Week Three – Part Two

We got down to it on Wednesday and Thursday and made all the interior room panels. This went quickly because we didn’t have to sheet many of them in OSB as this will happen onsite once all the panels are up and the roof trusses are on.

There have been some positive developments this week – our Building Warrant was approved so we can now go ahead with the groundworks. Credit where it is due, Argyll and Bute Council Building Control dealt with our application promptly and because Andrew answered their queries right away everything worked efficiently.

We have also appointed Simon, a groundworks contractor, to deal with all the preparation of the plot. This is a big job which we had considered doing with the help of family members before we realised just how big and complicated the task will be. It will involve levelling the ground where the house and shed foundations will go and compacting tons of stones, dig the waste water and toilet drains and install the sewage treatment system, dig the trenches and install the French drains to keep the plot as dry as possible (it rains a lot in Argyll) If all goes well the work will be mostly completed by the end of July or beginning of August.

We now have a quote from the power company for mains electricity connection, this can apparantly take up to seven months so we may not have a connection for a while and we have a site meeting with Scottish Water for the mains water connection.

On Friday Andrew got us started on making the gable ends for the house and shed by showing us how to cut the correct angles for the shed roof at 40º and the house roof at 45º.

Shed roof plans, a much more complicated prospect than anything we’ve done so far.

We spent a large part of the day cutting studs with angled tops, making the window and door frames because we have a window in the south facing gable of the shed, a window in the west gable of the house and a a balcony door in the west gable.

Then we started assembling the south gable of the shed and nothing seemed to be working well so we asked Andrew to help us out. He soon realised that we had cut the lengths too long because of confusion about where to measure from, the short or long end of the angle cut timber. Once that was fixed things moved fast with our guru’s input.

Once we fully understood the task Andrew left us to finish the job.

Having placed and nailed all the timbers the whole frame needs sheeted with OSB. Angles and an aperture tested our progress but we were pleased with the result. Here’s hoping we remember how to do all this because we have another three to do on Monday and Tuesday and the house gables are much bigger!