The return of the floorboards

Yesterday our floorboards came back. Some of you may remember the journey they have been on.

The oak trees were felled as part of our coppice management work here at Swan Barn Farm back in the winter.

They were then taken just down the road to Wests to be processed and kiln dried. I was really looking forward to them coming back, hoping they were going to look as good as I had imagined.

They came back all neatly bundled and wrapped up.

You couldn’t see the boards through the wrapping, so we had to unload them before getting chance to get a decent look. They were put straight into the building, construction of the floor is underway, and they will be starting to go down pretty soon.

I am not sure a photo really does them justice, but they looked pretty great to me. In these days of fake wooden flooring a solid oak floor is something you don’t see very often, certainly it hasn’t been cheap, but by using our own timber we made a considerable saving, and it should last for a very long time. It will also look pretty special in the building and will be a major part of the way the building reflects the character of the woods from which it came.

Having had a 20 mile round trip these are the furthest traveled pieces of wood in the whole building, most of the timber has travelled less than 2 or 3 miles, something we are very proud of. They will end up being used 3 fields away from where they grew.

Oak from this part of the world has always had a reputation for being of the best quality you can get, the timber produced at Swan Barn Farm is certainly right up there. The climate and soils in the Weald of England provide ideal growth conditions and the woodlands we have are cabable of sustainably producing timber without the resource being depleted.

The boards will go down soon as the edges of the floor form part of the support for the straw bale walls. They will have a protective covering put over them while the rest of the building is completed, I will definitely be taking a peek to see them in place before they are covered over.

 

A floorboard update and the membrane

Some of you may remember us sending the oak for our floorboards down to the local sawmill, Wests near Petworth, we are using them as it is the nearest wood drying kiln we can access. The floorboards need kiln drying to ensure they don’t warp and leave gaps between then when they dry out.

The oak logs were sawn into planks a few months ago and ever since have been stacked in the wood yard air drying.

Despite the rain we have had over the last couple of weeks they had a long period of time out in very dry conditions, this weather will have meant they air dred very effectively. This takes them down to a certain level of moisture content, but to ensure they are stable in the building the time has come to move them into the kiln for the final drying. Here you can see them being moved in with a forklift.

Throughout the process the planks are all kept in the order they were cut out of the log, this helps ensure they dry out evenly and minimises warping.

The next stage will be the thicknessing and milling of the boards into their final form, I am really looking forward to seeing them after they have been finished, I have high hopes for our floor, they were lovely pieces of wood and the floor should look pretty spectacular.

Meanwhile back at the building the membrane and some of the counter battens have gone on the roof.

The membrane will ensure the building stays nice and watertight and the counter battens are the strips of wood which hold it in place onto the rafters. The counter battens will also ensure there is an air gap underneath the shingles, which should keep them dry and prolong their life.

It also means that from now on whenever anyone is working inside the building they will be able to stay dry, with the way things have been here lately that is quite a blessing.

It defines the shape of the roof as well, and means you can really start to get a picture of what the internal spaces are going to be like.

Assembling the frames

The main A frames for the Speckled Wood building are now in the process of being constructed. They are put together on the framing bed which sits at the back of the build site. You may remember the components of the frame being lifted onto the bed in an earlier post. The framing bed has measurements built into it which allow the timbers in the frame to be lined up in their correct positions while they are being worked on. The bed also holds the timbers off the floor so that they are kept level and are at a convenient height to work on.

Above you can see Rudy, Rich and Nick starting to measure the timbers that will be jointed together to form the two sides of the A frame.

Ben and Rudy spent a while marking it out to ensure that everything would come together smoothly. You can also see above the tripod and block and tackle that is used to raise the upper timber out of the way for the joint to be cut in the bottom timber. These are heavy peices of wood, and as many mechanical aids as possible are used to make lifting and moving them easier.

The two sides of the A are traditionally known as cruck’s (sometimes an individual one is referred to as a blade), they form the strength at the heart of the main frame. Cruck framed buildings have been built in this part of the world for centuries, it was a very common construction technique in the early medieval period, often using two halfs of a curved oak tree that had been sawn in half to make the two sides. Ben has taken this traditional form of framing and adapted it by using roundwood poles to form a similar, but lighter structure, which can be built using materials that can be sustainably sourced in local woodlands.

Although they only came from less than a mile away it felt like these timbers had quite a journey to get this far, they still have a couple of much shorter, but much more complicated moves to make yet before they take their final place in the new building, but seeing them being jointed together was very exciting.

I was discussing moving the timber around for this project with a woodsman friend  in the pub the other week. It brought to our minds the occasion which sometimes happens when you recognise a piece of wood you are about to use for some purpose or other, sometimes, you even find you can think back and remember the tree it came from. I am not sure exactly what this says about how efficient we are in minimising the number of steps between tree and end product, you could look at that either way. But its certainly nice to know where the things you use have come from, and that the way they were produced had a minimal impact on the world around you.

