Final battening

We ran out of the stainless steel screws for fixing the battening and we ran out of staples for securing the insect mesh to the battening but Jeremy managed to finish adding the last of the battening to the South wall whilst Andy and I started chopping the cladding to length. Hopefully it will suddenly appear on at least a couple of walls tomorrow.



Apologies for the quality of the images - contrast was a bit out on the camera


Kingspan have called to say that a truck is leaving Yorkshire at 4am tomorrow morning so that it will arrive mid-morning. Unfortunately that truck doesn't have a Moffet on the back (the mobile forklift that you see on the backs of some big lorries) so another lorry is going to meet it here. That means that I have to guide TWO 40ft articulated lorries down our narrow lane and it will really block the road for a while. Odd that it takes them a minimum of 5 weeks to make these panels when you order them but that miraculously they can make them over night when they need to.

Battening, taping, meshing

75mm stainless steel mesh is stapled to the top and bottom of
the battening to keep insects from getting behind the cladding

Two days of relentless screwing in of battens for the cladding, taking up insect mesh and painting the Steico Universal sarking board with what appears to be PVC glue before applying a blue Profil tape have rather taken it out of us. First, we ran out of the Profil tape (which is supposed to water tighten the boards plus prevent air gaps - always theoretically good for thermal performance even if we have huge gaps around the doors) which required a repeat order from our least favourite on-line builders merchants then we ran out of stainless staples which Andy, Jeremy and I have been using to fasten the stainless steel insect mesh to the top and the bottom of the battening to keep the critters out and then today, no more torx head 5 x 80 stainless screws. All are now ordered and we should have them tomorrow.

The western face of the building, full battened out.
The big board on the front is to take the door handing

The taping is nearly done - all that remains is the 14m run across the "ridge" which will annoyingly leave us with 20m of a 30m roll left. The battening is nearly done - we just have the secondary battening on the south facing wall and the little porch wall that sticks out on the south wall that isn't really part of the fabric of the building. Then we shall be adding the Siberian Larch cladding as fast as we can go.





We ordered 65 sheets of 75mm Ecotherm UFH insulation to go onto the floor. If it arrives on Friday then we'll spend the week-end fitting it. Over £1,300 on underfloor insulation! Still, Covers did us a good price so thanks Dan and Gary.

Met the concrete man that we've been talking to about the power float finish. Seems very confident and sensible. Lets hope his price is too.

The rest of the Siberian Larch arrived from WL West & Sons. The pile of cladding is now pretty big.

Finally, the news that we've been waiting for - are the 6 missing roof panels going to appear tomorrow? Well at 4:30pm we were told that they were on the truck and would be with us between 9 and 9:30am tomorrow so I got Peter organising his "crane" and Jason and Dan geared up to come over in the afternoon. Then at 5:20pm, Kingspan rang to say that they hadn't put them on the truck because of "quality issues". I nearly fell off the chair... So no roof panels tomorrow. Let's hope that they arrive on Friday!

This morning I've got to make a difficult call

This morning I have to make a difficult call. I have to tell our roofing contractor that our supplier of roofing might not be fulfilling the promises that they made to us last week.

Dan, walking on the top of the frame

It all started to go wrong on Thursday morning. Jason and Dan finally manage to get to site (they have other projects that have delayed them and they're blaming the rain - seems rather plausible) and they started un-wrapping the roofing panels that Kingspan managed to deliver in two chunks in week 1. I got a call from Jason: "I'm not happy with them rooflights. They're cr*p!". I took a good look and I had to agree. The rooflights are supposed to be "factory fitted" and thus of high quality. They weren't in straight; they had roofing tape all over them that had been trimmed with a knife cutting into the painted finish of the roof panels; there was horrible gunk on them; the finish was poor. I called the head of customer services at Kingspan and sounded off (politely, mind you - this is my holiday and I only get rude when at work). She promised to despatch someone to come and take a look. Whilst we waited for him to arrive from Sittingbourne (somewhere near where Kent and the River Thames meet the North Sea) I also called the technical pre-sales guy at Kingspan who had helped earlier and, on my description, he admitted that the rooflights sounded appalling and that we were right to be upset. Shortly after, the local rep appeared (he must have driven fast) and after much deliberation we agreed to ditch the roof lights, and to put up the rest of the roof with some special cramps that Jason had been told weren't necessary. No sooner had Jason and Dan walked up some boards onto the roof (carrying panels 9m long and 1m wide on their heads up ladders to perch 4m off the ground) than we discovered dings in the underside of the panels and damage to the edges. More anguish later and now Kingspan promise to send round some magic touch-up guys who will somehow fill the dings and paint, patch up the poor joints and generally make it better than new... (well it is new and it's not good now so it had better be somewhat better than new).






