HIDE THE BREEZEBLOCK !

I know what you may be thinking, but I am not referring to some bizarre sexual practice but am, in fact, talking about a new building technique that we have mastered.

When Mr H the builder replaced the barn roof, he had to put in lots of new timbers, and in places he had to build block work and fit wooden wedges to straighten out the roof. Some of the block work is now covered up with plasterboard, but this left us with some breeze blocks showing at the top of the pointed wall.

In the picture above you can just see some block work near the chimney. There were also lots of gaps between the beam at the top of the wall and the ceiling, which needed to be closed to seal the room.

I asked Mr H about the best way to disguise the block work and he suggested covering them with thin slices of stone, glued on with tile adhesive. We also decided to use some old planks that had formed the old hay store to fill in the gaps at the top of the wall.

Gluing on the stone was fairly easy, as the tile adhesive worked a treat, but chipping layers off of some of the large stones from our rubble heap proved a bit tricky. I took a while, but I managed to get enough stone without smashing my thumbs too much with the hammer. There was also a gap under part of the beam at the top of the wall which we filled with more stonework and the next day we were able to point them up

The woodwork proved a bit more time consuming, as we had to scribe round each joist, as well as trying to meet the pitch of the roof. This involved a lot of measuring, cutting, taking the wood up and down the scaffold, remeasuring, re-cutting and planing the wood to get it right.

It was a lot of work, as a lot of finishing tasks are, but we think it has been well worth it.

Even after all the measuring, there were still the odd small gap, but these have all been filled now with either strips of wood, decorators caulk and rock wool.

Hopefully, the room is now sealed up ready for the winter, and we should have less of a problem with brain freeze this winter.