As the Agoraphobic Skinhead said "Inside"

When looking at the front of the hose the left hand side (originally concrete block) had no upstairs at all. It just went from concrete floor to ridge beam. 

The idea as to have a corridor from the back to the front the end of which would be a toilet under the small velux at the front.
The floor to ceiling window, at the front, was to be in a large bathroom thus keeping all of the plumbing at the front of the house. However, as Mrs B pointed out, it would be a bit tricky getting out of the bath or shower with any sort of decorum, (or in my case without scaring the neighbours) in front of a two meter high window.
Fair point, so it was decided that the bathroom. 3.5 metres by 3.5 meters would be at the back and get its natural light from the large velux there. And the front would be an office 3.5 x 2.5 meters
The corridor would be 1.1 meters wide and have fan lights above head height as it passed the bathroom bringing in any natural light from the bathroom to the corridor. Likewise the top half of the toilet door is to be glazed (with opaque glass) to bring natural light in .  

After taking advice it was decided that the corridor and bathroom floor would be done in 22mm marine ply (which I bought in the UK and bought over in a truck) The saving made on buying the ply in the UK paid for the truck and the ferry and enabled me to bring all of our remaining stuff over. 
After consultation with my building guru it was decided that the strongest way of doing this was to use steel H section as cross members and then have short 1.7 meter spans for the joists. 
Because we will be chucking a few quid at the tiled floor of the bathroom along with large steel bath and bespoke marble shower floor (2 meters X 1.2 metres) I wanted to be sure there would be no movement or spring in the floor so I space the joists at 300mm centres, I used quite chunky wood for them held in place by “bat hangers” nailed in every hole. 

First we built up some concrete block pillars in the studio room to hold the H section steel beams that would hold up the floor above 
Then we built a wooden frame 20 x 50mm to hold up the rear end of the floor and bolted through and into the concrete lintel at the fron end. 
Once we had the steel beams in place (pre-drilled to take the wood cladding) resting on their concrete block pillars (on of which maker up a wall to the downstairs loo and shower) it was a case of bolting the wood to them. 
After that it was a case of putting up the bat hangers making sure the tops of the joists were level and then putting up the joists.

Here you can see the steel beams up and the first joists in place (that’s my son Zak helping me out) 



In this next one you can see where we have made the opening upstairs for the door to the corridor (more detail on that later.) It also shows the framework at the other end which holds up the floor at the ends





It was then a case of getting the ply upstairs and screwing each piece into position 6 screws across the width of the ply in each joist. (1.4M)
The concrete block wall on the right is to be the downstairs loo and shower.








In this one you can see the framework at the front of the house that is bolted to the concrete lintel and holds up the floor at that end. 





Here it is upstairs with the plywood down in the bathroom corridor and toilet with the joists still showing where the office will be. We have chestnut wood for the floor of the office.





Here you can get a better view of the doorway through the old wall. The corridor is as wide as the doorway and the bathroom takes up the rest.





Here is the floor down and you can now see the demarcation of the rooms.
These photos were taken before the velux's were installed. 








This is the same from underneath giving us bags of space to run electrics and acoustic insulation. 





The plumbing for the bathroom is easy as the bathroom itself sits above our intended thermal store. 
When I built the pillars I incorporated a 55 mm waste pipe behind them with a y section do it will take the waste water from the bath, shower and sinks. (I can increase eiteir size if needs be but 55mm should be enough to cope with shower and bath water (or am I wrong???)
It runs to the front of the house where it picks up the waste water form the washing machine and sink situated at the front of that room. 

The upstairs toilet sits directly above the downstairs toilet for ease of plumbing and drainage. The bath sink washing machine water exit the house on the left of the front door and the toilets on the right and they join together into the fosse or micro system.

Bentley Animals

I realise I have missed out an important family member in the story. 
You have seen photo's of Mrs B, Minnie the dog and me however Smokey the cat has also been involved and here he is in YeeHaw shed assuring us of his interest in the proceedings and how to look cool when you are asleep.



Although you have seen many action shots of Minnie this is her at rest.  



It would seem that the Bentley animals have fully grasped the concept of getting comfortable 

What it was and what it has become

I thought this:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8v486aUYu0 
might be appropriate to listen to as you look at the changes we have made to the exterior of the house. 
We wanted the front to retain its originality or “roots” whilst at the same time having an interesting makeover. 
A hopefully subtle “nip and tuck” that I think we have pulled off. It still retains that old French peasant farmer spirit with some minor light enhancing tweaks.

