Sustainable Roofing Retrofit Bristol - Traditional Victorian House - Week 4

A quieter week this week, mostly just me and Felix on site. It mostly consisted of putting in the pad stones, some repairs to the neighbours roof and taking delivery of the steels for the floor.

Also Phil started this week and got on to rebuilding some of the cracked/unstable walls we had taken down and cleaned up.

Nice view eyeing through one pad to the other. We spent a good amount of time levelling all the pads very accurately throughout the site using a laser datum line we'd setup. We've dropped the floors slightly in this build (except for the front soffit area) so we had to work out where the steels were sitting.

It's always a compromise between head height in the upstairs bedrooms and head height in the loft space. The windows only allow you to drop so far down and luckily here the upstairs bedrooms had nice high ceilings so losing a few inches isn't noticeable.

Phil started rebuilding the parapet wall on the extension and made some good progress.

Stack of bricks for re-use, cleaned and kept wet.

One of the other walls that needed rebuilding. This end of the extension had sagged and the foundations are being underpinned while we're doing the roof. This wall had cracked badly as a result of the poor foundations and also had been pushed out by the old roof.

This house has quite deep soffits which are also shared across the party wall. As a result of this we had to remove all the old lathe and plaster across the whole soffit to allow us to do the work on our side while we were removing our old ceiling joists.

The new design specifies a cantilevered rafter/joist detail to prevent what commonly happens with these deeper soffits, sagging.

On top of this the old wall plate which spans across the two bays had rotted along with the gallows bracket coming out of the wall. We took it upon ourselves to do a little digging in the neighbours roof and made some complimentary repairs as well as giving their rafters some treatment with Sika 5-star woodworm/dry/wet rot treatment.

New wall plate added, spanning on to their bay and picking up their ceiling joists. I also doubled up their rafters and added some much needed triangulation!

Last day of the week was taking delivery of the steels for the floor. We had a crane come and post them up through the scaffolding straight through the sash window. One of them was far too big to carry up the stairs!

We treated the ends that were going into the walls with 2 coats of blackjack bitumous paint as per the engineers spec.