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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!!

Today, in glorious sunshine, we proceeded to installed our fifteen new rafters we made on Tuesday and got them glued and nailed into place on the Front Porch to form the “C” roof section and completed the two side “B” and “D” sections of the roof too.

As you can see, all went quite well this time! Oh yes, we moved the scaffolding tower from inside the Porch before we put up the rafters .. as it would have been trapped! We moved the tower around the corner to the position where the Side Porch will be constructed.
And we transferred our scaffolding platform over from the tall tower to our shorter tower so we could have a platform to work from when we start constructing the framework for the Side Porch.
The rest of the afternoon was spent indoors creating a “cut-list” drawing so we can start on generating the framework pieces in the workshop tomorrow and Saturday.

The day was spent on updating the drawings to finalise the design and measurements of the real world outside, so the Side Porch and the Conservatory “dormer” roof framework are accurately representing what we will need to do when we come to cut, slice and plane various pieces of timber to form these structures.

The new timber came this morning, slightly thicker (we couldn’t get hold of our original size in small quantities) and we will start generating the “parts” in the workshop on Friday and Saturday.

While it was raining on and off all day today, we worked on on the task of recycling some of our C rafters from yesterday and make fresh ones to make a grand total of fifteen rafters which will complete the framework for the Front Porch roof.
We sliced down C9 rafter to become C10, then C10 down to make C11 and so on to the final one of C12 being made into C13. We took outside (in between showers) C13 and it fitted much better this time around!
Then we made a fresh C9 and continued making new ones for C6, C5 etc. down to C1. The only complication was the 20degrees bevelled angle cuts was not possible to do in one go in the chop saw so we had to do it in two separate stages. Not so bad after we have sorted out the puzzle of which way round to put things and made another jig!

After lunch, we went outside to measure the four rafters for the small side portions of the porch roof, two on the B section and two on the D side. Using our large right angle framing square, we managed to project across from existing rafters to find the correct position where the upper ends of the new rafters will meet the hip diagonal rafter. Back in the workshop, we proceeded to put in the Bird’s mouth (after adjusting the jig template to 33 degrees) and then sliced a very acute angle on the top ends. This angle is 20degrees and we used our large Bevel Slicing Machine again for this task!

Hopefully on Thursday, weather permitting, we will get all these fifteen rafters up and have this porch finish. We then will start making the framework to build up the extension to the roof for the Side Porch, extending sideway the E section of the roof (going towards the garage) and producing a gable end so the wall can be extended upwards too. We have new timber arriving for this job soon we hope.

This morning, in glorious sunshine, we were ready to put up our newly created “C” set of rafters to build up the framework of the Front Porch roof. We drilled a series of clearance holes for our fixing screws and then started installing them, the longest one first. This one, C8, went in very nicely and seated good and firmly into place. We proceeded with the next two rafters, the C9 and C10, and it seems to be ok as well so those two were glued and screwed into place too. It was only after this, when we went on to the next rafter, C11 (getting shorter), that we noticed that something was wrong. This rafter was angled somewhat off the vertical line and questions started popping into our minds. We measured the bottom separation (on the C beam) and that seems to be ok at 611mm distance between C8, C9 and C10 but at the top end, they were definitely diverging and we could not understand why this was happening. The spreadsheet had the two measured distances for C8 and C12 and the middle rafters (c9 through to c11) calculated but something was wrong. It was only after we tested the last rafter (C12) that we finally found the “Mistake” .. the position for C12 was 100mm off!! Somehow, reading the measuring tape, we had managed to get an extra 100mm further along the C beam away from its neighbouring rafters!
This completely explains why our rafters weren’t fitting AND also why our smallest one, C13, wasn’t fitting too. So we unscrewed and took back down the last two rafters (C9 and C10) but left behind C8 because that was truly an accurate and measured and it is correct.

We will scrape off the excess brown glue after it had set with a razor blade. These rafters are too short to go anywhere else, including the other side (matching C5 down to C1) or on the Side Porch. The only solution is to reuse them again for the C4 through to C2 rafters by losing about 500mm off the lengths as waste but keeping the Bird’s Mouth ends that are already done. We will have to recreate a new set of rafters for C9 across to C13 and try again. The spreadsheet has now been corrected with the true number (the measurement for the ill-fated C12 was really 566mm instead of 510mm) and it shows how much difference it makes!!
We are only glad that we had the mind to spot this error before the brown glue set and as it gave us the opportunity to make amends! Phew!!

This morning, we finished off cutting and preparing the two long diagonal Hip Rafters for the Front Door Porch roof. We sliced a little bit off the end at the top, drilled a couple of clearance holes and then sliced the Bird’s Mouth notch in the exact position, following real measurements outside using a short template pieces so we can get a more accurate distance from the Bird’s mouth, up to the top where it meets the apex of the roof. One more drill hole put here and then both went outside to be installed up into place.

It went in very well indeed, thanks goodness!

After lunch, we got on wit the job of creating the 12 “C” Rafters, to go with the one already created and installed out there, The C7 Rafter! Firstly, we marked out regular place settings at every 611mm so that for a whole 8feet sheet, there will be a 4mm gap to allow for thermal and moisture expansion throughout the year. Then, we measured the length of C8 and C6 rafters plus C12 and C2. These numbers went into our spreadsheet to calculate the intermediate lengths of the other rafters. We grabbed five more lengths of 89mm CLS timber and after putting on the bird’s mouth notches on the end of these five CLS pieces, we proceeded to cut down to the required lengths. It was a a complex operation, having to cut the exact length right angles first, before putting this end into the chop saw that has our complicated template to allow us to slice a 61degrees cut one way and at the same time, slice a 20degrees tilting angled cut to form the bevel end to marry up against the diagonal Hip Rafter. We had to fiddle with lots of test pieces before we had a consistent and repeatable setup to produce accurate shaped ends.

In the last half of an hour, in the deepening dark, we took outside several of our new C rafters to test fit them and it seems to be ok, apart from the diagonal Hip Rafters having a bit of a bow in their length (which we can draw it back straight again when we screw and glue our new C rafters on to it) but also the very smallest one, the C13 one, seems to not fit quite as well as the others. We will analyse further on Monday when we had a rest and our brains have warmed up and recovered ready for sorting that out!! Smile!