From this 





And that is before we have pointed the old stone on the right


At the rear we knew the new dorma would make an big visual impact however we hope we have stayed true to and in a way enhanced the original two stories swooping down to one, with the long roof at the rear. 








It will only really reveal itself fully when all the windows are in but we are very happy with the result and the journey so far and hope that, as followers of the process, you are starting to get a feel for the place..
  

Making the front look pretty

We obviously wanted to clad the front wall with stone to try and match the right hand side and fit in with the old terrace of cottages to the left. 
There was a slight problem in that the block wall was about 25cms “in” at the bottom on the right and only about 10 at the top. 
We decided that it didn’t matter if the new bit stood a bit proud as we had placed the drain pipe so that it would disguise that when fitted properly.
We dug in some concrete footings just as a precaution and then installed the first wooden upright. Although we would have preferred to do it all in stone because of the thinness of some parts, we decided to put in some wooden uprights to act as beam /lintel supports.



Once the footings had gone off Mrs B set about building up the wall. 
When it was up to a level that we could put the beam on the following sequence shows how it was done. 
(May I suggest at this stage if you don’t own a chain block and you are about to start a major project like this then buy one. About 75 quid for a 1 ton block) 









Once the beam was in place it was simply a case of building up on it. 



Once it reached a level where Mrs B spent more time hanging onto the scaffold than concentrating on the stones I took over and finished it off the higher bits.





This summer (2011) we will be pointing right across the front which will bring it all up to the same sort of colour and over a year or two the frost and rain will remove any discoloration caused by the lime as it has at the back.
From an exterior point of view we completed the work in September 2010 and that is the outside pretty much as it is today (July 2011) as we are now concentrating on the interior.

Veluxes and wood cladding

I am now going top employ a tactic used by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction (which if you have never seen I would strongly suggest is one the best films ever made) 
By doing a QT I don’t mean I am going to get a couple of homeys around with pliers and blowtorches and get all medieval on your sorry asses.
Oh No!, 
What I mean is that I am going to take some liberties with time sequencing.
What we did in the autumn in 2009 was to start work on the inside upstairs doorways and the first bits of flooring for upstairs. However before I take you “upstairs” so to speak I will continue to show you how we have got on with finishing the outside so far. Then we can go inside and have a look at how it is progressing there.

The internal layout meant fitting some velux windows at the rear and also the front to utilise as much natural light as possible. (It's free as well) 
My roofer had explained that it was much quicker and easier to install Velux after the roof was on and come up from the inside, which is exactly what we did. 
They are fairly easy to install and come with instructions however I left this to my roofer and he had all 5 fitted within just under two days. 
Having seen them done I am comfortable that I could do them myself in the future although it would take longer. 
You can see the ones at the back in the following photos which are also of the cladding going on.
To do the cladding we just battened over the waterproof membrane and then secret-nailed and glued the Douglas Fir through the battens into the more substantial wooden frame beneath.
The Douglas Fir is tongue and grooved all round and is 18mm thick. 
Each piece was treated, first with two coats of wood preservative as well as two coats of Xylophene.
The finished article has had one coat of Danish oil so far although will be receiving another two or three later this summer 
The cladding was fitted in the late spring of 2010 and the Veluxs about the same time. 








As a finishing touch we added a small peddy roof to prevent wind driven rain sliding down the front of the cladding and pouring over the large window door combination below. 
The little roof will I hope add some protection to that arrangement.

You can see the Velux for the bathroom and office mezzanine sleeping deck (top small one) in this one on the right side of the roof. 
I am searching for a shot of the back where you can see the whole roof from the rear with both eyebrows and velux so you get an idea of the symmetry we were trying to achieve.

The back bedroom window is exactly half the size of the main opening . 
The side windows downstairs are a third the size of the bedroom one. 
The eyebrow windows to the side are a quarter the size of the bedroom window (or as near as makes no difference)







In the above photo you can also see Mrs B’s walls in their weathered glory. 
I may be biased but to me they look like they have always been there.

That’s pretty much where the back is to this day. 16-07-2011 and we are now mainly working inside while I save up for the windows. 

This summer I am hoping to fill in under the eaves on the side of the roof with more Douglass Fir and we will be sealing up with stone all the way to the base plate in between the corbles. 
That will just leave the windows to go in and the terrace to put down with the incorporated rain water harvesters (if possible die to ground rock) and drainage down to the garden.

