Category: Build Progress

This morning, our 75 sheets of pretty plywood arrived. The lorry managed to get down our Loke, and we placed our flat bed trolley alongside. We then pulled off the plywood, sheet by sheet. This allowed the delivery bloke to get off to his next port of call.

We then moved half the pile by taking 3 sheets at a time and walked about 15 metres to our new storage tent. Eventually, we were able to move the trolley itself, with much slipping and sliding on the snow, and got the remaining sheets unloaded.

This plywood is much nicer than the last lot (well we bought it as pretty)

After lunch, we resumed in the lovely and warm workshop and created five more rafters.

That’s was enough for Shaun’s back so tomorrow we will finish off the last two rafters and get ready for doing the “K” section by measuring the final set of rafters! Hurray!

This afternoon, we resumed work on creating the last couple of dozen of rafters for the roof. We did Five more today before Shaun’s back had enough and didn’t want to overdo things.
There are seven more to do in this current batch, which will finish off the roof area over the Great Room and leaves ten more rafters in the “K” section over the Bedroom Two area.

Tomorrow, we have the delivery of our “nice” plywood coming from Diss (only about 30 miles away) and we hope it will make it with the snow arriving from Russia!! In the meantime, we will carry on with a few more rafters.

This morning, we switched over to our latest and last angled cuts, the 45degrees angles, for the webbing. These were for the “O” set of rafters, all six of them, plus two top-flange only ones too. All these rafters have sticking out eves so they have the bird’s mouth notches and also this end of the rafters are fitting onto the walls which means they needed the clearance notches done too.
After lunch, we took the old P2 rafter (the mistake) and chopped off about 200mm off the end to turn it into a N9 rafter instead.

You can see the internal structure of one of our rafter, with the insulation in and the layers plus also how acute the bevel cuts has to be too!
Then sorting out the pile of webbing, and organising the order of which combination of rafters will go into the template and at the same time, remove the piece of wood from the bird’s mouths that have been half cut up to this point.
Finally, after cleaning the whole workshop and bringing in 23 strips of the insulation to fill the 14 rafters we are doing, we were ready to start the manufacturing assembling step of producing rafters.
But with Shaun on light duty at the moment, we did only one session with two rafters in our template and got them all glued and nailed up. Tomorrow, in the afternoon, we will do a couple more sessions, limited by Shaun’s back and get the rest done on Thursday.

Today, while it was a damp horrible day (and also Shaun is restricted to light duties!), we worked in our workshop to cut and prepare the material pieces to build more rafters. We made more noggins (both straight ones and diagonal 45 degrees angled ones), using up lots of odd left-over length of timber we have lying around and made enough to complete all the remaining rafters to build (both “O” and “K” sections).
Then, we chopped up a series of CLS timber pieces to have ready the top and bottom flanges for the “O” rafters (we had already made a similar set for the “N” rafters last week!). Finally, we paired up all our remaining plywood webbing and sliced the 40 degrees angles that are for the “N” rafters.
Tomorrow, we will do the “O” plywood webbing which have a 45 degrees angled ends so we will need to modify our templates and get those webbings sliced too. Hopefully, we will also get to create these rafters too and allow them to dry overnight before we take them outside, if we get a lucky break in the weather and installed them up and finish off the roof over the Great Room – Hurray!

With a very lovely sun shining down upon us, we proceeded to install the final set of “P” rafters up into the roof framework. The four rafters that goes up into the very far corner (left back corner of the Great Room) and the first two rafters of five that goes into the front left corner of the building.

But we discovered something wrong with the length and angle of the rafters (P4, P3 and P2). We did P4 first and realised that the angle of the Bevel cuts were incorrect, much too steep compared against the diagonal LVL hip rafter going down into the corner. We had to put in extra spacers to help fill in the gap and provide suitable structural connection. Then P3 rafter was too short by about 120mm in length and Disaster Number One, we seem to have a situation! We have a mismeasurement! When we originally measured this corner, we measured P4 and P2 and put the data into our spreadsheet and that where we got the numbers from to build these rafters. But we did something wrong somewhere and soon, we found it! the length of P2 was in error. We made the P2 rafter 1040mm long via the bottom flange but we realised that the distance from the LVL rafter down to the wall leg was actually 1400mm!! We Found It! A keyboard data entry error or perhaps a lithography error (writing into notepad!) or something! It is really the first time we have made a big mistake with a measurement during this roof phase or indeed other phases of this building project. So we abandoned P2 and finished installing P3 by inserting a large block of wood 62mm thick to fill in the gap and glue plus screws to hold everything together.

We then went onto doing the front left set of rafters and this time, we managed to get up two more rafters (P16 and P17) before the next Disaster Number Two occurred!! See Tower Crashes Down! and this put an end to our day’s work. This was about 4:30pm!

This afternoon, after a interruption to our work flow due to other meetings, we first went outside to verify the measurements we made last week on the “N” section and updated our spreadsheet. We then started the preparation job for building the next batch of rafters, this time for the “N” section of the roof. Using the new updated spreadsheet (showing the calculations as a result of our verification task earlier) and proceeded to slice and chop up a half a dozen of CLS timber to go towards the heap of material we will need for making another eight more rafters.

We finished off installing the rest of the “H” rafters outside, on quite a balmy day, on the shortest daylight day of the year!

Tomorrow, we will try and get some of the “P” rafters up before we have to stop for Christmas. We will see how things go and whether we will do some work on Saturday too.

This morning, we ventured outside to install as many rafters in the “H” section of the roof but could only do two in the end before lunch! It was a tight corner of the building and our tower needed to be juggled into position. We got the two rafters up and installed, only to discover that we managed to get our tower stuck in among the rafters! We had to dismantle one top end of the scaffolding in order to make it slide out from under the rafters, and back into a more spacious area!! Eeek!

Then after a quick lunch, we resumed the task of creating the batch of “P” rafters we have prepared and we were successfully able to complete all eight rafters – Phew!

Tomorrow, we will spend all the daylight hours installing as many of the rafters as possible and then return back in the workshop to slice the bevelled angled cuts on the new ones we have done today. Those final rafters, we will put up on Friday and possibly Saturday too – double phew!!

Today, after a fairly long delay where we were recovering from an injury but also doing the Oak timber Survey and Ordering, we resumed our task of creating more rafters for the roof. This time, it was the turn of the “P” section over the Great Room. We chopped up the collection of CLS timber lengths we had in the workshop and produced 12 individual pieces to do P5 through to P10 and P16 through to P21. Then, the large pile of plywood webbing strips were also cut and sliced including cutting in the notches on all 12 sets and ended up with a collection of webbing, ready for the assembly.
Then it was the usual job of bringing in polystyrene foam strips, 12 of them, then cleaning up the workshop and refilling the glue dispenser bottle too.
By the end of the day, we managed to complete three rafters, P5, P6 and P7. Tomorrow, we will take outside as many of the “H” rafters and get them installed up into the structure before lunch and then continue in the workshop to carry on making the remaining 9 “P” rafters during the afternoon and avoid the short daylight hours. We should get the rafters for both “P” and “H” all installed by Thursday and Friday and that will be it for the rest of the year as we can relax and celebrate Christmas and New Year and start fresh again in January!