Shower room refit with bonus joist and rafter repairs

[Cubist]

The velux is absolutely dead straight, its the rest of the house that's squint... I may try to offset this by stepping the wall studs to the right out a bit. Or maybe just not bother because nobody is going to notice...

'Squint' - years since I've heard that term used in a structural context but.... snaffled now for personal reuse.

Trouble is that whilst others may never notice you will every time you open the door. If it gets up your nose now then...?

 

[fernicarry]

Today's order of business, sister the rafter to the left of the valley, which was very frilly at the bottom where it used to meet the old valley rafter, and tie it in to the new valley rafter.

Another lesson in applied trigonometry. Got it close enough after about 7 tries. The angles were beyond what the chop saw could do on bevel so had to do it standing up as a mitre cut which meant it could only cut part way through and had to finish with a handsaw, like some sort of animal...





The stone at the front ended up at just the perfect height to support it after receiving some attention from the angle grinder. Shows how much the original rafter had settled into the stonework.

Then it was a case of building up the outer leaf whilst I could still get at it. This will be hidden by the soffits so doesn't need to be pretty but hey... Remember at the start of proceedings this was all smothered in cement. Plenty more cement further along though...




And the gap under the gable built back up using stones to fill it out rather than just bucket loads of mortar. I'll need to come back to this later and add the fillet of mortar between the wall and the soffits to close off the gap.




Then back inside to fix the repair piece in place and backfill the wall core. The original rafter was hard as iron where I drove the coach screws in so seems like only the very bottom of it that had suffered. Good old Dougie Fir.



Fair shattered after all that but one of those satisfying days you where the job leaps forwards and you can dare to hope that it will actually be finished sometime soon!

A few more big stones to build the inner leaf back up and I can start on insulating this area. Not out of the woods yet though, those laths that are sticking through from the room to the right are little more than woodworm holding hands so I suspect I'm going to need to strip away some of that wall. More scope for IWI, yay!