Cubist
Member
- Messages
- 2,275
- Location
- Shropshire/Herefordshire Border
Hi All,
Sorry but 2019 has been a very busy year with little time for reflection or to stand back and admire my own handiwork. Hence, my lack of contributions since March - must do better. The principal reason for this is that the First Lady decided to take a business contract in the US and has been ensconced in sunny California since February. Admitted absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that but this created some wonderful opportunities for yours truly to make some serious progress on a few of the elephant jobs around here as well as making a couple of lengthy visits to the sunshine state.
To bring you all up to date; during 2018 I started the rather mind numbing job of caulking the exterior of house. For those unfamiliar with exposed oak timber frames - the timber shrinks and gaps open up between the frame and the infill panels. Such gaps need to be cleaned out, on occasion widened and filled with appropriate products - definitely not the silicon filler, plumbers putty and lord knows what else I encountered among previous owner’s remediation efforts. This however was a job best left until the weather improved so before getting back to this I decided that the First Ladies absence from the premises would be my best opportunity to attack the other big elephant I had left until my appetite improved. The master bedroom floor.
I do not recall mentioning this project before in any of my posts but one of the more disconcerting features of period properties such as Fircroft is the tendency for floors above the ground level - and often those too - to be somewhat less than level. In this case, the maximum height variation was precisely 208 millimetres (or 8.19 inches for the diehards) and thoroughly inconsistent at any other two points across the floor – some less than 10mm. For nine years, this was a source of irritation and latterly becoming a worry as I have always been a little unbalanced and the condition is clearly getting worse as I approach my dotage! Consequently, the necessary wandering around in the dark (driven again by needs associated with advancing years, and my feet not meeting a floor where my head expects it to be has proved embarrassing and painful for me and disturbing for the First Lady! Also, of course, the fact that we have had to endure the ‘short-term’ solution of putting suitably sized wooden blocks under the corners of furniture to stop them falling over and me, quite literally, sliding or otherwise rolling out of bed unexpectedly.
Given the absence of my conscience and better judgment (aka the First Lady) I decided that in 2019 I would eat this elephant before anyone could restrain me.
The question ‘How to eat an elephant’ was used as the title for a book, ghost written I believe, for Lou Gerstner the then CEO of IBM. Now, comparing my bedroom floor project to getting IBM back into the black may seem inappropriate but the answer to that question is nevertheless relevant - Bite by bite.
So, first bite – work out what must be done and how to do it.
Now curiosity had got the better of me on previous occasions and I already knew that all the water and central heating pipes had been run underneath the bedroom flooring at the front of the house to utilise the space between the joists and to avoid cutting holes in a large beam in one of the bents, thus weakening it and perhaps making it unsafe. So, the right way to fix the floor level, jack up the supporting beams from below and insert new posts, was out of the question unless I removed and re-sited all the pipe-work as well.
Consequently, I decided that my best and least expensive approach would be to install firrings over the existing beams and joists to get the level I wanted together with noggins to provide suitable structural support and strength between the larger firrings. Also, it was plain to see that the joists ran East to West in roughly half of the bedroom floor and North to South in the other half. The divider between these areas being a summer beam which runs roughly Northwest to Southeast??? So, and insofar that the joist positioning did not lend itself to my achieving an economic or aesthetically pleasing floorboard layout - unless my carpentry skills miraculously improved, I needed to adjust my plan to accommodate a sub-floor.
Next bite – check my plans with a structural engineer and call in the CO.
The first part of this was rewarding insofar that my calculations were roughly accurate and the structural engineer confirmed that everything should be fine and the existing joists, beams and posts would happily accept the additional weight I needed to introduce. My meeting with the CO proved less than satisfactory however. This was perhaps because I hi-jacked him with a list of projects I had been planning for a while and had already made a start on ripping out the old bedroom floor. Now I know I should have waited until the bedroom had been inspected but…since the old floor consisted of chipboard flooring panels nailed and glued directly to the joists I could not see any way that he could object to my plan. However, he did manage to throw a curve ball back at me when it came to the stairs.
