Health and Safety Problem!

We have a Nid des Frelons in the trunk of one of the old oak trees on our Talus. That's a Hornet's Nest for my English language readers. Normally they don't cause us any problems apart from the odd one that gets lost and gets into the house.

I found a slight Health and Safety problem yesterday when I went to put my boots on:

Thank you Sir Isaac

A brief Physics lesson today.

The new lintel beam was lifted into place this week using a set of principles first written down by Sir Isaac Newton about a hundred years before the present building at La Basse Cour was built (Adam has a theory that part of the present building is older than 1798 but more on that in a future blog).

The new oak beam weighs 200kg and we had to lift it about 2.8 metres to its new home, having hauled it off the trailer and onto the ground Adam and I tried to work out what to do next

The Palan (winch) starts to lift the beam

Half way

Adam does the hard work as the lintel nears its destination

The beam hanging outside the wall near to its final location

 Here's where Sir Isaac comes in. Newton's first law of motion says (from Wikipedia):

Lex I: Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.

 
But of course this was how he wrote it originally in Latin.

More usefully in English:

Law I: Every body persists in its state of being at rest except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed

 So, with 200kg of beam hanging in mid air all three of us got up on the scaffolding and, using our feet, compelled it to change its state by force impressed. Here it is seated in its final location on its stone pads.
 

Thanks Sir Isaac !!

A line is crossed

It rained this morning just before six o'clock. Adam told me he woke up with the rain - he's been a bit concerned about the fragility of the wall around the barn door where the stones have been removed from the A frame holding up the roof. The stones in the wall are held together by clay (this was used before lime was in general use) and heavy rain could wash out the clay making the wall more unstable. So heavy rain could be very bad news.

There was an important day in the potager - in early April I think - when a line was crossed and a long period of putting things into the potager (time, effort, seeds .....) transformed as the potager produced its first crop.

We crossed a similar line today in the barn as two weeks of ripping things out of the barn changed and we put something back into the building for the first time. Barbara was on mixer duties for the lime mortar that Adam used to reconstruct the stone wall around the new steel beam, this secures the wall and makes the structure less fragile. A big milestone.

I also picked up the new lintel for the repair of the eroded lintel we'd cut back above the barn door - 200kg of solid seasoned oak cut to size by Soulaine in Questembert. Tomorrow we have to work out how to lift it up .......

Last week's progress

Adam has made good progress on the big new opening over the barn door and spent a day cutting and assembling stones to be used in the next stage. We've also cut back the rotten lintel beam above the barn door ready to accept a new lintel beam:

Sandblasting the Beams

Today the old beams were sandblasted to remove the limewash they had been painted with and prepare their surfaces for protective treatment. The effect has been to bring out the grain and the character of the wood and the colour has come out as a warm brown.

The sandblasting was done by GK Sandblasting, http://www.gksandblasting.com/ or http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.272841336072991.73613.262499017107223&saved#!/pages/Gk-sandblasting/262499017107223 .

Julie did the hard work and is inside the suit in the photos doing the blasting whilst Graham kept an eye on the compressor and machinery. 

The dust billows out as the sandblasting begins

We also had a small area of the wall blasted to reveal the stone colour under the limewash, the exposed areas of wall will look very good when finished.

Beam Banter II

Maybe I will write a book on beams in French barns ......

A couple of posts ago I introduced you to our beam set, beam 0 was cut out on Monday and revealed some of its inner secrets. At one end the outside of the beam had lots of worm holes and was quite crumbly - it was possible to break off bits of the beam easily and it didn't look very strong. Here's the cross-section after it was cut out:

 The light ring around the outside is the soft, crumbly worm-attacked wood that looks so weak from the outside - here it can be seen that the soft part of the wood is a very small part of the overall cross-section of the beam. The rest of the beam is hard as iron and retains the vast majority of its original strength.


The weakest area of a beam is at the end where it joins the wall, this is the other end of this beam where it had been messed around during some previous update or change in the barn and had half its cross-section cut through to accommodate a door lintel. The effect of this was that the core had been exposed to damp and worm attack and its core was very weak - correct decision to take it out.

More on beams in the next post.

Scaffolding and Beam Banter

This morning we put up the scaffolding that arrived on Friday, It had been imported from PSB Scaffolding in the UK, normally I prefer to source items in France but scaffold doesn't seem to exist for self-building in the form we use in the UK. We got lots of parts and like a huge meccano set set up two bays this morning of scaffold:

This afternoon we removed the beam from the barn that was specified for removal:

 Unfortunately the falling beam beat the photographer ...... :

Renovation or Conservation ?

One of the questions Adam Farndon asked us was whether we wanted to renovate or conserve the barn. We hadn't thought of the question before let alone the answer - we'd always used the term "renovate" to cover all options. It's been an important question this week however as the initial clearance and demolition work turned to putting things back into the barn.