Friday saw Jason and Dan return and Peter back in his beloved digger lifting the remaining panels onto the roof for Jason and Dan to bolt into place in next to no time before disappearing to "another job" (probably in some pub if they had any sense after the days that they had had).

So we have 10 out of 14 roofing panels on the eastern part of the building and 12 on the western. It's almost dry but not quite.





In the meantime, Andy and Jeremy cracked on and got all the sarking boards up (amazing stuff, the Steico Universal sarking boards - I'll put more about them in later). So we would be properly walled and dry if the roof had been on.

So why the call? Well, I thought I should email Kingspan on Friday morning confirming the points raised on Thursday. Their reply was less than 100% compliant and maybe the replacement panels promised for Thursday may only have been promised for sometime "after" Thursday but I'm sure we'll get over that. If we can get over the sudden extra dent in our budget (alternative rooflights being very much more expensive than the apparently good value "Upstand Rooflight" that turned out to be so shockingly poor) I'll let you know how we got on.

Studding Day 2

Well it was more studding. It's quite a task cutting up studwork and fixing it in place. All the verticals are cut to fit in the frame. The horizontals are essentially nogging pieces which keep the verticals apart. It gets entertaining when planning the internal sheeting joints (which are 1200 x 2400 as opposed to the more normal metric 8' x 4' at 1220 x 2440) and then even more complicated when it comes to guessing where future windows and doors might be.

Studd work to the north end of the building

Whilst the frame provides transvers stiffness (ie across the building)
the walls provide the longuitudinal. This is the main diagonal
studwork on the north east corner

Double rows of studd to seal off the gables

In addition we have been adding in two levels of 50mm x 150mm studwork on the top of the rafters at the gables so as to close the whole building in when the roof goes on top.

During all this work, Geoff popped by to use his smaller digger to clear away some of the crushed concrete around the main slab so as to make space for the french drains that will surround the building - its better to dig it out now when there is easy access before the cladding goes on. The cladding, with its battening and counter battening underneath, would extend some 150mm out over the french drains.

Studding Day 1

Well a long and busy day putting up studwork framing on the long east wall and the small pieces on the west wall. All this is done using some horrible normal softwood. Builder Centre (or Wolsey) supplied this at a good price and on schedule (OK, they were short on 60m of the 3m stock) and we just cut it up and stuck it in. Essentially we cut the verticals and then cut nogging pieces to go top and bottom such that the centres of the studs are 600mm apart (for the Fermacell wall cladding that is due to go on the inside). Note that the first pair of noggings have to be half the width of the stud narrower because the first sheet has to butt up to the outside of the stud fixed to the vertical posts. The only bit of complex studding was in the northern bays where we triangulated them to provide north-south stiffness whilst we wait for the internal cladding to be added. All is fixed in with 80mm screws with Torx heads which are so much better than philips or posidriv heads.

The roof arrives as we tidy up the frame

Finally Kingspan did as they said that they would do and a Polish driver turned up with a new load of roofing panels. Clearly incorrectly briefed, he didn't call us before he arrived (maybe he didn't want to try to speak too much English) so he tried to reach us under his own steam (usual satnav issues, ending up in the wrong place) before calling his base who called Peter. Although he couldn't easily communicate, this guy knew how to drive as he threaded his way through a much more crowded road without issue or drama and proceeded to offload with some considerable skill with his Moffett forklift; moving 10m panels can't be easy when you have to get them off the back of the lorry and into a 4m gate from a road that is only 4m wide. Fortunately the only people we blocked were are good neighbours and friends who were particularly chilled and complemented Peter on being "a good boy" (he's in his mid thirties but they've known him nearly all his life).

Why Kingspan? We spent a lot of time selecting our roofing method. We wanted something cheap (who am I kidding?), with good thermal values and that would go up very quickly. Originally we had wanted a zinc roof but the cost of that was out of the equation. Then we went for standing seam aluminium left in mill finish but that again was too expensive. The aluminium would be highly recyclable, the mill finish would reflect the sunlight and the standing seam would provide the sort of effect that we were after. Finally we decided on the not-quite bottom of the line, agricultural, Kingspan LP in a very light grey finish. Hopefully it will be up within three days, will keep heat in whilst reflecting summer heat out.