Access to the first floor in Fircroft is gained by a short stair to a half landing from which two further short flights of stairs provide access to the Master Bedroom to the east and guest bedrooms to the west. I have always considered the flight to the Master Bedroom as ugly and unsafe as these were produced by butchering a set of reclaimed pine stairs to produce an abomination that included a top step with a tread of 125mm and a rise of 100mm and held in place by a couple of nails. The CO was quite happy with my plan to replace this flight with a custom design oak stair from the half landing. However, when I pointed out that my plan included the replacement of the short flight from the ground floor to the half landing the short intakes of breath started.
Now that was, to some extent, understandable as these were, and are still, made of oak, a crude design as befits the house and clearly pre-dating the listing. The problem though, from my perspective was /is that these stairs, in particular the risers have been largely consumed by worm. As has the underlying frame that forms the half landing. Shortly after moving in, the First Lady, who is no lover of carpet, particularly wall to wall, insisted that we remove the stair and master bedroom carpeting. During that exercise though I found the problem with the stair risers and the frame when pieces of it came away with the carpet. This gave rise to my very first project in the house to make the stair and half landing safe by building and installing an inner frame and stringers to support everything above, at the sacrifice of some storage space. Seems I was undone by this as the CO then decided that they were obviously structurally safe enough to use until I could submit sufficient information and drawings to secure formal approval. Ah well, onward and upwards as they say.
Next big bite – the biggest.
Rip out the remaining chipboard flooring, make good where needed and final measurement cutting and fitting of the firrings.
The latter part much easier said than done as this included creating jigs I could use to guide circular saws and a router to profile the firrings to the shape of each joist or beam to ensure a good fit with few gaps of any significance, particularly those where a section of the firring may be less than 50mm deep. Lots of cussing here and some busted power tools and not a few worn-out blades and cutting heads.
Once done however the new sub-floor went down in a day and the new oak boards followed over the next two and, I’m happy to say, with no measurement accidents to boot. Very satisfying.
The penultimate bite.
This consisted of replacing the top surface boards of the half landing and preparing it to receive the new flight of stairs to the master bedroom and of course, making the stairs. Barring for testing my scribing and cutting skills to ensure proper fitment of the new boards to the half landing whilst ensuring the proper level for point at which the new stairs would land was reasonably straight forward. But I should perhaps have signed up for some yoga lessons beforehand – I’m sure they would have cost less than the osteopath!
Regarding the stairs; I was initially planning on cutting pockets to house the risers and treads but chickened out and went with right-angle brackets instead. Glad to say though that the final appearance from below is better suited to the house.
Last bite – restore the old bannister, newel post and make new spindles for same, fit all the new skirting (hide the gaps) clean the house timbers and re-paint.
Got annoyed with previous owners during this last step as while cleaning the house frame timbers I found they had added ‘Plastic Padding’, the car panel repair stuff, to their armoury of materials, including expanding foam, to fill small and large gaps around the room. All this of course had to come out and be replaced with appropriate materials. Behind one gob of this stuff though I was surprised to find the electricity supply cable for a wall light, so glad I had not tried to shove something sharp in that! I instantly understood why it had been covered over though. It came out at about chest height at the head of the new stairs??? Made the cable safe by separating it from the supply in the loft, once I found it, and covered the hole with a little brass Tudor rose. Much prettier – I think.
So, job done until I work up the nerve to tackle the ground floor stair.
Until then, or until the good weather comes around I’ll be re-pointing the random stone chimney breast and planning my next mammoth project.
For this coming year though I already have a few things on the ToDo List so when the sun next shines for more than a couple of hours each day, I’ll be back outside,
finishing the caulking – I did manage to do some of this during 2019 but then the rains came down,
installing an additional land-drain,
building a new front door – under the watchful eye of my CO,
restoring the old corrugated iron wood shed which has largely been eaten by worms and rust,
labouring for the thatcher who will be making some repairs and replacing the ridge,
etc, etc, etc,
Happy New Year folks.
