Week 20-22 - Flood Clean up

As I am sure every Cumbrian (or anyone else that owns any kind of news giving device - tv etc) knows we've had some floods. Seeing as we haven't started on any of the flood defenses for the building yet and are quite literally on the banks of the river, it got a little wet. 

Needless to say it was rather [insert expletive adjective here to taste]

We were due a big tidy up on site anyway and had a skip booked for the next week already. It  has taken a good few weeks but we have now tidied all the original and the flood mess. By the way, if anyone lost some terrible 90's films on DVD, a copy of 'to kill a mocking bird' (complete with students annotations) or a 8 pack of butchers choice sausages in the floods? They made there way down stream to us and i will return them to you for a small fee!

No photos of the flooding im afraid, i had bigger problems on the day, plus its not something i want to reminisce in the photo albums over. Having said that the flood does come with a silver lining. We did not loose any materials (got them all up to 1st floor) and there was no structural damage. Seeing the flood happen first hand helped a lot with confirming what flood defenses we need to put in place should be - water comes from places you would not have thought. 

Week 19&23 - Re-building internal floor and walls

This is the last of the major structural timber work to be done (for this stage of the build anyway)...

The building is over 4 staggered floors, each cutting in half way through the height of the space below. As you can see in the picture this means lots of edges of floors supporting the wall above in turn up the building. Problem being the first one (holding up two floors above it) is not up to the job - we're talking flaps in the wind. So it all comes down...

Above is the original set up from the upper ground floor looking toward the river side of the building.
Below is the same veiw from upper ground with all unsounds structure removed

 And same view with rebuilt structure

 View of original structure from 1st floor

Same view with old structure removed, looking down onto ground floor (street level) and up onto second floor

 View from ground floor looking up past edge of 2nd floor to roof

 New structure from 1st floor level. The stairs will come up from ground floor in the bottom right of the 3 door sized gaps. Middle gap will be a large window looking down into the workshop below, and then left most gap is stairs up to 2nd floor

 Finished structure from the 2nd floor, this will be residential part of the building. There is now also a small mezzenene level above the staircase at this level to become a sleeping area in the spare room

 New hole out into the 2nd floor for a staircase down to the front door of the residential area.