At work not so often. Although when the agency labourer f***ed off home at midday I downed my snips and I fire stopped the building before the building inspector arrived. And it passed the inspection with flying colours.
My then neighbour some years ago decided to remove all the downstairs walls and make it open plan, and then build a single storey extension on the back and knocked the back wall of the house out as well. All in a terrace of four on one of the inner houses next to mine. Using mainly mates from the trade he did jack things up and put the right bits of old iron in, but still managed to damage all our roofs cementing and crack the render on the outside walls as the structure moved slightly with the change in weight bearing. Also he came unstuck by burying the soil pipe from the toilet under the concrete floor of the extension and had to have it dug up. Very noisy that was.
I do sometimes wonder if enough consideration is payed to neighbouring property when folk get the urge to do 'home improvements'. Brian
'kinell, lucky the whole lot did not just splay out at the top and dump the whole roof into the room under it!
Nice recovery...
Would be worth sticking that quick overview into the wiki to go with the photos. Nicely illustrates what the "floor/ceiling" joists do in traditional roof framing.
And, for constructional know-nothings like me, it would be useful to have a brief overview of how things would be done differently, if there'd been no extension there and one wanted to build what the DIYer had been trying to convert it to, i.e., an extension with a vaulted ceiling.
I'm curious since the house I owned in California had a vaulted ceiling main living-room.
The main issue is one of "thrust". Nail a couple of bits of wood together to form an apex, and then add weight to the top (tiles etc), you will tend to flatten out the apex - pushing the free ends apart (and if you are unlucky, pushing the walls over into the bargain). Normally a roof truss or framed roof will have cross members that will act in tension to resist the spread of the base. So even if the apex joint is a relatively weak nailed one, it all stays together since the apex joint is only subject to compression rather than rotational moments.
If you want a vaulted ceiling, then you need to deal with the thrust - either eliminate it or cope with it.
One way is to modify the ceiling structure to eliminate the thrust - either with some tie beams across (don't need them on every rafter, and they can be quite high up making an A frame).
You could use a ring frame of some form around the perimeter at the base. This works well for hipped vaulted ceilings with 4 sloping sides. The counters the thrust by placing the 4 hip rafters into compression.
Alternatively with a gable wall at each end you can stick a heavy ridge beam in to transfer the loads from the tops of all the rafters onto the game walls. The loads from the bottom end of the rafters is then carried by the side walls.
All those will eliminate the thrust. An alternative is to design the supporting structure to be able to cope with the outward thrust, such that it can supply the restraint to the roof's thrust. (so perpendicular walls, or other buttress arrangements for the side walls)
I'm trying to picture it, sold it more than 20 years ago. Allegedly it had been built in the 20s by a property developer for his mistress. English cottage look to it.
Lathe and plaster everywhere with knob/tube wiring in the walls.
No, the living room had a wall with a gable at the far end, with a loft behind at the top and bedrooms behind, underneath. Then at the other end there was a gable built over a set of doors that led to the entrance hall. I don't think there were any A-frame beams.
Gothic designed frequently sidestepped the issue with gothic arches, which transfer all the weight downwards and have little or no sideways thrust. (unlike the rounder Norman arches that predated them)
Can you remember what the roof was made of? Might it have been covered with felt tiles - or somesuch - which would have been a lot lighter than slates or concrete tiles?
I continue to be amazed how many people managed to stay alive well into adulthood with a complete inability to perceive the world around them and notice things like weight at X does stuff to Y, how many digits their town's telephone numbers have, containers cannot have additional contents added until existing passengers depart, etc.
Common cause of structural failure in bay windows with more modern flat and segmented arches too, where there's no wall for the ends of the arch to push against.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.