Extension Stuff

If you have been looking at this blog to see where I am up to with my extension, you'll have the impression that there has been no progress since last October. This is not (exactly) the case. In fact, I've been too busy with it to take photos and write on the internet. But now Sophia has unexpectedly fallen asleep, so I have a few minutes. So here's what's been going on.

Last time I wrote, I'd demolished the old stone wall. The next stage was to dig a trench where the old wall had been, for the new concrete foundations. This was done using a spade and a pick axe, took a long time, was really difficult and not much fun. Here is a picture of the result, complete with pegs to show the level to pour the concrete to.



Next we poured the concrete. I employed Jamie (the builder who lives down the road), and we mixed and poured the whole thing on an extremely wet (no really, extremely wet) afternoon in November. At least it was before it got cold. I haven't got any pictures of what that looked like... sorry.

Then I built the underbuilding - this is brickwork off the foundation up to ground level. There is a picture below but it is not at all good, because I've already put the damp proof membrane over it... see that black structure in the middle of the picture? That's what I built.



What I wanted to do next was a bit more masonry and concreting (filling in the small space between the underbuilding and the existing house with concrete). But by then it has got cold, and you can't use cement below 3 degrees C. So, I found some joinery to do instead.

The wooden wall that we are building here has two large gaps in it, for big wide doorways. To span those gaps, we require flitch beams. These consist of two pieces of timber with a steel plate sandwiched between them (you can do an image search on google for 'flitch beam' and find a diagram). These are the steel plates...



... and very heavy they are too. This bit was complicated by the way these beams had to be interfaced to the existing house - basically I had to cut the end of all the existing floor joists, put joist hangers on them, then connect the flitch beam to the joist hangers. In the end, the flitch beams will support the floor joists, but to start with it was the other way round, and they were just hanging there!

All that was complicated by the fact that the roof timbers were supported by the ends of the floor joists that I needed to cut off, and so something had to be done to hold the roof up while the flitch beams were installed. Here is a picture showing a cut floor joist, with plywood screwed to it to hold up the roof, and a joist hanger. You can also see one of the timbers for the flitch beam to the left, ready to be offered up to the joist hanger.



So all in all, that was very complicated and time consuming, not to mention probably rather more dangerous than it should have been, since I didn't waste time waiting for help to lift the bigger flitch plate into place. But I ended up with two flitch beams hanging from the house, ready for the rest of the timber to be installed underneath them.

And here is a bit of that wall. Really this stuff is quick and easy (compared).



There is some finishing off to do on this wall, it needs to have plywood screwed to it to keep it square, and the concrete and masonry round about it is still outstanding (once the weather warmed up, Jamie needed his cement mixer).

And after that, we do the other foundations and the floor, which is a whole lot of digging, for which we will be getting a digger!