Roof

These photos show the north end of the building.
8x2 ceiling joists, 4x2 rafters, 4x2 ashler wall type strutting(not yet complete).
This was all achieved in 4 days last week.
We are now ready to start building the barn hip ends once the brickwork has been brought up to the profile rafters ready for plate and the ladder rafters to be built into.

9x2 A frame's at south end of building.
The collar's shown bolted in these pictures are needed to prevent the roof from spreading and accommodate the higher ceiling in the kitchen/living area.

Time-lapse of roof construction (part 1)

Even with the weather at the beginning of the week I think we did pretty well to get this far. It also didn't help that I lost most of Thursday sat in a broken Land Rover at the side of the A23 waiting for a tow.

Roof Framing Week 1 from James Hole on Vimeo.

Videos of the stages of the Foundations.

I have put together a short slide-show of the foundations being piled, excavated, constructed and concreted, it gives you an idea of the amount of work involved.
Prices quoted for the whole job were in the region of £28-30,000, unimpressed by this we had piling undertaken by a local contractor and took on the ground beam ourselves. Not a job to be under estimated!
But after concreting all the dimensions were spot on (apparently an uncommon occurrence) and local Building Control and NHBC seemed quite impressed.

Foundations for Rock Cottage from James Hole on Vimeo.

Second day roof framing

Weather was better today, so we got stuck into fixing the rest of the joists that we didn't manage to get on yesterday. I then scaffold boarded a walkway under the ridge board position so we can work safely under it.
We cut the first rafters and offered them up, I measured the roof height with the laser and decided that we needed to drop the angle of the roof by a degree to lower the ridge height slightly.
Then after cutting the new rafters and deciding I was happy with the new height, things began to move along quickly and we got the about 26 rafters cut and fixed before the weather turned on us.

First day on roof.

Despite our best efforts the intermittent heavy showers made progress hard today so no as much achieved as hoped but the forecast looks Ok till Saturday now, what you can see here is 200mm x 47mm ceiling joists @400mm centres over bed 1, 2, 3, hallway and the en suite fixed with 90mm paslode clipped head nails with a 75mm overhang on the loadbearing wall( max of 100mm for NHBC) and nailed through overlap with the same i was going to coach bolt these but NHBC said to nail is enough. I may still coach bolt for my own piece of mind.

Wall plate in position ready for roof.

4x3 Wall plate as required by NHBC with 130mm stainless steel Fischer fixings at 1000mm centres not required by NHBC but no harm in extra fixings. 1600mm wall straps still to be fixed at maximum 2000mm centres (NHBC spec).