Appart from this, the task for the day was to peg the joints, bolt the rafters together and fix down the purlins on the lower roof. The gap between the rafters is almost exactly a hands width apart so threading the washers and nuts in was a bit of a hassle and I have two sores on the backs of my hands where the skin was warn away. Still everything closed up nicely and it is looking very trim. Andy and Jeremy were happy with progress and, because Jason the roofer has been stuck on another roofing project (too much rain last week) and so won't be with us until Tuesday or Wednesday, opted to go home for a week-end R&R rather than slave away all week-end.

Craning

It was supposed to be a 15 tonne crane but a 30 tonne whopper turned up. No problem, it has rear wheel steering and so managed to get into the site when so many trucks failed; did some damage to the lane on the way in mind you but we will get Peter to flatten it back out with his big digger.

And that arm is only half out! Joining the rafters The last piece goes on.

We started work at 8am lifting the 75 x 250 rafters and 75 x 200 purlins into place. It was quite a challenge and it meant many many trips up and down the scaffolding frames for Andy, Jeremy and myself but we had the majority of rafters up by lunch break and topped it off shortly after 4pm. If you look closely at the time-lapse you will see how the structure takes shape. The lower rafter continues through the central wall and joins the higher rafter about 1/4 of the way down its span. That not only triangulates the structure (meaning that it won't move in line with the rafters) but also effectively reduces the span of the higher rafter down from the rather large 8m. A couple of these joints caused some fitting issues but nothing that you can't fix with a little tug from a 30 tonne crane. It was a beautiful morning but watch for the rain - we got rather wet in the afternoon! Quite a party assembled to watch the action today with family members and friends dropping by so we all had a good lunch with some special carrot cake made by the girls. When the crane had neatly stacked itself away, we lead it out of the site to the north (rather than taking the sorter route to the south) and the drive managed to trim quite a few hedges on the way but otherwise escaped with no reversing and no hassle. A little tidying up after that and it was day over.

The morning's time lapse


The afternoon's time lapse

You'd think that people would want to sell to you in times of recession

I have a project. It's going to cost money so we have been saving like crazy for years. I'm now ready to spend it. I know what I want. You'd think it would be easy to buy but no, the world conspires to make purchasing simple things like screws and insulation nice and easy.

After yesterday's debacle on the delivery of our roof panels, today we tried to get to pay for the 140mm Steico insulation and the larch cladding whilst ordering several thousand stainless ring nails and torx head screws. Screws now on order from one of our local suppliers (Bryants, they're a good family run company); the other local supplier has gone bust - clearly not enough business to cope with their borrowings. Still no insulation and another delay on the cladding.

In the meantime, progress went really well on the framing. Sorry, the time-lapse filming when totally wrong on this, most important of days. The camera tipped over so all we get are images of the top of a caravan.

This evening we have all the vertical posts up and some of the lintels as well. Its really looking like a decent building.

Crane arrives tomorrow morning at 8am.

The central wall with the sills to the clerestory in place.
The East wall columns can be seen behind.

The top of the East wall columns.

Detail from the top of the middle wall.

Near the end of the day, with the West wall columns.

Don't believe what they say

There were two big events for the day: laying out the sole-plates and the arrival of the roofing panels.

Whilst the laying out when smoothly and calmly (OK, there were the odd break for massive down-pours from the grey clouds) and Andy, Jeremy and I were quite happy with progress at dusk, the roofing panels didn't go so well.



After much deliberation we ordered roofing panels through a small reseller of roofing materials who then ordered them from Kingspan. Kingspan were seriously painful to deal with and anyone considering their products really does have to think very carefully about if they want to go through the pain involved. Essentially they wanted to deliver it all on the back of a 40ft articulated lorry that has a Moffett forklift on the back. The first problem was clearing the lane of parked cars (mostly successful except for some idiot who parked their car just at the wrong place rather than in the station car park so as to save on the £3.80 car park fee so it would have saved them right if we'd gouged chunks out of their offside) and then guiding the truck down the lane. Our primary contractor Peter (seriously good fellow, there will be more about him later) and I met the truck as it turned off the main road and guided it inch by inch down the lane. We had to stop by the previously mentioned idiot's car so that the driver could off-load the Moffett to squeeze by but that resulted in an irate neighbour shouting at us for dumping the Moffett in his drive. From there on it was pretty easy but whilst we waited for 20 minutes for the driver's tacho to catch up before he could offload, Peter and I counted the panels. There should have been 34. There were 9. Where were the rest? Apparently Kingspan ran out of materials as they fabricated our panels. The 9 that we had were done 2 weeks ago because they had skylights in them and needed to be made early. Some seriously irate calls to Kingspan and finally, they're now promised for Friday so we have to do the whole clearing of the lane exercise again. Maybe this time there won't be any idiots...

