Sustainable construction Bristol - Re-roofing a Victorian house - Week 5

paulalexanderwoodwork
3 days ago
2 min read

The big event this week was lifting the steels in to place to make the skeleton of the new floor structure. We took delivery of them last week and had them craned into the top floor through the scaffolding. The ends to go into the external walls were treated with a primer and two coats of "blackjack" bituminous paint.

We hired a genie lift which always makes life easy when lifting steels. The hardest bit is getting the genie lift up the stairs!

Things were pretty busy on site so I didn't get around to taking any photo's until the end of the week by which time the steels were in and the guys had started putting the webbing in the steels.

Some of my week was spent starting to make a 3D model of the space so we could look at head heights in the corridors and room spaces... A lot of details to work out here as the head height was already quite tight and the roof line is coming down by 145mm perpendicular to the pitch. More on that later.

Floor steels in! Felix making some adjustments to the new wall plate before final fit.

George "webbing" the steels so we can fit all the hangers on the timber to carry the floor joists throughout the building. The web of the steel is the central part between the flanges.

The soffit joists will be at the same height as the original joists as they have to come over the front masonary walls to form the soffit and fascia as the same height as the original. On the other side of the steel (going into the building) we will drop the floor joists to the bottom of the steel to gain 3 inches of head height in the loft space.

Showing the treatment at the end of the steels. It was decided that on top of the 1 coat of primer and 2 coats of blackjack bituminous paint that we would also wrap the ends in a layer of DPM and tape it closed. This big end of terrace wall had some damp ingress in it when we first removed the render so it's good to go the extra mile on this end of the steels.

A nice picture showing the steels trimming the chimney. Usually of course we could do this in timber but the steel you can see with timber in the web is actually going to carry the steel post which will be supporting the main ridge steel.

Some close ups of the new 3" x 4" wall plate. The masonary will be built back up around the wall plate next week. The wall plate will carry the new 6 x 2 joists coming from the steel and forming the deep soffit. The joists are to be cantilever using the new rafters to individually support each one so the soffit doesn't sag as it had before.

We'll still have to lift the two ends of the new wall plate to bed it on for final fit.