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.