Other progress: we've ordered 1.4Km of larch cladding and 1Km of softwood studding, 157 sq m of sarking board and other bits and pieces. The softwood and sarking board (actually Steiko Universal - lets hope it's good) arrive first thing Friday.

The timber arrives

Well today was perhaps a light day: we made some phone calls, I helped unload some timber and then cut a bit of hedge as the rain started.

OK, so the phone calls were quite extensive. We're trying to use good, decent materials that won't kill either ourselves or the environment. Unfortunately any "eco" product usually has the terms "mug" and "rip-off" closely attached to it. Try to purchase any wool or wood fibre insulation and you are directed to the "eco" type of builders merchants. They clearly think that all purchasers are mugs and that they can rip you off without blinking an eye. Fortunately, in our search for Steico Universal (for the sarking board, providing the initial layer of insulation on the outside of the timber structure and the moisture barrier) and the Steico Flex, the good guys (as in Builder Centre, Travis Perkins and Covers) are now getting in the act and are putting their normal discounts to play, effectively halving the cost of these materials. However, they didn't quite finish the job off. The Flex 140mm insulations comes in pallets of 54. 54 batts measures 2.2m high. Haulage companies won't lift anything over 2.0m to Steico UK, despite having the required 4 batts in their yard, can't deliver it to us and so we have to wait for our potential heros to sort out collection! More on that tomorrow but in the meantime, I hope that the various eco builder's merchants quickly come to realise that they have to be sensible with their pricing!

OK, so I lied a little when I said that I helped unload some timber. I didn't do much. Andy and Jeremy, our framers, turned up in their van and then shortly after a 12.5 ton hiab equipped truck appeared. They couldn't back it off the lane into our site (bad omens for the 40ft artic' coming tomorrow with the roof panels) so we blocked the road and swung the timbers off the truck into the site entrance and Peter got in his big digger and swung them into the site from there. Great team work! We didn't hear from the truck so I assume he got to Brighton - thanks Scott for the delivery! We now have a building's worth of structural timbers ready to start to assemble tomorrow...

I did cut the hedge to make it appear as though we've tried for the big truck tomorrow. Peter is a tad worried about blocking the road and also worried about the truck getting out of the lane having off-loaded. Its very narrow and twisty down here.

Jeremy and Andy headed off to our trusty local for a relaxer and I hope that they sleep well in the caravan in the rain.

The building begins

Over this past week-end we have been panicking about details on the cladding and getting the stub walls waterproofed because today the timber frame for a new 14m x 14m building arrives on the back of a flatbed lorry.

During the past month we have cleared a site, laid a floating slab complete with a significant mess steel strengthening, cast stub walls and now, after a week-end of going around and around with a rough hand brush and some Sika Prufe we are almost ready for the timber to arrive and the erection of the framework.

Why Sika Prufe? Well we need a DPM. If we used a plastic sheet DPM we'd end up with a ruck in the corners as it folds up the stub walls. Painting on a DPM basically removes any such rucking and the weakness and failure potential they it presents. Why Sika? Well it was half the price of the Ruberoid version (with apologies to the Aisher family for not choosing Marley...) and I've used Sika products for years and felt that it was a bit more reliable than some of the other products that I've never heard of. Besides, the people at the Builder Centre nearby were very helpful and got it delivered on time but a driver we've known for 15 years.

I'm aiming to do a load of time-lapse movies of construction but I didn't set enough images when putting on the first coat of the Prufe. Anyway, here is a sample.

So what is this building for and how have we go here so far. Well, I'll be adding lots more details as I can (it's a high pressure build so there may not be that much spare) but essentially we have a 5ha site of which 3.5ha is designated as agricultural. Fortunately there were two very dilapidated buildings because we need to build a studio and workshop for our business. The long and the short of it is that we got planning permission for a 190 sq m timber frame building complete with a 36 sq m studio (which has domestic user permission). Took a lot of effort to get it done but I'll provide some more details later.

In the meantime, here are the planning drawings which show what we are aiming at!