We hired a digger and dumper from Ellon Timber, to sieve and remove spoil from out courtyard. We borrowed the dumper at intervals to run loads of our hardcore up our driveway, patching up potholes. Ric sieved four loads for us, for shallow repairs and we used un-sieved for the deeper potholes. They all got compacted down for several days before we had a day of rain. I was a bit surprised that it had all locked down well and even survived an Ellon Timber truck delivering timber and rooflights to us. Some of the repairs were rough, but definitely better than bouncing around through the potholes. We need at least another 8 loads to finish tidying it up. It is a temporary fix until we can afford to get George to use his big digger to break up the current surface, add in more hardcore, then roller it down for a permanent fix.
Monthly Archives: May 2019
Tanking and studwork in the north wing
Ric has rendered some of the north wing and, as we were still waiting for rooflights to turn up, we followed him, tanking sections of wall and then building studwork over that. It is non-structural, so we had one baseplate, ran studs up to our rafters and nailed them down. We put uprights either side of openings, a lintel across the top and short studs from the lintel up to the rafters. We ran out of wood about a third of the way along the length, so ordered another 100 lengths of 145×47 timber.
Stonework on the garage gable wall
Garage door quoins
We built up stonework for the north-west gable wall, to the left of the new garage wall, alongside rebuilding the front-door area, as they are adjacent. Once this was at lintel height, we spent a couple of half-days building up the quoin stones to the right of the garage door. This was really close to the corner of the building, so the stones were generally rather skinny. I had to sculpt the bottom few stones to shape and used steel strapping to tie the tops into the existing stonework, to add strength. I could then add larger quoins to get up to lintel height, again strapping them to the existing stones. So we created a decent & solid edge up the wall from a very un-promising start.
Garage door granite lintel
Which mattered, because the lintel was 150mm deep, 300mm high and 2.7m long, so was a big beast. We reckoned it weighed around 400kg. I got our chain hoist slung from timbers propped over the top of the concrete blockwork and strapped them to a scaffolding bay behind the wall. We lifted the lintel it with an effort, got it above the height of the padstones, lowered one end onto a padstone and were able to lower the other end into place without too much damage. We built the rest of that course of stonework, fortunately it tied in exactly with the existing quoin on the right had edge of the gable wall.
Garage door structural lintel
The next day we made up a bucket of quite dry lime mortar and put a bed at each end of the granite lintel. We hoisted a Catnic steel joist up and rested it on the mortar pads, leaving a minimum 10mm gap between the granite and the steel. It was ridiculously light compared to the granite. The following day we were able to start building a 200mm course of granite facing over the front 100mm-deep shelf of the Catnic, then extend it to a full-depth course either end. Again it tied in very well to an existing quoin. It very effectively disguised the Catnic, there will be a wider line to be pointed at the top of the granite and that is all. After filling the lower half of the gap behind the Catnic with squirty foam, we topped it up with lime mortar and waste material. We left the wall at that point to go off before we carry on building above the Catnic. We will point in the gap when the wall above is complete and the Catnic had deflected as much as it is going to.
Clearing the courtyard
We hired a digger & dumper, to clear the piles of spoil in the courtyard and to get it levelled up. This did not go wonderfully to plan as we have had regular soakings over the last couple of weeks, which has really delayed us and added to the cost of the exercise. Ric repaired the giant sieve he made a couple of years ago, but has had to be quite brutal about pushing material through, so it has had maintenance every couple of days. About four-fifths of the material has been spread amongst our trees, he has raised some of the low points in the courtyard, but it is still all a bit of a quagmire.
We worked on the door steps into the courtyard, facing the concrete blocks under the granite sills with granite before we can get the doorsteps concreted into place.
Finishing the new window
We had got the inside of the new window opened out with concrete blockwork up the sides and concrete lintels over the top. We moved on to the outside.
Removing render from the gable wall
We drilled through from the inside to create a marker point and I was concerned about having to drill through some 50mm of hard cement mortar. I investigated by using the rotary hammer with a chisel tip to blast through from the outside. It turned out I had drilled through between two stones and that the render was more normally less than 20-30mm. More importantly, I discovered that the hammer did a massively better job of clearing render than the little SDS drill we had been using, with relatively little damage to the stone underneath. Several hours of work saw about half the gable wall cleared, a big boost.
Laying quoin stones
We broke out columns of stone each side of the window, back to whole stones. We scratched around our granite piles and came up with enough fairly rough stones that we could trim down. Which we did and after a couple of days with some of them propped in place, we could move on.
Outer lintels
We were fortunate that a course of stones coincided exactly with where the tops of our lintels needed to go. We were able to pull out the stones just below the courseand the ones above did not budge at all, very stable. We used the chain hoist hooked to a timber poking out of the upstairs window and pushed a third concrete lintel into place, then packed above it with mortar. The granite lintel followed, with some minor trimming. It was a bit of a struggle, but we just had space to get concrete into the space behind. Then it was a case of tidying it all up. I ran DPC over the concrete lintel then down and under the granite one.
Sill
We pulled out the remaining stone within the window opening, then sorted out the sill area with lime mortar, with a sloping section on the outside half of the opening and a raised flat section at the back. I left it to go off for several days. I shaped up a sill as we had done for the other windows – trimming along a lintel at an angle to form the outside vertical face, bush hammering it then cutting at 90 degrees on the underside and scoring a drip groove into it. Assembling the sill was straightforward, we tanked it and joined it back into the wall tanking on the inside, then placed foam strips down the slope at intervals, then placed the sill on that and tied it back with straps to the back of the opening. And that was it. It took a long time, but was done as a background job.
