A flying visit, Ric settles in

I flew up to Aberdeen in mid-March, to get Ric set up for his long stint. He will not have a vehicle. I spent a long weekend setting him up to survive until we arrived mid-April. I got two 19kg bottles of propane, to keep the caravan warm, and two 20l jerry cans to stockpile diesel. Ric fitted the new water heater in the caravan.

He was looking around for a folding bike. We found someone in Ellon who had one he could try, we went round to look. Ric was quite taken with the idea and looked on Ebay.

I mis-booked my flight home and had to wait an extra day, I put it to good use. We got our parcel drop-box fixed to the wall and contacted the post office to let them know – they got our regular postie to check it out, they were happy. I fixed a couple of long lengths of windbreak netting back to the fence. They were undone along the bottom and seemed to have unravelled rather than worn through.

We got plenty of supplies in for Ric and I left him to it.

The drop box is big enough for several small parcels.

Our new water heater, installed & ready!

Floor levels, room heights & roof trusses: I wanted to get floor levels marked accurately and, from that, solve the mystery of how much ceiling space we would have. I bought two cans of spray paint – orange & purple. We used the level to establish floor levels at one point near the main bedroom. We knew we intended the blockwork on the gable-end foundation to be at around finished floor level, it was really a case of deciding the exact height. We sprayed lines at slab level (orange) and final floor level (purple, 15cm above slab). We used the level to find the same height at every opening and sprayed our orange & purple marks. Most of the sections of blockwork correctly have the tops at finished floor level, the blockwork will have a damp proof course that drops down to meet with the damp proof membrane under the floor slab. It will also overlap with the tanking we need to put over the edges of the floor slab and up the inside of the wall.

It was easy to measure the height to the old joists in the west section of the steading. This is the same height we need to have the new joists because there is one window which will be close to the downstairs ceiling.This gives us a comfortable 2.2m room height. From there I measured to the wall heads and added 40cm for the blockwork that will raise the trusses. With a 42 degree roof slope and knowing the widths of the east and west sections of the steading, we calculated total height. The upstairs should be able to have a 2.2m ceiling over a large chunk of the width, with the lie-in (coombing) starting about 1.2m above floor level. The old joists were 200mm deep, so this pretty much decided me on roof trusses and floor joists. We will go with the current plans for raised-tie trusses and separate 200mm easijoists. The alternative, attic trusses, cannot have less than 300mm joists, losing us 100mm of head space.

The caravan is getting encroached on by piles of spoil.

Thickening our floor slab: We spent some time pondering on the need to deepen our floor slab at the edges to 300mm at the edges of the building, to support structural timberwork. We thought this would mean digging well under the foundations and it worried us. We decided that the deepening was only needed where the timberwork was carrying load i.e. floor joists in the west and east sections of the steading, along the long walls. We could take away from that all the pieces of internal and external foundations we had already laid, because we had already built them up to support the slab directly. We can take away the gallery area in the east section. So we are left with no more than 20m deepening in total.

Even better, the architect, when quizzed, was happy that we create the deepening by not running hardcore to the wall edge. So no dodgy digging under foundation depth at all.

More flooding on our future driveway: We noted that the area round our drop-off from our track was flooded and that the remaining soft ground was clearly not going to allow trucks on and off, despite the 6 tonnes of 40mm gravel we had laid last year. We were a bit puzzled why things were getting worse, but planned to dig out all the soft ground, build up a much bigger solid base and run a French drain across the soft area from our surface water drain.

We ordered 20 tonnes of MOT Type 3 sub base and 10 tonnes of 10mm pea gravel. We arranged for the mini digger and mini dumper to be dropped off.

Once the digger arrived, Ric dug out the soft ground. He cleared right up to the steading wall, where our garage door will be. The seeping of water into the area turned into a definite spring of water. More on this shortly…

Standing water on the concrete hardstanding.

Which got worse.

Ric cleared away teh softw ground to incestigate.

And took the opportunity to clear right back to teh steading gable-end.

What next, including roof trusses…

Roof trusses

Refreshed from our festive break, I got back in touch with Stevenson & Kelly. I arranged to send my plans over to get an estimate. The architect has specified separate trusses and joists. The trusses are to be raised-tie i.e. a standard truss but with an extra timber on either side to extend them far enough to rest on the raised wallhead, but also provides the depth to insulate the roof.

They got back quite quickly, asking why we were not using attic trusses, they would be cheaper than what was planned. I asked the architect.  He replied that he had used both designs and had problems with attic trusses where the building was at all wonky (as ours is). He thought the installation would be more tricky – we would probably want to buy in help and a bigger crane and may have trouble accommodating variations in our walls.

S&K came back to say they did not think they could design trusses as specified. I left the architect to talk with them, but asked them for a quote for attic trusses with easijoists. It came back at under £10k, which I was pleasantly surprised about.

I showed the architect the proposed design. He pointed out that, as designed, there was not enough room to insulate the trusses. If they were enlarged enough to allow us to use PIR foam insulation, the trusses would cost more, plus PIR insulation costs more than the mineral wool panels in the building warrant. Enlarging the trusses again to use the mineral wool insulation panels would increase the cost of the trusses again. Or we could add timber inside the trusses to create the additional depth for insulation, but this would lower and narrow the ceiling. We also noted that attic trusses could not have the joists shallower than 300mm, whilst separate easijoists could be 200mm deep.

On my last call to S&K, they did own up that they could design trusses as designed, but they would be more expensive than attic trusses.

I concluded that we would accurately measure heights on our next visit and see whether that 10cm difference would really matter.

Next block of work

Ric suggested he could do a long stint – 8-9 weeks in the period March-May. He suggested a) more on surface water drains, b) tidying up spoil, c) preparing for a floor slab and d) laying the floor slab. I would fly up for the first couple of days to get him settled in in March. We would go up for two weeks over Easter. We booked him in.

A few other things

We ordered a new water heater for the caravan – a Morco 61-B. We also decided to get a parcel drop-box put up and get the address activated so that we could get deliveries direct to the steading – I will need to arrange for the post office to check out that deliveries are practical and safe.