Modifying my roof to keep it on the house - another excuse..

^ top marks

Thanks for the educational / amusing / "what-not-to-do" updates, it's all appreciated!

Cracking educational and entertaining project ( for those whos roof is stable )

A nice touch on the initials on the steel work , I'm sure in many years the future owners will find this thread with a google of

AJH MAY 2015


Ive seen many a 2 - 5 year old kids hand prints or foot prints in the concrete of newly laid driveways ,

I moved a friend into a 1930s property a few months ago

when he knocked a wall down for the new extension an empty folded packet of cigarettes were found with the apprentices name and company he worked for inside the cavity

...Going back a page or 2 , did i spot a Technics 1210 record deck in the HI-FI pile ?

Thank you all.

georgeb I quite like that display too. I actually thought about painting the tools so they looked 'perfect' but then I decided that life is just too short.

blower In our last house we found newspaper stuffed under the skirting boards in one room. When I slowly teased them apart they were from 1871. I said 'Good Heavens Above!' or something like that. It was doubly interesting because until then we didn't know exactly when the house was built.

Yep it is an SL 1200 with an Ortofon OM Pro in it. I've not had it that long - it's ex hospital radio and needed a bit of cleaning and polishing.
Before that I had a Dual 505 but the belts - including the pitch change belt (which seems to be almost impossible to get hold of) were knackered. And to be honest it wasn't that special even when it worked. So when the 1200 needed a new home, and having no belts to fail, it seemed like a match made in heaven. It sounds brilliant.

envoycdx On the subject of music, I was in living in Jesmond when Belinda Carlisle released her anthem to the North East 'Hebburn Is A Place On Earth'.
We were very surprised she'd even heard of the place let alone written a record about it but what what do you know...

James

this begs the question, why didn't you fit the ladder the right way up in the first place?

This is a great thread, but as the new owner of a 1930's house, it's properly sh1t me up over whether or not the roof will fall off it.....

Hi all,

Not wishing to resurrect an old thread but I have to say a big thanks…
This thread got 3rd place in the 'Readers Other Mods' awards this year. That came as a surprise because for some reason I'd missed the fact that it'd even been nominated.

Given the quality of threads on this site I reckon just to get nominated is fairly impressive - but to get third... Well chuffed. Thank you.

Then over on  georgeb 's thread bstardchild said…


Yes mate!
So to add a bit to the story here's what's happened to the house since.

The steel work was done and the roof tied in back in May but I hadn't put all the loft floor down. That was because of another little project I did in the summer. Painting the side of the house.




I had to work off my neighbours car port so I bought some steel tube and built a set of props for additional support for the roof. Then a few sheets of OSB to cover the plastic top and my scaffold tower on top of that.

When that job was finished the OSB sheets became the flooring in the loft.

Back to the house painting… That's a 9 Mtr tower on top of a 2 Mtr carport. It looks fine in the photo above but it's at least three times higher when you are at the top looking down than from the bottom looking up.
I knew one of the chimney pots was lose so I wanted to re-bed it while I was up there. Well, I started chipping the old flaunching off and the mortar between the top courses of bricks ran out as sand. Bum hats.

The height I could cope with. Just. The chimney pot I could cope with. Even a few courses of lose brick isn't a problem.
But all three - right at the top of the chimney? No chance! Brown trousers time.
So I got a chap called 'Nick the Roofer' to sort it out. He did a cracking job.

Here's a couple of photos of Faversham from the top of my chimney.







Rather nice isn't it? Looks better from up there than it does from the street.

Back inside the loft hatch was a bit of a mess when you last saw it.




But it looks a bit tidier now.




I wasn't working fast enough for Mrs Sweetpea so the coving was put up by the nice chap who replastered the worst bits of the walls. (Plastering is one of those things that I just can't do. I've tried and tried and I just don't get it. So we got a man in.)
Anyway some of the coving fell down a week later. A layer of paint or something higher up came unstuck from the ceiling. Oops. So the poor plasterer came back and we put it all back up again. I actually took the Black and Decker power file to the walls and ceiling and sanded it back to the plaster. It's not coming down again!

In other news we now have a new window surround in white oak. The original was a mess and had woodworm.




It needs architrave to finish it off. The house still has some beautiful architrave from the 30's when it was built. You can't get it or anything like it anymore so I'm making new stuff to match.

The job today was to get rid of the glass from under the banister. It had been fitted in the 70's I reckon.
I got most of it out yesterday - last bit today.




There are two reasons. Firstly glass is really dangerous if you happen to fall down the stairs and break it as you go. Secondly it looked like a 1970's Indian restaurant rather than a 1930's house. Wooden spindles will be going back in. Probably white oak as it's usually a pretty good colour match for the 30's wood once it's all oiled.

Next on the list is to strip the paint off all the wood work and finish in Danish Oil. Not looking forward to that. It'll be messy and take forever.

So that's a quick round up of 'post roof' works and it explains why I've been ignoring the MR2 lately.

Thanks again for voting. Especially if it was for this thread!

James

Got to say James, you're a braver man than I. There's no way on God's earth would I have gone up there.

When Nick the Roofer went up the first thing he did was bear hug the stack and gave it a good wobble. It didn't move. The render has protected all but the very top. Anyway, he gave a good shove and I thought "hells bells, if that is unstable you'll find yourself with a very large armful of bricks".
I guess if it was that unstable it'd have blown down in the wind so giving it a shove wasn't going to harm.



George, you are terribly polite. Most people used the phrase "f*&king idiot".
To be fair, I'd got my climbing rope tied to the top of the stack and was wearing a harness. Especially when I went round the back of the stack where the render was coming off. I'm old enough to be concerned about dying, unlike when I was young and knew I was immortal!



Years ago I went to a local joiners to get a quote for the architrave exactly as you suggest. It was a bigish number.
So I went and got the cutters made and bought myself a baby spindle molder. It wasn't much more expensive and I got a nice handy toy.
Scary machines, spindle molders. When you start it the lights dim and there is a WOOOOOO noise. If it ever flings a cutter out it'll kill somebody across the channel in France.

James

Couple of big hinges on that steelwork and some hydraulic rams, you could have a flip top roof ........

A very interesting project; with regards to pre-tensioning the various steel elements, the following crossed my mind. When you did the actual pre-tensioning and arrived at a situation which you were satisfied with, the loft space would have been at a given temperature (XºC). The steel would have been at a given length, taking account of said temperature.
We all know from bitter experience that going up a loft space on a cold winter's evening, that the temperature will be considerably lower than goiung into the same space on a hot summer's evening. The temperature being a difference of several ºC.
Metal, ie. your steel work, will contract and expand according to the ambient temperature.
Therefore does this effect have any effect on your stirling efforts to secure the roof? Only asking and not trying to nit pick or demean your efforts.
Finally what was the total weight of the inserted steel, do you have any idea?