A few pictures of the OSB boards

Last Saturday and Sunday Uli and I put in a good 60 square metres of OSB boards on top of the joists. There is still at least 40 square metres to be done. About 20 square metres of that should be relatively easy (the floor in the living room area) because the joists are all level. The other 20 square metres (where the kitchen will be) will be more complicated because we are installing the OSB boards on top of an existing floor - we will have to get the levels rights with the original floor itself as well as with the rest of the OSB in the living room area. Hopefully it won't be too difficult. I already found a couple of places where the roof is leaking badly, so there are now buckets set up. The weather is particularly bad at the moment - wet with heavy rain and snow melting on the roof - so those buckets need to be checked often.

 

 

 

Underfloor insulation is done

Today, Uli and I put in the underfloor insulation and got started on the OSB boards for the floor. The carpenters had put already fixed light boards about 20cm down from the top of the joists. The light boards ran parallel with the joists. The idea was that the 20cm insulation would rest on those boards and so would not fall down into the arches. On the photo you can see the light boards running between the joists. The boards are treated so there should hopefully be no problem with woodworm.

From 09:00 in the morning (of 26th January (2013)) we measured and cut insulation to size. The insulation is 035 20cm fibreglass wool. I opted for the cheaper variety which does not have a foil on either surface (the idea of the foil being that it is easier to press the insulation between rafters and have it stay there). Cutting the insulation was relatively easy and the floor area was done by about 12:30. You can see from the picture that the insulation is (almost) flush with the top of the joists.

Once the insulation was finished (we had only half a roll left over, so the calculation of how much we needed worked out quite well) we started work on the OSB boards. These were on a trailer in the yard and needed to be handed up and lifted across the floor. We decided to start in the back corner (the north west corner, so to speak). The first row (675mm x 2500mm) needed to have three slots cut for roof props. The OSB boards have a tongue and groove cut into them. We glued the top of each tongue, to try to make sure that the entire floor is a vapour proof level. We managed to get in two and half rows by 17:00. The rest of the floor will (hopefully) be faster, as we won't have to do much cutting.

Putting in a new floor

One of the biggest worries up until now was the floor in the main living room area. This is the area that was a hay barn and which was officially classed as "agricultural" until we got the planning permission to change it to "living room". The floor area is about 100 square metres, of which about half was covered in a concrete floor. This has been laid on top of the existing floorboards, which covered the existing joists. Given that only about half of the floor area had a concrete floor (about 5cm high), there was a step in the middle. The original idea was to either keep the step or to fill up the step (i.e. half of the room area) with insulation and then put underfloor heating on top of the whole lot. However, concerns for the stability of the roof meant that we needed to check the condition of the floor joists as they are responsible not only for holding up the floor, but also for tying the roof together. Problems with floor joists could thus very quickly lead to problems with the roof. Given that we are putting a new roof on, which weighs a lot more than the existing one, we did not want problems arising.

Thus, we decided to take up the concrete floor. With a big crowbar as a lever, a big sledge and a small sledge, it took a weekend to pull up the concrete in big slabs and to throw it out and into a hired skip (cost €140, by the way - about 5 cubic metres of concrete). Once the concrete was up we were able to have a look at the condition of the floor boards. The verdict was that the floor boards were not really safe at all. Towards the west side of the house they were ok-ish. Towards the middle, they were actually dangerous. Some had rotted and there was evidence of substantial woodworm damage. Another thing that became evident was that the joist spacing was far too big - the joists (albeit big at 18cm by 16cm) were spaced at over a metre from centre to centre. Using the DIN standard for calculating minimum load bearing floor thickness, this would have meant about 5cm thick boards (or OSB). Another problem was that the floor was not level at all. Over the entire length of the room (about 12 metres) there were differences of up to 4 centimetres.

To get a better idea of whether there was going to be problems down the road for the roof, we decided to take up the floor boards (many of them were rotted through anyway). This brought another issue to light. Apparently, before the concrete floor went in on top of the floor boards, the area had been used to store grain and hay. Over the years, grain had filtered through the gaps between the floor boards and had collected above the arches of the ground floor. It took roughly 80 wheelbarrows full to get rid of it! Each wheelbarrow was 7 buckets. Each of those buckets had to be carried down on a ladder.