The Roof Part 5 The technical and the reasons

Some technical stuff about the roof and reasons for decisions taken to do it how we did it.  
We had no option but to cut into the very top of the chimney as the gable is not in the middle where we needed to dorma gable to go to maintain the symmetry of the back. The ridge sits about 4 cms from the gable and structurally sound and I have not heard about it being allowed or not. 
The ridge from the left side of the roof was already in the outer side of the chimney as thats how they were built and there is little heat by the time the smoke gets to the top judging by the state of the old main ridge we took out. 
What I have done since is, after building up the rear edge of the inner gable, I have installed vertical wooden supports wedged in just to take any undue weight form the chimney although my building adviser has assured me it wasn't necessary and I was being a bit "belt and braces".
The chimney is to be used but there is no danger at all from heat damage as the flue for the wood burning cooker boiler will be the stainless double lined insulated stuff.

I am laughing away to myself as I type this about the roof drawings
I designed it but was just not capable of drawing it nor did I know how to make it become a reality. Thankfully the roofer did. 
If you remember earlier in the record of the build I said that we did our own drawings, with measurements etc, to submit with the planning. These were fine for the simple "plan" views required by planning and anyone with a set square, ruler and sharp pencil could pull them off. 
In my minds eye I could "see" the shape the roof had to be but it was beyond my drawing skills to represent it on paper, despite numerous teeth gnashing, paper and pencil throwing, dummy spitting attempts.
I had tried numerous ways to explain how it looked to Mrs B but she couldn't picture it in her imagination so her attempts to copy and and enhance my rubbish scrawlings was a bit comical and not really to scale. 

I did, in my frustration, consider making a model but it would have been a waste of time as the roofer knew exactly what I meant and it was pretty simple to do once we got going. 
With the main roof already mainly chevroned and battened out (apart from where the dorma roof and eyebrows were likely to land) we chevroned out the dorma from front towards the back.
Once we got to the bit where the eyebrow started the chevron just kept on going down until it met the roof as did the next and the next and so on until the eyebrow was complete. 
Then the chevrons just kept going but cut to meet the main roof 
If you look at the photos of the timber work already posted you can see how that works.
Any excess woodwork that was going to be under the slates is just simply cut away after slating had occurred. 
I think this one shows it best. If you look closely you can see the cube shape of the room that the dorma creates with the stud wall inside forming one side of a 110 cm wide corridor inside. The eyebrow starts at that stud wall and continues back to the internal stone wall and then fades into the rest of the roof. The idea of the eyebrows is to gain head room for the stairs and I put in two for symmetry or else it would have looked like the house was winking at you. 

Where sometimes I was looking at timber work and thinking "how does that have any structural integrity" the roofer explained that once you start getting the chevrons on and then the battens the whole roof (every part of it) holds the whole roof (every part of it) together.
The down force (or weight if you like ) is spread over the A frames pearlings and gables. Because it is hand built, bespoke if you like, it is amazingly strong. 

This is looking up at where the left hand ridge and the dorma ridge go into the chimney stack. later on when I post the pictures of the work inside over the last couple of years you will be able to see the extra supports I fitted to the dorma ridge.

The slate material is difficult to describe as they feel like slates but it is a composite material, (black colour guaranteed for 25 years). 
I will send more details once I get back and have access to the spec. 
You cut them easily with a special tool. It is the same f sort of size as a hand help pop riveter and looks like a large pair of tin snips with one flat bottomed blade and one sharp one, almost like an elaborate pair of wick trimming scissors. 
Any decent builders merchant or roofing supplies place will have them and they are easy and accurate to use.
The French also have special "roofing hammers" which have a cutting/trimming blade on them but they are better suited for trimming real slate however they do have a notch cut into the head for twisting out a hook should you need to. 

The Roof part 4 "Sorted"

This is how the front of roof looked in December 2009, with all the window openings secured and weather proof. 
You can see in the second photo how having the dipped dormas in the front didn’t cause any planning issues as although next doors are in roof dormas ours were not really radical and fit in. We were very happy (very very very happy) with the result





And this is how the back panned out. 
I know it look s a bit “slum dog millionaire” in the middle section but it is weather proof and that’s what counts for the winter. The plan was to clad the back to the dorma room in wood but that would wait until spring 2010.







And from the right side showing the shape of the eyebrow and the rendered chimney. 
You can also see the benefit of all the measuring and setting the lines out for the hooks as the sign of a good roof is that when you look up at the hooks they should all be in neat straight and parallel lines. 