Powder coating – Oven
The first use of the metal folder was to make a powder-coating oven, using three sheets of 0.7mm aluminium. Ric folded a sheet to form the long sides and bottom, with false bottom below that. This housed a 2.5kw cooker element and a fan that drew air down from the middle of the oven, through the heating element and along the false bottom. He ducted the heated air into the oven at each end and folded a lid to go completely along the top. He used a digital controller and thermocouple to control the heating element. The electrics worked first time and we got the thing up to 50c for a sustained period. Ric wrapped it all with 100mm loft insulation wired on to the outside and, at the second firing, just got up to a sustainable 200c. It leaked a lot of heat out around the lid, so we bought a set of clamps to close up gaps. We await our electrostatic spray gun so that we can try it out for real. We have bought 25kg of primer and 25kg of our chosen RAL 6004 powder.
Building up the front door
The front door area had concrete blockwork on the left side tied onto existing rubble wall. The right hand side had been completely demolished, so was just concrete blockwork up until it met the north-west gable wall, which had also been demolished but had the concrete blockwork up to the height of the upstairs window sill. The gable wall is set 20cm forwards of the front door wall.
Stonework
We worked courses along both sections of wall, one per day. We used our best red Peterhead granite quoin stones rescued from the former (now demolished) farm house on the next-door plot. We kept the stones symmetrical either side of the front door, but generally used bigger stones on the gable wall, so it got higher more quickly that the front door. We put five courses up and had reached lintel height for the garage door, but added another course to the front door to get it to the same height.
Front door lintels
The front door lintels were the same as our other windows, but longer – a third concrete structural lintel in front of the two over the concrete blocks, then the decorative granite lintel. We filled the gap with concrete. So we are now able to build the concrete block raised wallhead above the front door and put the remaining roof trusses on.
Powder coating – Aluminium folder
We need a folder that will take full-length sheets of aluminium up to .7mm thick. Buying one would cost thousands, so Ric decided to make his own. We got him two lengths of I-beam (Universal Beam) in two different sizes, a length of angle iron and steel tubes for legs. He used M20 bolts drilled at each end to join the UB together, with fillet of wood. The top, lighter beam lifts up to allow a sheet of metal to slide between and bolts down to hold it in place. A length of angle iron runs along one side of the lower beam and is hinged to it at either end. The angle iron can be lifted with a handle and bends the metal sheet to up to 90 degrees, with a nice reasonable sharp corner. He even put trampoline springs at either end to make it easier to lift the upper beam when feeding the sheet through.
Rooflights ordered and delayed
We ordered rooflights for our east and north wings early in May. These comprised 14 small ones (55x98cm) and the larger escape window (90×160). I phoned Ellon Timber after the expected 5 days to ask after them. They phoned Fakro, who gave them the bad news: We had ordered triple glazing, those units had to come from Poland and would be delayed by at least two weeks. There was nothing we could do, we decided to work on building the front door and garage gable walls until the rooflights turned up.
And It seems that triple-glazing is still a bit of a luxury or oddity. We decided on it because we wanted the bit extra insulation – a window U value of 0.97 against the standard 1.3 – and the improved acoustics.
East wing stud walling
Having tanked the walls of the east wing, we got on with the studwork that will hold our insulation. That under the trusses is to be structural (to the architect’s specification), to transfer some of the load from the attic trusses down to the thickened floor slab. The rest – gable walls and the side walls in the gallery area – is to be non-structural. It will use 147mmx45mm timber.
East wall
We laid three pieces of timber along the foot of the entire length of the east wall, with the last one cut to fit. We ran a builders line and aligned it so the boards were straight and as close as possible to the wall. We drilled through the boards and into the slab, fitted wall plugs in the concrete, injected silicone into the drill holes then screwed the boards down with 80mm stainless steel screws. That was the floor plate. We used a plumb line to mark the line of the ceiling plate on the underside of the joists of the attic trusses, directly above the floor plate. We screwed the timber to the trusses.
We had enough floor space to lay our timber out and to build the studwork as three units. The first, with top & bottom plates, double stud at the north end and single studs at 600mm centres, ran from the north end to the left-hand end of the first window. We were able to hammer it into place between the plates, nail it in, then cut and fit the noggins/dwangs. We dunked all cut ends of timber in a bucket with wood preserver in, left them for five minutes then stood them on end to dry out a bit.
The two other blocks of studwork ran between the first two windows and the second and third windows respectively. We filled in above the windows with wooden lintels bearing on a separate stud (jack stud). Below the windows we cut three short studs and a top rail.
West wall
We already had structural studwork in the gap where the north and east wings join, so we had a short length to finish under the trusses. We did this in two blocks, a short one between the old studwork and the external door to the courtyard, then a longer one across the door and window and up to the end of the trusses.
Downstairs north wall
This was non-structural, so had single floor and ceiling plates and single noggins. We did it as one block, bar two studs that we put in afterwards. We nailed the ceiling plate to the underside of the end-most truss. I cut the studs a bit on the long side and had to plane the ceiling plate to get it all to fit.
South wall and gallery area
The southern end of the east wing will have a gallery overlooking the big window, so will be a void from floor to jack rafters. It is all non-structural, but varies between 3.5m up to over 5m at the ridge. The side walls were straightforward, with studs up to the ceiling plate at the base of the rafters, then stubs from the top of the plate, nailed to the rafters. We did the south wall in two stages. Firstly we laid timbers across the entire width just above the window, supported on an upright on the left hand side and on a noggin on the right hand side (the window butts right up to studwork). We filled in with studs to the left of the window and fitted single noggins. We fitted ceiling plates to the undersides of the end-most rafters, resting at the lower end on uprights fixed to the rest of the studwork, then cut studs to size across the space. This was fiddly because it was a lot of ladder-climbing and was awkward, with poor access for using the nail gun and getting accurate verticals.
East Byreleask Steading 