Month: July 2007

New Ground Floor Windows have been Delivered

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In amongst all the troubles that we having upstairs we have now received the new windows for the ground floor.

Ground Floor Window Delivery

I’m looking forward to seeing what they all look like after they are installed, especially the louver windows for the master bedroom, as it took me quite a bit of time and a few variations to finally find the windows that I wanted for the master bedroom.

We got all of the windows tinted, to help with privacy and to help keep the rooms cooler.

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Demolishing our Bathroom Floor

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I think that I will let the photos do most of the talking here, as I am extremely tired and Tamara’s dad is about to go to bed (we are staying with them while we don’t have a bathroom at our house).

Using a Jackhammer on the Bathroom Floor Second Floor Concrete Bathroom Floor Pieces in the Ground Floor A large hole where our bathroom floor used to be

Unfortunately for us they decided to do the bathroom floor demolision a day earlier than expected, so we didn’t get a chance to clean up and pack up like we had wanted to. Our house is now discustingly dirty. Concrete dust has gotten into every nook and cranny in the house and our furniture is caked in it.

We had planned to seal off the work area with plastic sheeting, but we never got a chance to. When we got there this afternoon to cover stuff with sheets it was too late.

I don’t know how long it will take to clean it up, but we are probably talking days, rather than hours.

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Renovating the Upstairs Bathroom

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It’s sort of funny, I was flipping through some of my old posts trying to find photos of our office and I came accross this quote:

That does bring up another problem though, what happens if it starts to leak again? How will I know until it has actually destroyed the ceiling under it?

Given the option I would just get rid of the spa bath all together and redo the entire upstairs bathroom, but I can’t see that happening any time soon …

Given the fact that we have just ripped out the floor, ceiling and walls in our upstairs bathroom so that we can completely renovate the bathroom to replace the crumbling floor I thought that was kind of ironic. It made me smile, although I am still not in a chuckling mood right now.

Original Article: How to Fix a Spa Bath

Tying Down the Roof Trusses and Load Bearing Walls

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To be honest I am so emotionally tired right now that I don’t really feel like writing anything, but I am hoping that this will help me to process a bit…

On Friday last week, if you recall, we found out that we need to replace the floor in our bathroom. This means gutting the entire bathroom and starting from scratch with a new bathroom floor, walls and ceiling.

I got a phone call this morning from our builder asking when I would be home, and suggesting that I bring a camera with me when I come to take a photo of something.

So I get there and he shows me how after removing the wall sheeting he can lift up the roof just by pushing on it ! Here is a series of photos of the wall frames, the roof trusses and the ceiling frame, I’ll explain more about the problems after you see the photos.

Load bearing internal wall - with non-structural timber Where are the roof truss tie downs Cut up load bearing wall with no roof truss tie downs

The top two photos show the wall between the dining room and the bathroom. Although it is an internal wall, it is a load bearing wall. Being a load bearing wall it should be made of structural grade timber (it’s not), it should have a large, high strength continuous beam running the entire width of it (it doesn’t) and it should be tied down to the roof trusses (again it isn’t).

The third photo shows the external wall, which is also a structural / load bearing wall. This is where our builder was able to lift the roof just by pushing up on it. The external wall at least has the continuous beam running the full lenth, and some of it is structural timber, but a lot of the wall framing has been cut in half to put in the louvers and the concrete floor, and again the roof trusses are not tied down to the top beam on the wall , and some of the trusses have been installed upside down.

With the roof itself there is also not enough support for the tin that is there . There is supposed to be either 60 or 90 cm between the timber under the tin (I can’t remember which at the moment), but on our roof there is nearly a metre and a half gap in some places!

Our builder reckons that most of these problems continue into the office area of our house as well. So he will be pulling down the ceiling in the office, which is sagging in a lot of places, and having a look at it.

I won’t know until tomorrow what this all means, but what I do know for sure is that the renovation costs are now due to blow out even more. We have already needed to change our expectations to where we won’t be moving in under the house anytime soon, so I don’t know what all these additional problems with our roof and load bearing walls is going to mean…

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