Week Fifteen

Week beginning 12th September.

We’ve had another grreat weekend, this time in Edinburgh visiting family and friends so we’re ready for another exciting week and have loads of enthusiasm and drive.

Pete is having a call with Andrew, and it’s not even breakfast time, to organise the day and now we’ve not quite finished our cup of tea and the boys are arriving. It’s Scott and Eoghain back to help us with the joists and flooring the mezzanines.

Our first task is to move some of the shed trusses out of the way so that Andrew can add the roof ladders to the first truss on each gable when he gets here.

It’s a bit of a job as they are not light and a bit awkward to move but we are managing without hurting ourselves.

We’ve just finished and a delivery of 25 lengths of 145mmx95mm and our three Velux skylights which we are unloading and they are so heavy that we can’t lift them so we are rolling them into place. Looks like it’s going to be one of those heavy lifting kind of days.

Just as we are putting the final Velux on the pallette Andrew arrives and sets to work on the roof ladders and cutting notches into some of the trusses which the suppliers, for some reason best known to them, hadn’t done. The notches allow the truss to sit on the wall head in the special truss braces. The roof ladders connect the first truss to the gable and overhang the gable end of the building.

Scott and Eoghain have been getting on with the joists and have started fitting the rim beam and blocks to the joist that will secure all of this together ready for the flooring. The rim beams were the lenghts of glulam timber that we had to cut to the correct width because what they had supplied was in the wrong dimensions.

Now that the joists and rim beams are up Scott and Eoghain are working on the flooring and our job is to carry the floor panels down to them. The floor panels are also quite heavy because they are made of chipboard so our heavy lfting day continues.

It’s the end of the day and although evryone has worked hard we are a bit behind on what we had wanted to achieve. We only have one side boarded and even that is not finished. With the Hiab coming tomorrow to lift the joists into place we are going to be under a bit of pressure to get this job and a few others finished before the lifting can begin.

After a good nights sleep we are full of anticipation and a bit of apprehension for the day ahead. It’s a big day and we need things to go well. Luckily the weather forecast is good so at least we shouldn’t get any rain or, worse still, heavy winds.

With breakfast over Pete gets straight into getting ready for the day ahead by getting all the screws and tools set up close to the buildings. Molly is pulling the tarpaulin off our wood stack because we will be using a lot of timber today.

Scott arrives with Simon and a new member of the team, Nathan and it isn’t long before David arrives with the Hiab.

With such a busy day ahead, the team get straight into finishing the floor laying and we are packing insulation between the two rim beams.

Before they can fit the header plates we need to pull the airtight membrane back onto the floor so that later we can tape it to the inside of the roof to create a continues airtight envelope. This is an important part of our house design and will help to keep the house warm.

While all this has been going on Andrew and Nathan have been erecting the trusses with the roof ladders on the shed, with the help of David and his Hiab.

With that done all the rest of the shed trusses can be erected, the ones to the south are attic trusses for our storage platform. It doesn’t take them long to get all the trusses up.

It’s time to put the house gables up but without the roof ladders. Andrew has decided to leave the roof ladders for later because we have little enough time with the Hiab to do everything today.

Now it’s time for David and his Hiab to start lifting the roof trusses into place. They are a mixture of single and double trusses, the doubles go either side of the Velux skylights to support the extra weight. We have to bolt two trusses together to make a double before they are lifted into place.

Things are taking much longer than expected and David is meant to leave very soon but Andrew has asked him to stay until the job is done and he kindly agrees. This is very important because if we had to hire a Hiab for another day that would be a very big costly business. Thanks David.

It’s been a long hard day for everyone and they have all worked their socks off. We owe them all a huge debt of gratitude, and a few beers, for staying the course and finishing the job in one day. We are over the moon that this has been achieved today even though we were behind in our preparations, thanks to the hard work of Andrew, Simon, David, Scott and Nathan. A great team!