Sarah Catastrophic Beany looks interesting tonight.

[robgil]

The weekly bearer of catastrophic bad news on a biblical scale is doing a 14c timber framed house tonight.

Me and Mrs Robgil are literally wetting our selves laughing at the doom and gloom, even her eye brows have been trained to bear the bad news and pass it on to the unsuspecting home owner..

 

[robgil]

omg! She has put a timber beam on a press to test its breaking point , apparently according to Beany two tons is the weight of two people walking around on the floor above said timber beam. Two tons! :shock: Thats one ton per person. :shock: :lol: :lol:

 

[Feltwell]

She must be thinking of Americans.

 

[robgil]

She must be thinking of Americans.

No , she only said one ton per person.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

I've only watched 15 minutes of it so far, but the saga of the shower suggests there may be an "I D ten T" problem, quite apart from the cement render etc that the ancestors have bequeathed.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Well, I skipped through so may have missed the outright condemnation of cement and all its works which was otherwise only vaguely alluded to, but:
On the plus side, it was a pretty good illustration of what happens when obvious problems get ignored. (Which reminds me - I really must check where that damp patch on my bedroom ceiling is coming from :roll: )
On the neutral side, I assume it's not listed so I won't comment on the plastic windows or the exposed brick chimney breasts.
On the minus side, TV's demand for a "finished" project to end with meant the figures clearly didn't stack up. At the outset, the owners had £60k to spend, Bossy Beeny's assessment was they they wouldn't get away with less than £100k on the minumum that needed to be done structurally, and yet the end result (leaving aside the rendering that hadn't been finished) included at least £20k of frankly superficial bathroom and kitchen fittings, which weren't part of the original budget... :?

 

[robgil]

I think the money gained came from the use of 5 feet of soft wood instead of 5 feet of oak in the 10k sole plate repair.

 

[rebeccac]

As it was a 14th century cottage how did anyone get permission for the horrible aluminium windows an cement render in the first place?
It looks as if they were replaced by more plastic dg units and did anyone notice the addition of the porch in wood but as the owners couldn't afford oak was this softwood?

The money spent on all the IKEA kitchen/bathroom stuff would have been better spent on the building.

Why couldn't they get reclaimed oak for the beam? Our local reclaimation yard has plenty at very reasonable cost and in Italy we were given 2 wonderful oak beams for our house!

On the plus side it was a good demonstration of how cement damages timber buildings as well as the need for taking precautionary measures to make sure your house doesn't end up like this one!

 

[Feltwell]

I only watched a short part of it, where they were reinforcing the rotten beam by carving a notch in the top and filling it with steel reinforcing bars and resin.

On the face of it that looked like quite a sympathetic repair - the beam stays in-situ and it's outward appearance is unchanged, once the upstairs floor is put back. I'm surprised that a few lengths of rebar and some resin gives enough strength though.

Did they re-render the outside of the house in lime? Or repair the frame and then slap more cement render on?

 

[Pford75]

They ran out of money and hadn't rendered the house at all by the end of the programme.

 

[Feltwell]

Hmm - well, it's a breathable finish I suppose........

 

[robgil]

That iron bar repair was laughable, angle iron would have been a better repair.

 

[Feltwell]

I'm inclined to agree. Rebar is made to take tensile forces, i.e. to resist being stretched. It's not meant to resist being bent, which in crude terms is what is needed for a beam. A fairly small pocket cut in the top of the original beam with a chainsaw, a few pieces of rebar dropped in and then some resin? I can't see how it can work, i.e. make the beam strong enough.

I can understand rebar being bonded in to join in new beam ends where the original ends have rotted away. It seems Ms Beeny isn't the only one to use this method though.

http://www.iscapreservation.co.uk/beam-end-repairs14.htm

 

[Flyfisher]

When a wooden beam bends it is under tension, the lower part of it anyway, so increasing the tensile strength by fixing a steel bar into the beam makes some sense, though I would have guessed it would be most effective to fit the rebar into the underside of a wooden beam.

I'm no structural engineer though - just amateur musings.

 

[CatherineB]

I would love to get Sarah reading this - can one "invite" people to join the forum?!

 

[MatthewC]

When a wooden beam bends it is under tension, the lower part of it anyway, so increasing the tensile strength by fixing a steel bar into the beam makes some sense, though I would have guessed it would be most effective to fit the rebar into the underside of a wooden beam.

I'm no structural engineer though - just amateur musings.

I've seen this before on her programme and then they put the bars in the middle of the side of the joists; putting them on top means the steel bar is then in compression which helps but it would then have a tendency to buckle. This position is far less effective (probably by a factor of ten or twenty) than putting the steel bars at the bottom of the joists where they are, as FF says, in tension and doing the greatest benefit.

As regards the question of people weighing a ton, I suspect that she was just confused with moments as compared to forces (moment equals force times distance). The moment can be measured in Newton-metres or (old money) pound-feet, so if you have a large figure you can use ton-feet which is what I guess she did, omitting the "feet"!

Matthew
(Chartered Engineer, retired)
http://houseintheenchantedforest.blogspot.com/

 

[Moo]

She really excelled herself tonight, didn't she?
Gutters cleared, leaks dealt with, but just to make sure she had that poor woman spending a small fortune on Injected damp-proofing all round, bitumen on the inside, and a 'protective render' on the outside.

 

[Sue Wilkinson]

Oh, what programme is this that I have missed?

 

[Gareth Hughes]

The undramatically-titled "Help! My House is falling down!" on Channel 4

 

[Sue Wilkinson]

The undramatically-titled "Help! My House is falling down!" on Channel 4

Oh that one. So that's Sarah is it. I saw the one where the hapless couple seemed surprised that the wet Walls and ceilings were caused by a hole in the roof large enough to crawl in. And where she did a ridiculous alarming test with a smoke machine to convince them their kids would die before the week was out.

Not been able to face watching another. Perhaps I should.