Winter 2009, and there it was done. 
The new roof was on.
The roofer had always said that with such a complex series of angles it would be a big surprise if it didn’t leak to start with and he identified where the problems might occur and he was right and wrong at the same time .We had one small leak on the left hand side, where the water came off the dorma roof and forced its way in sideways near the eyebrow. 
It took about 4 hours to strip of some slates insert a couple of bits of wider tin and the problem was solved. 
The roof was finished September 2009 and it is going to be 2012/13 before I fit any insulation so “if” there are any hard to detect “seepers” they will become obvious in the 2 to 3 years the roof has had to settle.

The Roof part 3 Now you can see what I have seen

.
Here you can see how we have run the ridge of the dorma back to the main gable of the house, (we actually had to cut it into the chimney)
On the far side you can see the chevrons cut down to meet the angle of the main roof. 



Here is some of the detail from the left hand side of the roof of creating the valleys and angle changes needed to make one roof of it all and you can also see the formation of the eyebrows. All of the valleys were covered in zinc to maintain watertight integrity. 











Here the eye brow can been seen. The face of it closest to the camera is level with the last upright of the Shed Room. Then there is one meter from that upright to the stone wall.
This was to give us head room to get up the stairs from down below without crouching. There is to be one on each side because it looks balanced that way.

Here is the right side with in the second photo the chevron coming down from the dorma roof to dictate the “eyebrow” start.and shows the corridor gap between the ShedRoom and the wall. 








Here it is looking up from the front towards the back of the house. 




This is it tidied up and all cut in with all the battens and membrane in place.



 


Now it was time to get some slates on. The roofer gets a long piece of string and it is in a plastic bottle full of red dye. Works out the width of each tile in comparison to the roof and where to start laying so it looks right and therefore where the hooks go. He gets up the top and I was at the bottom, and we move a measure piece of wood across the bottom and he does the top. Then you take the tension on the string at batten level and lift it, under tension, then let it slap onto the battens leaving a neat line of where the hooks need to go on each of the battens. These marks act as a guide to indicate if you are coming off line when you lay out the slates.

This is us from underneath doing the lines and getting ready to lay the relatively easy front slates



Here is a shot of the front with the integral gutters fitted already just waiting for the tiles. The grat thing about these gutters is that you can stand a ladder in them and nip up the roof from there. You can also see the old original, and slightly less ornate, corbles still in place. 



That’s the first half of the front. 



And here is the front nearly finished with just the trimmings and the sealing and splicing of the sides left.



Just a quick word on the hooks used to hold the slates in place. The are stainless steel and hook over the batten (or nail in where the hook position and a chevron coincide) This leaves a slot where the tile sits in. The next set of hooks go in the batten above and that holds the next slate but it also hols the ones below tighter in place then the next row go on and that holds the new slate and also the other two rows in place. Once you have a few rows on it is near impossible to lift the slates without first having to bend over the end of the hook that is showing. 
I think a wind would lift the entire roof off the house as opposed to dislodging a couple of slates. It is a very good way of holding a roof on.
If you are doing it do not be tempted to use the "cheaper" galvanised hooks (unless you are a complete tightwad) as they rot out leading to slates shifting after a few years. 



So now for the back with the dorma first and hopefully you can really see the sweeping curves of how the roof is going to finish. You can also see the scratch coat of lime and mud render on the chimney stack. 





Now sadly it was 11th Sept 2009 and I had to go back to sea and Mrs B had to run a training course back in UK so we had to leave with the roof not finished. 
We had started work on 4th August and it was now 11th September. 
Out of 38 days we had worked 34. 
We were fortunate in that we only had one late afternoon, later in the build when all the membrane was on, when it rained and we couldn’t work. 
We used the time very productively by all going to the local bar and having a pool competition among ourselves all afternoon

With heavy hearts we had to go and leave the roofer to it, but we were both feeling very fit, healthy, tanned and very very satisfied or if you prefer “chuffed as nuts” with the roof progress. 
I received an email 10 days later to say that the roof was complete. 
OH Yes.

Total cost was under half what you would expect to pay however that was because I was the labourer and a fast learning, semi skilled helper, comfortable at height, and, as the client, I was prepared for the job to “take as long as it took”. 

If you have the cash but not the time nor inclination to do it yourself, you are left with no option but to pay, however if you can find the time and a roofer who is willing for you to be a significant part of the team then you can make enormous savings that you can spend elsewhere on the project. The total cost of the roof came in under 12,000 UK pounds and that considering the complexity of it  has got to be a bargain.