Now You See Him ...

Glen is the newest recruit to project Balintore. He is helping Gregor with the heavy work of rebuilding floors. This blog entry deals with the rebuilding of the floor of room RA13, as labelled in the 2007 attic floor plans.

Look at the coving at the top right of the hallway in the first photo - this is immediately below room RA13. In the second photo, both Glen and the coving have gone, with plastic buckets holding the material that has been removed. :-) 

before coving removal

after coving removal

It's horrible losing original fabric, but this was adhering to rotten wood which had to be removed to put the new floor in place. At least, in these photos, I have a visual record.

Another aspect of rebuilding floors is repairing rotten beams. The beam shown below is known as a flitch beam. Between two 12" x 6" wooden beams is a cast iron metal plate. The bolted-together composite (the flitch beam) provides strength and resistant to twisting. The rotten ends of the wooden beam have been sawn off. You can see some residual dry-rot damage in the centre of the cut ends. The dry-rot is fortunately no longer active.

In the second picture the wooden beams ends have been replaced by modern reclaim beams - and these have been packed to the cast iron plate and bolted through, so an improvised but strong solution.

before beam repair

after beam repair

The room being refloored had its original flooring sawn out and sold on long ago - pretty criminal if you ask me. Anyhow, you can see the short sawn ends of the floor boards by the skirting board in the photo below. These have to be removed for the new floor to be put in place. They are only good as firewood and this photo is the last formal record of their existence. 

remnants of original flooring