Sorry but 2019 has been a very busy year with little time for reflection or to stand back and admire my own handiwork. Hence, my lack of contributions since March - must do better. The principal reason for this is that the First Lady decided to take a business contract in the US and has been ensconced in sunny California since February. Admitted absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that but this created some wonderful opportunities for yours truly to make some serious progress on a few of the elephant jobs around here as well as making a couple of lengthy visits to the sunshine state.
To bring you all up to date; during 2018 I started the rather mind numbing job of caulking the exterior of house. For those unfamiliar with exposed oak timber frames - the timber shrinks and gaps open up between the frame and the infill panels. Such gaps need to be cleaned out, on occasion widened and filled with appropriate products - definitely not the silicon filler, plumbers putty and lord knows what else I encountered among previous owner’s remediation efforts. This however was a job best left until the weather improved so before getting back to this I decided that the First Ladies absence from the premises would be my best opportunity to attack the other big elephant I had left until my appetite improved. The master bedroom floor.
I do not recall mentioning this project before in any of my posts but one of the more disconcerting features of period properties such as Fircroft is the tendency for floors above the ground level - and often those too - to be somewhat less than level. In this case, the maximum height variation was precisely 208 millimetres (or 8.19 inches for the diehards) and thoroughly inconsistent at any other two points across the floor – some less than 10mm. For nine years, this was a source of irritation and latterly becoming a worry as I have always been a little unbalanced and the condition is clearly getting worse as I approach my dotage! Consequently, the necessary wandering around in the dark (driven again by needs associated with advancing years, and my feet not meeting a floor where my head expects it to be has proved embarrassing and painful for me and disturbing for the First Lady! Also, of course, the fact that we have had to endure the ‘short-term’ solution of putting suitably sized wooden blocks under the corners of furniture to stop them falling over and me, quite literally, sliding or otherwise rolling out of bed unexpectedly.
Given the absence of my conscience and better judgment (aka the First Lady) I decided that in 2019 I would eat this elephant before anyone could restrain me.
The question ‘How to eat an elephant’ was used as the title for a book, ghost written I believe, for Lou Gerstner the then CEO of IBM. Now, comparing my bedroom floor project to getting IBM back into the black may seem inappropriate but the answer to that question is nevertheless relevant - Bite by bite.
So, first bite – work out what must be done and how to do it.
Now curiosity had got the better of me on previous occasions and I already knew that all the water and central heating pipes had been run underneath the bedroom flooring at the front of the house to utilise the space between the joists and to avoid cutting holes in a large beam in one of the bents, thus weakening it and perhaps making it unsafe. So, the right way to fix the floor level, jack up the supporting beams from below and insert new posts, was out of the question unless I removed and re-sited all the pipe-work as well.
Consequently, I decided that my best and least expensive approach would be to install firrings over the existing beams and joists to get the level I wanted together with noggins to provide suitable structural support and strength between the larger firrings. Also, it was plain to see that the joists ran East to West in roughly half of the bedroom floor and North to South in the other half. The divider between these areas being a summer beam which runs roughly Northwest to Southeast??? So, and insofar that the joist positioning did not lend itself to my achieving an economic or aesthetically pleasing floorboard layout - unless my carpentry skills miraculously improved, I needed to adjust my plan to accommodate a sub-floor.
Next bite – check my plans with a structural engineer and call in the CO.
The first part of this was rewarding insofar that my calculations were roughly accurate and the structural engineer confirmed that everything should be fine and the existing joists, beams and posts would happily accept the additional weight I needed to introduce. My meeting with the CO proved less than satisfactory however. This was perhaps because I hi-jacked him with a list of projects I had been planning for a while and had already made a start on ripping out the old bedroom floor. Now I know I should have waited until the bedroom had been inspected but…since the old floor consisted of chipboard flooring panels nailed and glued directly to the joists I could not see any way that he could object to my plan. However, he did manage to throw a curve ball back at me when it came to the stairs.
