With the roof now completely off the old ‘barn doors’ were removed and widening of the door aperture to a more usable dimension (as well as the installing a new substantial lintel above it to bear the weight of the new roof cross member) commenced.
The door aperture being widened and the new lintel being installed.
At the same time a new side door aperture was opened up using a convenient butt joint in the brickwork from an earlier alteration as one side of the new doorway and cutting the other away with a brick cutter before installing a new lintel by removing further material at the top of the new aperture and re-bricking around the lintel. The single skin section of the back wall was also rebuilt to be double skinned (9” thick), this was slightly problematic as there was an oil boiler mounted on it that heats the cottage adjacent to the garage so this was removed and reinstalled on the now thicker wall necessitating the need for the fabrication of a new flue as the boiler is so old a new one was not readily available.
New door aperture and 9” wall rebuilt.
Once the new lintels were installed and the walls built back up attention turned to the gable end and the roof structure. The gable end was a relatively simple rebuild of the existing, but ensuring it was straight and level (the original was leaning quite alarmingly). Many of the bricks from the original gable end were able to be cleaned and reused but some were broken and/or crumbling so a pallet of matching reclaimed bricks from a local salvage yard was sourced to make up for these.
The roof was to be built from scratch using wall plates, ‘A’ frames, purlins and a ridge beam to support the rafters and slates. This was a similar design to the original, but the timbers were to be somewhat oversized from the originals to give more strength and to allow for a mezzanine storage floor. First off was the installation of the new timber wall plates and then the fitting of the two bottom cross members that would eventually form the base of the ‘A’ frames as well as support the mezzanine floor. Large timbers were also anchor bolted to the gable ends to add support for the edges of the mezzanine floor. The next part of the process was adding joist hangers to the cross members and side timbers and fitting the mezzanine floor joists between them. This had an added bonus of providing a platform to work off in order to build the roof up further.
Next up was the construction of the ‘A’ frames, installation of the purlins, ridge beam and rafters. This was where an issue became apparent in that the building is not quite square with the north elevation being about 50mm shorter than the south elevation. To cater for this a number of templates were made to help measure and ultimately fix the purlins and ridge in the right places such that the rafters would all line up perfectly level and could be trimmed to the same sizes either side so the slates wouldn’t ultimately be visually ‘out of true’. Luckily the walls were so uneven any discrepancy in the soffit caused by the building being out of square yet the roof not was not going to be obvious. Even with accurate measuring some of the rafters ultimately needed installing with packers, but ultimately a level and square roof was created. Next up were the fascias that were made from 195 x 22 softwood that was cut to size and tacked temporarily in position before being taken down and given two coats of Sadolin after which it was fixed permanently back in position.
‘A’ frames, purlins, ridge, rafters and fascias.
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