Day 5 - more steps forward, more steps back!

Kev throws bricks at Ging through the newly finished window opening

It's been a great day for building - blue skies and sun (ok, and the odd shower!). Above you can see the finished first floor gable end window opening - compare it to the photos below for the change (from original, through the mess to finished opening). Shoot, it sure looks pretty don't it. Eventually there'll be another deeper window opening mirroring it on the ground floor.

Progress included replacing the existing supporting end brick pillar that the cowboys had done with this new, tied-in pillar. Looks good to me!

Whilst worked cracked on, 'Big Al', our structural engineer brought in to look at the work from the cowboys which started the job, reported back with some bad news. They say bad news comes in threes, well, here's ours!

1) roof to the new first floor extension

Well, the cowboys who erected it have managed to make the slope well below the tolerance for natural slate! Matt and Kev had already begun stripping the slates for relaying, but now the whole bloody lot has to come off! Also, the window opening the cowboys put in are too high so they need to be lowered. So, this first floor extension is going to be pretty much redone one way or another!

2) floor joists to first floor extension

A double-whammy here! See the large piece of steel on the left, well, that shouldn't be there! And the floor joists running up to it, well, they're the wrong size. Yes, you've guessed it, they're too small! Removing the steel and replacing all the joists now would be a nightmare (and a disaster). So Big Al has calculated that doubling up all the existing joists will over-compensate for the weight of the steel hanging unsupported cantalever-style over the back ground floor wall.

3) new supporting pillar in our new open plan living room

Here you can see our nice new steel pillar which is the midway support for the new steel that runs the full width of the cottage supporting the floor above. Problem is, that from photos I took during the excavation for the new concrete floor the cowboys laid, we can see that they didn't reinforce below the pillar to the spec on the plans, and it was never inspected by the building inspector (he loves us!). So, its dig a bloody big hole through the new floor around it and retro reinforce the thing.

Oh, bloody, hum. We'll find out on Monday how much more this little lot will cost us.

More progress when we went from this . . .

. . . to this.

We were going to have a false door here, but we might not be able to get that paint off, and with brick damage either side of the two windows, it might be best if we rebuild this wall between the two windows.