Access to the first floor in Fircroft is gained by a short stair to a half landing from which two further short flights of stairs provide access to the Master Bedroom to the east and guest bedrooms to the west. I have always considered the flight to the Master Bedroom as ugly and unsafe as these were produced by butchering a set of reclaimed pine stairs to produce an abomination that included a top step with a tread of 125mm and a rise of 100mm and held in place by a couple of nails. The CO was quite happy with my plan to replace this flight with a custom design oak stair from the half landing. However, when I pointed out that my plan included the replacement of the short flight from the ground floor to the half landing the short intakes of breath started.
Now that was, to some extent, understandable as these were, and are still, made of oak, a crude design as befits the house and clearly pre-dating the listing. The problem though, from my perspective was /is that these stairs, in particular the risers have been largely consumed by worm. As has the underlying frame that forms the half landing. Shortly after moving in, the First Lady, who is no lover of carpet, particularly wall to wall, insisted that we remove the stair and master bedroom carpeting. During that exercise though I found the problem with the stair risers and the frame when pieces of it came away with the carpet. This gave rise to my very first project in the house to make the stair and half landing safe by building and installing an inner frame and stringers to support everything above, at the sacrifice of some storage space. Seems I was undone by this as the CO then decided that they were obviously structurally safe enough to use until I could submit sufficient information and drawings to secure formal approval. Ah well, onward and upwards as they say.
Next big bite – the biggest.
Rip out the remaining chipboard flooring, make good where needed and final measurement cutting and fitting of the firrings.
The latter part much easier said than done as this included creating jigs I could use to guide circular saws and a router to profile the firrings to the shape of each joist or beam to ensure a good fit with few gaps of any significance, particularly those where a section of the firring may be less than 50mm deep. Lots of cussing here and some busted power tools and not a few worn-out blades and cutting heads.
Once done however the new sub-floor went down in a day and the new oak boards followed over the next two and, I’m happy to say, with no measurement accidents to boot. Very satisfying.
The penultimate bite.
This consisted of replacing the top surface boards of the half landing and preparing it to receive the new flight of stairs to the master bedroom and of course, making the stairs. Barring for testing my scribing and cutting skills to ensure proper fitment of the new boards to the half landing whilst ensuring the proper level for point at which the new stairs would land was reasonably straight forward. But I should perhaps have signed up for some yoga lessons beforehand – I’m sure they would have cost less than the osteopath!
Regarding the stairs; I was initially planning on cutting pockets to house the risers and treads but chickened out and went with right-angle brackets instead. Glad to say though that the final appearance from below is better suited to the house.
Last bite – restore the old bannister, newel post and make new spindles for same, fit all the new skirting (hide the gaps) clean the house timbers and re-paint.
Got annoyed with previous owners during this last step as while cleaning the house frame timbers I found they had added ‘Plastic Padding’, the car panel repair stuff, to their armoury of materials, including expanding foam, to fill small and large gaps around the room. All this of course had to come out and be replaced with appropriate materials. Behind one gob of this stuff though I was surprised to find the electricity supply cable for a wall light, so glad I had not tried to shove something sharp in that! I instantly understood why it had been covered over though. It came out at about chest height at the head of the new stairs??? Made the cable safe by separating it from the supply in the loft, once I found it, and covered the hole with a little brass Tudor rose. Much prettier – I think.
So, job done until I work up the nerve to tackle the ground floor stair.
Until then, or until the good weather comes around I’ll be re-pointing the random stone chimney breast and planning my next mammoth project.
For this coming year though I already have a few things on the ToDo List so when the sun next shines for more than a couple of hours each day, I’ll be back outside,
finishing the caulking – I did manage to do some of this during 2019 but then the rains came down,
installing an additional land-drain,
building a new front door – under the watchful eye of my CO,
restoring the old corrugated iron wood shed which has largely been eaten by worms and rust,
labouring for the thatcher who will be making some repairs and replacing the ridge,
etc, etc, etc,
Happy New Year folks.