Roselea

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  • Juggle Things Around and A Lovely Bonfire!

    Today, in a breezy cold wind, we moved the polystyrene foam strips to inside the house as we need the location for the upcoming arrival of a pallet of 12mm B-BB grade plywood boards. These sheets are going to be the exposed (hence pretty B-BB visual quality) roof covering around the outside edge of the roof, out along the eves, the various overhanging porches and out to the gutters.

    Plywood-store-moved

    Plywood-store-moved


    We moved the ‘Wendy house’ covering, doing a bit of reinforcing of the frame and using a new full size palette to their new location, ready for the stack of materials. We will have to move each sheet separately as the delivery lorry will not be able to get down our Loke and it wont have a crane to help us, so it will be a case of man-handling all 75 sheets up on the main road and using our large flatbed trolley, to transport them down the Loke in 2 or 3 trips, depending on the weight. The total weight of the 75 sheets is over 1½ tons!!
    Juggle Things Around and A Lovely Bonfire!

    Lots-of-offcuts-to-burn

    Pile-of-scrap-wood-to-burn

    Pile-of-scrap-wood-to-burn



    After lunch, we decided to do a lovely job of having a bonfire! We have been accumulating lots of trugs and bags of rubbish so it was time to get the fire barrel going and get rid of some of the rubbish, especially the heap of OSB bits and pieces and other junk slated for the fire.
    Blazing-Incinerator

    Blazing-Incinerator


    It was a lovely bonfire and very hot! The barrel is a very good incinerator and concentrates the heat into drying out the old rubbish and burning it after a few minutes.
    Next week, we have the forecast of heavy snow arriving from Russia so it will definitely be the case of working in the workshop and hopefully Shaun will be able to do some heavier work. The weekend will be a good chance for more recovery of his muscles!!

  • Little Jobs Completed

    Today, while Shaun is still on light duty as instructed by our nursing team, we have been doing little odd jobs around the site that needed doing. Our temporary (now 9 months old!) tarpaulin cover over the 89mm CLS timber stack needed reinforcing on the wooden struts as the single screw broke in the strong winds last week.
    We also patched our temporary (now been 8 years) the felt covering on the wall where the old felt has cracked in several places.

    Little Jobs Completed

    Back-of-shed-patched


    And after lunch, we did another patch on the roof of this same temporary building (the building itself is about 15 years old!) where a small leak was getting in and making a growing stain on the ceiling inside.
    It probably was caused by the wooden little platform (part of the prop that holds up the tarpaulin sun shield) had dented and stressed the fabric of the roofing felt and made a couple of cracks. We heated up the roof surface with a hot air gun to dry it and applied several patches of 100mm wide flashing tape.

    Little Jobs Completed

    Roof-patched


    After that, we then tackled the guttering on the bottom of the temporary building roof where it have been blocked for a while now but first, it was the job to cut down a broken branch of ivy, fallen away from the boundary hedge and leaning on our roof.
    Little Jobs Completed

    Ivy-Collaped

    Little Jobs Completed

    Ivy-Cleared



    A combination of loppers and sabre saw to cleared that away, before we got on with digging out the bottom of the downpipe from the gutters to find where the blockage is. It turned out to be right at the bottom of the pipe inside the aqua-cell module where we had only a small gap between the cut end of the pipe and the bottom of the crate. We pulled out the pipe and banged out the smelly mush of leaves and gritty silt!! The aqua-cell itself was fine and still empty, thanks goodness for that!
    Little Jobs Completed

    Gutter-Cleaned


    We put everything back, cleaned the whole length of the guttering and hopefully that will last another couple of years before we will have to clean it again (or dismantle it!!) – Smile!

  • Assembling of “O” and “N” Rafters begins

    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.

    Assembling of

    Rafter-offcut


    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.

  • “N” and “O” Rafters Being Prepared

    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!

  • Two Days Lost to Back Injury

    Work on doing the rafters was postponed while Shaun recovers from his muscles injuries. The recovery is going well. With the weekend here now, he should see him have enough time to gain his physical health back again and start doing some light duty work on Monday.

  • Process Heap of Five Year Old Oak Timber

    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.

  • Tower Crashes Down!!

    At about 4:30pm, on a cooling afternoon but still lovely sunshine, we had a bit of a disaster! We were moving the scaffolding tower to its new position to install some more rafters into the “P” section of the roof over the Great Room. The problem was that while moving the tower, it had picked up a trailing end of the orange power lead that was hanging off the other tower and somehow hooked itself up on the platform. So both of us suddenly had the same idea of climbing up the tower to rescue the lead but immediately, the tower started toppling over! It was the combined force of our first step onto the bottom rail and the weight of our bodies that made the tower suddenly have its “feet” knocked out from underneath itself! It was one scary moment where we both skipped out of the way, and somehow avoiding the falling metal structure. But it wasn’t a total escape as Shaun sustained some muscle injuries in doing the sudden sideways movement and also trying to stop the tower falling over and strained his muscles on both sides of his back.

    Tower Crashes Down!!

    The-tower-has-fallen


    That was Disaster Number Two and we were left wondering what Number Three will be? O Boy!

  • The Final “P” Rafters Goes Up!

    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.

    The Final

    Rafters-P1P3-and-P4


    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.
    The Final

    Spacer-for-P3

    The Final

    Rafters-P16-and-P17


    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!

  • Preparing For “N” Rafters

    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.

  • Oak Timber Finally All Classified and Quantified!

    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 Timber Finally All Classified and Quantified!

    Oak-Rack-Full-Front

    Oak Timber Finally All Classified and Quantified!

    Oak-Rack-Full-Back



    And guess what? We were just tidying up and bringing in various tools like ladders and things .. and the rain came! Talk about good timing! Smile!
    That was one long 6 hours stint (we carried about 2 tons of wood)! Phew!

    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.