Timber studs being re-installed

A big step forward today - kitchen corner windows in and wall studs going up - it looks and feels so much stronger than it did.

Kitchen windows

View towards new bedroom and kitchen

new bedroom

IdealCombi Windows

Today mostly been putting a window in....... on the corner of bedroom, but of course there are problems as the upper part of the building is not built straight to the corners of the lower part.  Problem solving over lunch by John and his team.

the rebuilt wall to the sitting room

Brickwork and metal work

This afternoon, brickwork and corners.... the blue tinge is because we are expecting rain maybe and the new brickwork will be protected.

Stone chips round the building - a hard working day

Saturday was a clean up day - the skip was loaded and stone chips placed around the perimeter of the house and the sheds by the back door were moved to make room for the windows to be easily manoeuvred around the building.  

Why are sheds sited in the sunniest parts of gardens? 

Now have a very open space which will be even better once the garden tool shed is moved round to the other side of the house where we will have the raised beds.

before

before moving on Saturday

after moving

just the little shed to go eventually to other side of house, when the area is clear and ready for the raised beds and planting.

Foundations rebuilt

Yesterday the brickwork and foundations were restored, ready for re-construction of timber walls.........

See more later!

BRICKWORK

Today, mostly there is brick work, these pics taken at lunch time today Wednesday 22nd May

Expanding foam and silicone seal - I have mostly.......

Today I have been removing expanding foam and silicone seal from around the doors and windows from the front of the house.

windows sunbathing

Todays structural discoveries include:

The main entrance upright, which holds beams right the way across the new kitchen front is sitting over a void over the damp proof membrane (yes it is there) with nothing more than about 5mm concrete, either side, and has been shored up with pieces of second hand, used timber onto the floor.  But it does have the DPM beneath it! Phew.

The ties that hold the building down to the ground and the roof of the building down onto the rest of the structure:

On the outside of one of the two long walls there are three ties but one of them was not fastened onto the timber struts, and coming up from the brickwork only two ties, which were held into the brick wall with a wooden block.  On the kitchen wall, there is only one, and I am not sure that there are any coming down.  

There are no ties between the blockwork and the brickwork.

All this stuff is cunningly hidden.  So who knows what has been going on.

Remedial work will be carried out on these - i.e. take down the brick wall three courses and insert appropriate number of ties to hold the building down, and rebuild the wall, etc.

The kitchen door threshold, which seemed the most stable of all the threshold was mounted on a piece of wood from a pallet!

Hopefully there are no more discoveries to be made.

Excavating in the new part of the house - is there a DPM

The big question of today is, where is the DPM - is there one - it has been seen in photographs, but has now gone missing.

After cutting back the floor by four inches the DPM is discovered.  Fortunately it is there, and the builder is going to seal over and under it with DPC to make sure the floor stays dry.

This has to be done wherever there are doors and windows on the new part of the house, for some mysterious reason MTS have cut off the DPM in these places, and pretended to have it showing after the architect had been round and asked where the DPC was.  Not only bad building but lies as well.

Scroll down to the next exciting event

The master bedroom corner with the windows removed.....

the kitchen window area waiting to be excavated

The roof was held on by two straps with two/three nails - the third strap was not secured at all....... strong wind, no roof!

the strap in the middle had no nails in it on the wall

Wednesday 15th May 2013 - good news bad news day

Good news - the roof is o.k. and will get its certificate

Bad news - where is the DPM under the windows - oooh its been chopped off and there is no DPC either

roof pic 1

Window out and now on the lawn

where's the DPM or DPC

one of bedroom windows now in garden