Once the grain was taken care of, we could take a good look at the joists. In summary, many of them were in quite good condition (surprisingly, really) but one was completely rotted through in the middle and another one (the one carrying one of the roof props) had been badly damaged in the middle by woodworm.



To get the floor up to scratch, we decided to:

1. Supplement the existing joists with new ones to reduce the spacing
2. Strap additional planks onto the sides of the existing joists to raise them up
3. Replace the damaged joists
4. Replace the badly damaged roof prop (the one embedded in a concrete wall)

We enlisted Johannes Stuckenberger for help with adding the joists, leveling the floor and fixing the decayed roof prop. On January 22nd (2013) two of his men started working on the joists. They quickly added the new joists using a laser level. They also quickly raised up the existing joists using new planks bolted to the sides of the existing ones. They then started working on the roof prop. That turned out to be substantially more work than anticipated because of a concrete platform (overhead the shower in the party room) and a concrete "nose" into which the bottom of the decayed prop was embedded. It turned out that we needed to completely remove the concrete platform - which in turn meant removing the ceiling of the shower. At the end of the day, it will probably work out better anyway - we can fix a new shower ceiling to the underside of the new joists.

On the 23rd of January, the two carpenters from Stuckenberger continued working on the floor. There was more work to be done with leveling. Between the joists they also had to fix light boards to take the insulation (i.e. to stop the insulation from dropping down around the arches of the party room below). Below is a picture of how the room now looks - the spacing is now much more acceptable and we can use 25mm OSB instead of 50mm or 60mm as would have been necessary. It should also be a relatively simple job to add the insulation and the OSB on top of the joists, as the floor should be perfectly level.

The story so far

There it is - the project that has been taking up most of our (little) spare time since summer 2012 and which will be taking up any spare time for the foreseeable future. The project parameter are that this building badly needs to be renovated. Until October 2012 the building officially consisted of a house (the right hand side) attached to a stable (the left hand side, ground level) with a hay barn on top (the left hand side, first floor).

The first thing that we did was to divide up the bedrooms on the first floor (the first three windows from the right hand side on the first floor on the photo above). Originally, there were three bedrooms. Of these, one could only be reached through one of the others - not an ideal situation. Moreover, all three bedrooms were very big. We decided to split one of the big bedrooms into two smaller ones and a corridor. The corridor allowed us to access the last bedroom without needing to go through the other bedroom. Here are some photos of the interior walls going up in the larger bedroom (the one that split up). In the picture to the left you can see the corridor. The "new" bedrooms are to the left and at the end of the corridor. There is a door into the "cut off" bedroom to the right.

After splitting up the bedrooms in the existing house, we needed to get planning permission from the Landratsamt in Erding. We found out that we needed to get permission to change the declared usage from agricultural (for the stable) to living room. To get that through, we needed to submit a plan, drawn by somebody with enough training in planning. Luckily for us, Johannes Stuckenberger came up with a plan which was approved. On October 25th (2012), I was finally able to pick up the planning permission in Erding. The administrative fee was about €560. Below is the first floor from the plan.

When we got the planning permission, winter was about to set in and it was already getting cold. We decided that it was most likely not a good idea to open the roof. Instead, we decided that we could get working on the floor in the main living room area (the hay barn) and on getting ready for installing the heating in the bedroom area.

You can see from the photo on the right that there was a concrete floor in the hay barn area - at least part of it. We wanted to install underfloor heating here. I decided to get rid of the concrete floor because it would have meant having to put in a step in the floor, the concrete was cracked and I also wanted to get a look at the floorboards and joists underneath.

It turned out that I was right to get rid of the floor. The boards underneath were in a woeful state in many areas. At least one of the joists was rotted completely through in the middle. Other than that, the joists were spaced at over a metre - this was not really good given that we want to put in a couple of inches of concrete (for the underfloor heating). So I got rid of the floorboards too, as you can see from the picture.

So, that's enough for a first post. I'll try to keep this updated as often as I can.