Sustainable Roofing Retrofit Bristol - Traditional Victorian House. Week 2

Okay the week by week aspiration was unsurprisingly not kept up with! In my defence it was the weeks leading up to Christmas and as every self-employed person will tell you, these are manic weeks!

I did however, keep taking photo's throughout the process and regularly saved them to the computer in sequential order and have only slipped behind by a couple of weeks.

Week 2 was a really great week. We got the old batten and bitumous felt off the roof and exposed the entire frame. This post is mostly going to be photo's of the whole frame. We needed to accurately document everything for the rebuild before taking all the framing down. Ridge heights, pitches, hip striking points etc were all accurately documented.

A lot to take in there!

It's as much for our own records as for sharing and interest.

The most exciting thing we did that week was cut a block to give us a point on the ridge where the ridge would have been before it had dropped. This gave us the theoretical point of intersection of the hips and king/end commons. We could then string a line from this point to the corners to confirm the hip pitch and the main roof pitch as well as see just how much the hips had deflected. I've never before seen hips at this length (or any length) made up of 2 pieces of 3" x 2" timber nailed together on edge.

Once we'd documented all we needed to, the process of careful demolitions started. Many of the nail fixings holding in the rafters had rusted badly or the rafter ends had split making it a very fragile structure to dismantle.

We had decked out the inside ceiling joists with boards and propped them from below. We'd also propped the hips, ridge and what remained of the purlins.

Seeing just the ridge and hips left in position. You don't need a string line to see the deflection in those hips!

Then it was just removing the hips and ridge followed by the floor joists.