200 Plus Posts, and Other Stuff !

I have only just realised that my 200th post to this blog was passed sometime last week. I think that deserves a round of applause.

*clap*clap*clap*

Why thankyou - you are tooooo kind.

Seriously, the rain has come down this week thus preventing the roof from being quite finished. A fair proportion of the water seems to have been diverted by various tarpaulins onto the front door which has now swollen to a size slightly larger than the opening into which it is supposed to fit. Never mind, we can always go in and out the back way !

Attention has therefore been diverted to the laying of the floorboards. The bedroom is done from the back window up to the steel beam at the halfway point. The treatment around the steel beam has been a source of a little interest. You may remember (probably not - it was too long ago) that the joists rest on the bottom "rung" of the steel I-beam and are sized such that their top surface is a few millimeters proud of the steel. According to the structural engineer, this is to accommodate shrinkage of the joists which would otherwise force up the floorboards along the length of the steel.

I was surprised therefore, to find that one of the builders was today effectively filling this gap with a sheet of ply. His intention is that this gives a flat surface onto which the floorboards can be laid. I mentioned to him, what the structural engineer had said to me, and how I thought that the ply was going to be used instead of the floorboards, to span the gap. He made some derogatory comments about Building Professionals and expressed the opinion that any shrinkage will have already happened in the 6 months or so that this part of the build has been complete and that "this is how we always do it". I was actually reasonably happy with this. The quality of the building work so far has been top notch and I was happy to take his word that it would be OK. However, when I looked again at the end of the day, I noticed that the ply had been removed from the beam top.

Hopefully these two cross-sections help to explain the two different approaches I have talked about. The brown bits are the joists, either side of the I beam, yellow is ply, grey the floorboards :

I will let you know next week how this develops !

The other good news is that the kit of parts for the remaining mullions was delivered today. Better late than never !

Finally, I asked the builder about laying the remaining insulation and screed layers to the basement floor. We have lots of our "stuff" coming out of storage in a couple of weeks time, and ideally this is where it will go, but the screed has to be done first. He said that if it is done by Wednesday week, it will be dry enough by the following weekend. This is therefore his target date !