There are 4 of these main frames to be built, and we still have to face the challenge of moving a comleted one onto its padstones. But if all goes to plan we hope to be raising the frames on the 12th of May, if you are not to far away and have been following the project you might like to come and watch the raise take place from the field next door to the build site.

The A frame has two horizontal timbers on it, the lower one (furthest away in the picture below) is the underfloor beam. This, as it says on the tin, supports the main floor of the building, joists will bridge the gaps between the beams and the floorboards will sit on top of these. It is made out of oak from the woods here at Swan Barn Farm, you may remember me posting about how complicated it was to make. We still have to make two more of these to support the verandah floor, another challenge!

The second horizontal (closest to you in the pic below) is the tie beam. This is made out of coppiced chestnut and ties the two crucks together as well as fixing into the jowel posts. It also supports the first floor of the building.

The jowel posts are the two vertical posts you can see outside of the A, they are held in place by the two horizontals and will eventually form part of the structure of the walls of the building. They will hold up the wall plate which in turn will support the roof.

Having just re-read this post I am not utterly convinced of how much sense I have been making, especially as with the bed underneath the frame its a bit confusing seeing which bit of wood belongs to which. Hopefully it will all become clear when they frames are raised and can be seen in their vertical positions. That is going to be quite a day.

Fetching the long timbers

The new Speckled Wood building is going to need a number of long timbers for its construction. Bringing in the oak for the underfloor beams was tricky enough at 7 metres, these range from 9 metres up to 14 metres. This was going to require a new plan!

There was no way we could fit them down Collards Lane, the main entrance to Swan Barn, so they were going to have to come in cross country from the far end of the farm.

Our collegues Matt and James from Hindhead very kindly agreed to lend us a hand, they brought along their long hay bale trailer on the back of their Massey Fergusson tractor to act as a transporter for the day. We had skidded all of the timbers as far as we could so that they could be loaded up. The first load was the larch poles from Valewood. These are going to be used for the ridge pole and wall plates, as well as for a couple of long beams.

Quite a long load!

They were driven to Almshouse Common and then down a track into the back of Swan Barn Farm, we had to take them over a ditch and bank (only getting stuck once! Thankfully we had our Big Valtra tractor there to pull out the Massey and trailer) and into one of the fields at the far end of the farm.

Unloading was a bit quicker and easier than loading.

Then it was back out up on to Black Down to fetch the Chestnut. These poles are going to be used for the crucks and tie beams which will form the main frame of the building, they are the ones we were cutting in Ridden Corner Copse.

These were a bit shorter, so could be loaded with the timber crane, which was lucky as there were quite a few to load up and it needed to be done quite gently to make sure we didn’t knock off the ones that had already been loaded.

It all went pretty smoothly, and soon enough another load was on its way across Almshouse Common to be unloaded in the fields.

That was only the first part of the journey, they then need to be skidded (dragged behind a tractor) the half mile or so through the farm to the Speckled wood build site.

Its quite a relief to see them all lined up ready to be used in the building, theres still a lot to bring back, but most of the rest is all a lot smaller and easier to handle, I am really looking forward to seeing them starting to be used in the coming weeks as the building starts to take shape.

Some tricky sawing

Matt and I have made a start on our underfloor beams today, its a bit of a challenge and quite a tricky job. The timber came from the nearby Devils Punch Bowl, it was felled in the appropriately named Sawpit Field as part of a project aimed at creating a habitat link for butterflies and other heathland wildlife between the Punchbowl and Highcombe Edge.

This is the timber being loaded for the journey back to Swan Barn farm. As you can see they are not exactly small logs. At over seven metres they are at the limit of what our timber trailer can cope with.

In fact they are too heavy for the crane to lift in one go and had to be lifted off end over end. We brought four of these back to the farm, they are to provide four beams which will support the floor of the Speckled Wood building. They are also over a metre to long to fit on our sawmill (we new that before we bought it, a longer mill was prohibitively expensive and all the other sawn timbers in the build are much smaller) meaning a little bit of inginuity was required to saw the beams.

The plan was to cut the beam out of one end of the log, then move it down the mill and saw out the remainder of the beam. If that sounds simple I can assure you it wasn’t!

After the log was positioned on the mill we made measurements and cut up the length of the mill to the right point.

We then had to knock in wedges to release the trapped blade so it could be backed out of the cut.

Once the sawmill blade was backed out of the cut we had to use a chainsaw to remove the piece of timber we were milling away from the beam.

Once this had been done all around the beam we ended up with the worlds biggest lolipop.

This lollipop was slid back along the mill on rollers so the saw could be brought back in to finish off the far end.

It was a bit nervy milling off the end bits, hoping that all the cuts were going to line up properly and we weren’t going to end up with a wonky beam. But things seemed to be coming together well.

You can see above the point where we just had one final cut to make, by now sighs of relief were starting to be drawn, I definitely fealt like this was quite a big challenge, and was chuffed to bits when the last cut went through and the finished beam came off the bed of the mill.

We have three more of these to make this week, along with the challenge of getting all of the long timbers back to the build site. All in all quite a tricky week. Wish us luck!