Building Blox: Week 15 – Roof tiling and cleanup

What we did:

• Tiling cont,
• Building Control and warranty provider inspections,
• Utility connections.

On site, the tiling continued and we had a couple of council building control and warranty provider inspections, whilst back at my desk I was buried in the boring task of organising underground utility connections.

Now the roof structure was completed, the coverings could continue to be completed and the design of the front gables (flat ends of the triangular roof section) was really coming to life.

Aside from this, onsite the guys worked to cleanup what had become a messy site!

Finalising the design

This week I finalised the internal layout with some help from a friend who made me some cool 3D renders which really helped visualise the space!

Nerves before inspections...

Both the council’s Building Regulations officer, who checks the technical and safety standards of the build, and the surveyor from the company providing the warranty, wanted to inspect the roof structure once it was completed, so both visited this week. Like waiting for your exam results, I always get a little nervous at this point, but fortunately there were no real issues, simply a couple of simple clarifications to be made.

Conflicts between experts

An ongoing issue and area of contention we have had is with the provision of movement joints – these are thin gaps between sections of brickwork, filled with flexible material, which allow for expansion and shrinkage in the brickwork. You probably would have seen these within long sections of brickwork, or between two different brick buildings.

If not, a more obvious use of movement joints which you may have noticed are those within road sections of bridges as below:

Movement joints in bridges

The structural engineer had specified that we should use these within the long 18.7m of brickwork on the front and back, and also all of the side walls. However, most of the other parties, including the contractors, surveyors and inspectors disagreed. After hearing their arguments, I agreed these shouldn’t be required in the side walls and there would be a lot of unnecessary work to fit them. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a sticky position as the engineer wouldn’t sign off on the design if they were not fitted, so I had to insist on them being fitted, leading to some frustrated and disgruntled members of the team!

Next week we would continue with finishing off the tiling as the rest of the team took a break to work for another client.