The Roof

In a long long overdue blog entry, here’s where we are with the extension.

My last entry on the subject was the 5th of May, where I had some pillars in place to support some steel elements with hold up the roof. I was waiting for the steel to be delivered, and also a large amount of timber with which to construct the rest of the roof.

Here is one of those steel elements in place, and you can see the supports for the others, the two triangular bits to the left and right, in the foreground. The missing beam is a big flitch beam (3 pieces of timber sandwiching 2 steel plates, all bolted together), and it is not in place in this photo.



Here are the roof timbers packing in to that steel element:



Here is the existing house roof, opened up to reveal the big steel beam we installed last year, which more of the flat roof timbers will interface with:



Here is a photo of the roof timbers taken from the existing ridge line, showing the flitch beam I mentioned earlier at the top of the photo, and showing some of the roof timbers that go and interface with the existing roof going off to the left.



Here is the finished flat roof structure, with all the timbers in place, and the fillet pieces which give the roof a 1:50 drop (so it sheds water) running perpendicular to the timbers. You can also see some plastic sheet where it joins the house, which was my vain attempt to keep rain out of the kid’s bedroom.



Here’s another picture which shows why it was raining int he house a bit...



The next thing was the deck itself - no pictures of the buildup of the deck - but it is not just a flat bit of wood! There is a sheet of 18mm OSB, then a vapour barrier, 100mm of closed cell foam insulation and a top layer of plywood. All round the edges there are upstands for the roof surface to turn up on. Here is a picture:



Here’s the upstands round the chimney:



And here it is with the self adhesive rubber finish fitted (the first bit in this post that I didn’t do myself):



The flat roof isn’t all. Here’s what it looks like today. You can see the rafters for the sloping slate roof, 2 dormers, and a bit of infill between the extension and the pre-existing dormer (left). The infill has a small flat roof that will be done in lead, and will have a light pipe in it to light the stairs. This is a departure from the plans and I hope the planners don’t mind it, but the way the plan was drawn was effectively unbuildable... oops!



Here is a better picture of one of the dormers (they are both the same):



Here is a picture of the outer leaf of the underground section of the cavity wall that I built last Thursday:



And here is picture of the absence of a huge pile of stones, which is what Seiko and I were doing all weekend:



I can’t find a decent picture to show you what it was like, but suffice to say that the whole patio from those slabs leaning against the wall right to the wheelbarrow at the back, was stacked with large rocks, to the height of the wall that retains the lawn. Quite a lot of rocks, anyway.

Next stage is waiting for a roofer to do the slating, and get a bricky to build the external wall.