Christian French

Category: Build Blog

  • Box Hedge Caterpillar

    I went out to trim our hedge today and I noticed a lot of the small box hedge at the front of my garden has significant dieback. 

    Upon closer inspection the hedge has a large amount of web type covering and small round creatures in the webbing. The RHS website shows this as box hedge caterpillar / moth, which is pretty damaging.

    box hedge

    I’ve given the hedge a good going over with Provanto which is suggested for control of this damaging caterpillar. I’ll update my blog in a couple of weeks with the result.

  • Roof Construction

    Following the lifting up and installation of the roof trusses on my last post, I opened the main roof and built the diminishing trusses from the old roof structure to the new trusses and started on the construction of the valley between the two roofs using a timber valley covered with a GRP trough.

    The photo below shows the timber valley backing with the breather membrane covering prior to the GRP valley being installed.

    I decided to put a temporary sheet over the whole roof to stop my joists and trusses getting soaked and warping. This made life easier and more difficult in equal measure.

    I used the 2000 gauge DPM that I had left over from the concrete floor. I stapled it and then realised the wind was going to lift that straight off so ended up battening it down. This is something I have noticed not many house builders do, I have seen loads of new builds around my area with exposed timber for months. I can only imagine how warped things are in these new builds.

    Here’s the GRP valley before it is put in place 

  • Trusses Arrive

    Here’s the video of my brother and I hauling the roof trusses two storeys up the side of the building and onto the wallplates by use of a long rope and some brute force.

    Having discovered that the trusses were a little low I subsequently added a course of engineering bricks to raise the roof height slightly. To achieve this, I used some long timber and a car jack to lift each end in turn.

  • Arrived at Wallplate

    Now we’re at the wallplate height and waiting for the trusses to be made and delivered.

    Not much can be done now until they arrive so here’s some photos of the progress for you to look at.

  • Up Up & Away

    Here’s a couple of clips from the old CCTV camera which show the progress of the build quite well. the camera position hasn’t moved.

  • The Garage

    This is the bit I have been looking forward to the least.

    The garage is full of stuff so I could not afford for it to be exposed to the weather for any time at all.

    The drawings utilise the existing garage wall as the lower part of the inner leaf and a steel beam to be installed to for the support for the outer leaf.

    In order for me to continue building the blockwork upwards I needed to take off a part of the garage roof to expose the brickwork.

    This sounds easy but the garage is a flat GRP roof that slopes backwards towards where I am working, this means that any rain that falls is going to run down towards the open roof and into the garage so I better work quickly and pick my day.

    First I removed the door & frame in order to make the door central and create a support pier

    New blockwork completed and door reinstalled

    In goes the lintel and the roof is off and the interior exposed to the elements, worse still is the roof slopes back towards the opening

    Here you see the padstone in place for the steel to support the outer leaf

    What I have done to stop water running into the garage is buy some torch-on felt and apply it to the GRP roof and create a dam. So far it seems to work pretty well although using a plumbing blowtorch to heat up felt is pretty tough as the flame is just far too small.