Renovate or conserve came up as soon as we climbed up to assess the condition of the major transverse beams - there are five of them being kept in the finished design - and we had our suspicions when we first bought the place as one of them had a very permanent and solid looking oak beam propping it up. The state of beams in French country properties should be, and for all I know already is, the subject of a book and there are lots of opinions around. Ours each have an individual character so let me introduce them to you,  counting from the house:

Number 0: This one is coming out - an increasingly wise decision by the architect when we saw the condition of the end by the existing door/ lucarne window!
Number 1: this is oversize at nearly 35cm square, in very good condition and well squared off.
Number 2: Standard sized at 30cm square, solid with some worm but square
Number 3: This is the one that is propped up, the top of the beam at both ends has been hollowed out (we thought it was rot but it's much too precise a shape). The north end has quite a bit of worm attack and is flaky wood, the prop beam is directly under a complex knot.
Number 4: I call this one a cranked shape as it twists about 25cm over its length. This also has hollows on top of the beam - something to do with how the roof was put up? - and looked solid at first glance. Deeper inspection showed that it has a couple of long and deep cracks through it of unknown provenance. This beam has had the ignominy of deep slots being cut in its top to adjust the floor for the wayward shape of beam 5.
Number 5: This one appears to have been installed from a completely different building - it's a different shape to the others, twists down significantly over its length and is fitted into the wall at least 15cm below the others. Current theory is that this one was added after the others - either it's a Breton bodge or we haven't worked out its purpose yet.

So the weakest beams are 3 and 4 - the two beams that will be taking the main load of our two first floor bathrooms - not good.

So do we conserve by rescuing the beams or replacing them (not an easy task when the span is nearly six metres) or restore by allowing modern building techniques to give us and the old building a hand. We went for restoration and on Friday morning CMB delivered three 6.5m steel beams to go into the walls to support the floor loads upstairs. Adam had prepared the walls and knocked through a gap on the north side to allow us to "post" the beam through from the outside. Sounds easy doesn't it? Here's how we did it in pictures:

Adam supervises the unloading of the steel beams

The three beams are stored ready for moving

Two entry holes prepared in the wall

The scaffolding system arrived from the UK in the middle of beam work

Nothing to do with the beams - photographer got distracted !

Lots of scaffolding ...

The first beam through the wall

Beam 1 balancing on the wall opening

Drawing Beam 1 through on the inside

Adam checks the position of the first beam

The second beam is brought up to the prepared entry hole

In position ready for the final lift

The hardest part !

Beam 2 gets brought into the barn

Final positioning checks

Beam 2 in place :o)

Update on the Barn

The whole of the ceiling is out now,the smaller beams have gone to be stored for future re-use, into Adam's trailer for his winter's heating or onto a huge fire that Barbara has been tending for four days. The space in the barn is very cathedral like, the attached pictures don't quite do justice to the space but give some idea:

0

The north side of the Barn and ceiling

The roof exposed in all its glory

 

 

 

South side of the Barn

Looking towards the main barn door

Barbara's fire

The east wall of the barn - this will be left pierres apparants (exposed stone) in the final design

Looking down the barn from above the beams

These beams and roof have stood for at least 220 years ......

As we've worked through clearing the barn Adam and I have often found ourselves speculating about the people who built this barn, how they set about their work and what their life was like. It's been a bit like Inspector Morse as well as we've also had a chance to turn detective and work out what changes have been done since 1789. Mostly they are apparent because the quality of work isn't as good as the original building or because the builders took a short cut they didn't think would be apparent - until we came along.

It's a bit disconcerting when bits of a main beam that we'd hoped to build our bathroom floor on come off in your hand. In the next entry I'll talk about how we're using modern technology to complement the original craftsmanship to hopefully create a building that can last for another hundred years or so.

The Barn Renovation Commences

Monday 5th September 2011 marks the start of phase 2 of our construction work and, in many ways, the real objective of us being here. We've started work with an English stonemason, Adam of Farndon Restoration, on the construction of our barn renovation.

We started by knocking out the ceiling and small beams in the roof. Part of the ceiling was made with lath and daub: hundreds of short chestnut stakes had been painstakingly rolled in a mixture of mud and straw, then put between cross beams and the whole thing had been plastered from below with lime to create a ceiling. This must have taken a long, long time for whoever built the barn. The construction of the barn is interesting and more and more it seems as if it was built originally as a residence due to the detail and care taken in the construction. For the first time in probably 220 years the barn is open from the floor to the ceiling.

It was dirty, horrible work but has already made a huge difference as the attached photos show:

Work starts on pulling down the ceiling

The high gable end to the barn is visible above the white stones

Adam at work

Ceiling out, just befor the small beams came out