The house wot Juffy built
With the easy stuff done, we moved onto the trickier bits – very large brackets (to hold the ridge beam) installed on top of tall posts, with angled beams forming the gable ends. I’d been trying to work out a good way of doing these bits, and hadn’t really come up with a good answer until last night. The best I had was “put bracket on post, raise post and brace it *somehow* then muck around putting beams in. Last night I had the epiphany…Continue Reading “Framing day 6”
I’d been tossing up options for how to install the major beam work for the shed…most of which was pretty long and quite heavy. My default assumption had been “hire crane, pay lots of money” because that’s how you lift heavy things, right? Then started watching Youtube videos about lifting beams, and stumbled across these guys using materials hoists. Apparently materials hoists are a thing, and actually quite cheap to hire – figured it was worth a shot, and meant I wasn’t paying for a…Continue Reading “Framing day…5, I think?”
Spent the day cutting up timber into posts, cutting slots (for post supports), drilling lots of holes and cutting some rather large slots in rather large posts: (That’s a 190×190 merbau glulam, for the wood nerds playing at home. Quite nice bits of timber, but bloody heavy when you get four metres of it at once.
Day 2: Did a bit more work on the brackets while the plumbers dug holes all over the place putting the water and sewer pipes in. Day 3: Took a bit longer than I was hoping to get hold of the post supports for all the other structural posts for the shed, but they finally came through. Frustratingly unproductive day working out the best way to drill the holes, empty the concrete dust out of the holes (google suggests all kinds of silly compressed-air-in-a-can, air…Continue Reading “Shed framing, days 2, 3 and 4”
Armed with a pile of timber and a ute full of brackets, it was time to attack the shed framing. Figured I’d start with the posts mounted on the big brackets I’d put in place the other day and set up the cross-bracing – also I don’t have the post supports for all the other posts until Monday, so I can’t do them anyway. 🙂 So anyway, normal people would build normal houses where all the posts are the same length. Between the different top…Continue Reading “Shed Framing, day 1”
Collected the first batch of brackets for the framing yesterday, so I could (finally) start putting together something that might be a building, rather than just moving dirt around. ’tis very exciting. Plan for the day was to mount all the brackets for the shed on the L-bolts buried in the slab, which required a layer of grout. I’d vaguely contemplated doing each one as a free-standing pad, but a combination of sensibility and reading the instructions convinced me to make up some little formworks…Continue Reading “Above ground at last!”
Another 7am start on a lovely cool morning for more concrete. Felt much better about this one – what with being largely organised, not running around like an idiot at the last minute, and simply having done it before. Had few hours of setup with Maurice and his crew, finishing off the formwork and steel – some quite tight timelines on this pour, what with Maurice trying to retrieve his schedule from the dumpster fire of the recent wet weeks. Prep went something like this:…Continue Reading “Shed pour day”
I’ve been stalled for a few weeks waiting for the rain to go away long enough for the shed slab to be poured. I’d dug out the foundations for the shed within a week of the house slab being poured, then the rain started and my concrete guy’s schedule went to hell. In the meantime, I caught up on some small jobs: Taking the formwork off the house slab and sealing the sides: which was more digging, lots of tedious painting and then some more…Continue Reading “Small progress and rain”
Two days post-pour, with some decent rainfall overnight to keep the slab from drying out too fast….or at all, really. 🙂
Back to the block after snatching 6 hours’ sleep. Immediately got roped into cutting more lengths of ply, after inconveniently pointing out that a few bits of formwork were a touch low – which I noticed….oh, about 8:30 last night. Meanwhile the pumper arrived, squeezed itself between my verge trees and set up: shortly followed by the first of the concrete trucks. I put together the last of the inside formwork (this is fine, right?) which I couldn’t do late last night because of noise…Continue Reading “Pour day!”