all the way around the edge of the roof.

Today, we proceeded to cut six rafters to fill in the sloping sides of the dormer roof structure, and then four vertical posts to fill in the gable flat extension of the wall going up.

On Monday, we will put up two cement boards on the gable wall to get that covered up and then we will need to add the last rafters on the front which will be the actual interface to the conservatory

The we can start looking at the Facia boards and the guttering.

This morning, we carried on with the manufacturing and installing of framework pieces to build up the “Dormer” roof section ready for the Conservatory. The two long valley rafters were finished and got installed up on the “P” section of the roof.
We had to file away the edge of the cement board so these diagonal beams can reach pass and over to where the guttering will be.
Next, we cut the horizontal ridge beam which had a complex joint to connect to the two diagonal valley rafters

And a vertical post from the main wall of the building. All was glued and screwed into place.

It was a short day today but tomorrow, we will continue with this job by making a set of rafters that will come down from the Ridge beam and sit on top of the valley beams!

After a delayed start, we got the final three “F” rafters cut and installed up into the Side Porch Roof structure.

Then we dismantled the scaffolding tower to move it to the far side of the house where we will have our Conservatory. This will join to the house with a ‘seamless’ transition, so the house roof needs to have a dormer formed where they join which will extend out to the main house gutter line. We are calling this section of the roof the “Q”, connecting onto the “P” roof!
After a very late lunch, we ripped sawn down the length of two 95mm by 45mm timber to produce a sloping edge with a 40degrees angle. These will be the Valley rafters on either side of the dormer roof framework.
And finally, to finish off the day, we took a couple of short pieces off the ends of the newly created valley rafter and glued and screwed them in between two rafters to help support the dangling end of the valley as it comes off the roof to join onto the back of the facia board.

Tomorrow, we will carry on creating more pieces to form the “Q” framework, with a flat gable end which will be covered up with cement boards as usual, but with an extra sticking out portion which will interface onto the glass roof of the Conservatory (built much later on!!).

We resumed our work on creating the two diagonal Hip Rafters, putting in the bird mouth and slicing the bevel ends and getting both up and installed.

Then we measured the position for the four side rafters (two on each side for the E and G sections), cut in the 32degrees angled bird mouth using our standard template and then slicing another shallow wedge off the top ends. These were also taken outside, glued and screwed up into place!
And finally, we started on the “F” set of rafters (F1 to F7), doing the middle F4 first and then measuring either side of this central piece so we can get the exact spacing correct (being 611mm centre to centre) and proceeded to cut 45degrees bird’s mouth this time (after adjusting our template accordingly). We managed to complete F5 to F7 along with F4.


All is looking quite neat and tomorrow, we will complete the other three rafters (F1 to F3) and after that, switch over to making the Conservatory “dormer” framework which is the last piece of work to do to the roof before we start working with our Oak timber and manufacture the Facia board around the edge of the roof.

This morning with patchy sunshine but quite warm, we went and glued and screwed up a collection of cement boards to cover up the gable wall framework we installed last week for the Side Door Porch. The 12mm thick sheets, two of them, had a groove routed along the long edge and then cut in half so we could handle them by ourselves, as they are very heavy, about 50kg per full sized sheet so even half length, they are still 25kg!!
We put four of them up in a line, on the existing tongue edge of the cement boards lower down, and sliced off the over-lapping sticking out bits.

This afternoon, we got our Hip Rafters that we had made a couple of weeks ago, and planed the two sloping angles along the top edge. We did this using our mobile electric planer which took about an hour to do. Then we sliced the top end off to form the angled vertical end and got out our Bevel Slicing Machine to take off a very thin  58 degree wedge. The drawing indicated that the length from the top down to the bird’s mouth (2970mm) and we cut the little notch. Then going outside, we cut a little flat notch bits off the outer corners of the sticking out framework parts of the Porch. We stopped as it was past our end of work day time but also we had a delivery to interrupt us too!! We will carry on tomorrow!

We carried on with the creation of the basic framework to form the Gable end to extend the wall up over the Side Door and Utility Room window.
The first bit was the extension to the E10, E11 and E12 rafters, which we had made yesterday and they got installed this morning, all glued and screwed into place.

Then we tackled the next job of slicing down the whole 3m length of a timber, a 40 degree slope cut to form a special valley beam that goes flat on the “H” rafters, from the top of the F Ridge where it meets the EH rafter and all the way down to the bottom where the G3 rafters meets the edge of the porch top plate.
We had to use our Bevel Slicing machine as we needed a quite a deep saw cut and none of the standard circular saws can cut that much in one go at the 40degrees angle we wanted. It was a slow job with frequent pauses to allow the motor to cool down and in fact, we stopped for lunch as well!

After lunch, we finished off the slicing down the length of the valley beam and then we cut the required angled ends (on both ends) to connect properly and tightly. It took several tries to get all the correct angles into place and then we did our usual glue and screw this valley beam up onto the roof.

The next job was to make the twin set of rafters to go down from the F ridge beam to the new valley beam and that got cut and sliced with more complex angles to marry to the valley beam correctly!!
And finally, we made six vertical posts to fill in the two triangular sections along the front using 63mm wide CLS timber.


This concludes our work on building this piece of roof framework and now we are ready to install several cement boards to build up the wall covering to form the triangular gable section over the Side Door. After that, we can build the structure of the roof going outwards to form the overhanging roof of this Porch.

Today we started work on our second porch, the one over the side door situated in our Utility Room. We took our technical drawing, two lengths of our new fatter 95mm by 45mm timber and created several pieces to build up the framework to form the basic roof shape.

The horizontal ridge sits on a vertical leg and braced by two diagonal struts, with a slight clearance at the bottom to allow the extra thick cement boards to fit. This was glued and screwed together in horrible cold rainy weather – yukk!
After that, we fetched two more lengths of timber and proceeded to slice one of these into three pieces to form the “E” rafters (E10, E11 and E12) which continues up the roof slope following from the original main rafters E10, E11 and E12 and join up to the horizontal Ridge beam. We didn’t put these up as it was still raining and rather wet on our wood work so that will be tomorrow’s job if it is dry!!