With the second half of the timber order finally in there's some lost time to make up. To begin with, as an aside for anyone with a technical interest in these things, we're going for a belt and braces approach with the ground level woodwork. It's lovely C24 regularised kiln dried pressure treated stuff and will be subjected to a dip in bitumen on both ends. That's the braces. The belt, in an almost literal sense, is a roll of damp proof membrane. This will isolate the sleeper joists from hopefully everything. Both underneath and tucked around the ends for good measure. If there's something missing from this setup please comment below.
In theory the new sleepers and joists are fairly simple to fit. The sleepers just get cut to length and plonked onto the new sectioned sleepers walls (sectioned for added ventilation) and the joists nailed on top. The Hall, due to its 7m length has two 3.6m joists trimmed and lap jointed end to end for the sleepers.
In practice, wanging around enormously long pieces of wood indoors is a little challenging, especially when one end is dripping sludgy synthetic bitumen stuff all over the place. It's not too bad though and it all goes down pretty quickly. Actually adding new stuff to the house makes for a nice change too. Some tangible progress at last. Cross nailing the joists into the sleepers is satisfying work too, it's not every day you get to use 100mm nails. One small mercy is that the masonry sleeper walls are pretty much bang on plumb and so require virtually no attention whatsoever. That and both rooms divide up almost perfectly into joists with 400mm centres. By almost, we're talking about 20mm off, so pretty good. Suddenly, we're back at floor height again.
The observant reader may notice some strips of OSB3 tacked to the bottom of the joists. These are for the insulation to sit in order to meet building regulations. Budget dependent we'll likely try and use some sheep to fill the gaps as it allows the wood to breath better than synthetic materials. You get brownie points from mother nature too, though sadly these don't turn into actual brownies.
