Moving on.
Moving on
With the old beam out, the generator gets fired up and the angle grinder gets a wire-cup head to help me clean the worst of the softwood from the beam and although it’s a messy job, it doesn’t take long to get down to the rock-solid material beneath. Once cleaned up and treated, it goes around the back ready to be placed in front of the steel-reinforced concrete lintel to give the back of the building a more authentic look again. To be fair no one wants to see a stark grey concrete lintel so it makes for a nice feature. The beam isn’t load bearing as all of the weight from the roof is taken by the new lintel but from the outside it’s much harder to tell and it looks really nice.
Rachel (occasionally referred to from now on as ‘the client’) has come up for the day to check on progress and is really pleased how things are moving on and the way the patchwork of stone looks from the front. No one is allowed to stand still on-site so she’s on brew duty and can’t help herself, getting stuck into cleaning out some rubble and trying to help out wherever she can. She’s not a fan of heights so although we offer, she has no intention of making the trip up the scaffolding to get a better view. We do get her half-way up the ladders though so she can see we aren’t skiving but overall, she’s content to take photos from the ground!
With the woodwork going in, the chimney stack can be built up a little more and we get word the skylights have arrived at the builders merchants Armstrongs in Bentham. That’s a job for another day though so we leave them there, it’s good to know they’ve arrived safely though as I really don’t want any delays now we’re motoring on. Again, at the end of the day, we loosely tack the felt back on to protect the building a little.
Again, working into the night and knowing we have planning approval to reinstate the original rear window dimensions, I decided to pull out the plastering to see how much work was required and it turns out, most of it wasn’t really held in there with much at all.
There is a new concrete lintel above the window taking the weight of the roof timbers so although you can’t really tell, the stone to the outside is more of a decorative feature. It’s hard to see from the ground but the original window must have been around 6ft by 7ft so once we’ve decided on the style, I’ll need to start ringing around for a supplier as I’m not tackling that one.