New Shed Build

The skitz said:
Strokes for folks innit a roofing square on a roof is near identical to marking a stairs out but im fucking useless at roofs having done so few of them but I have made probably made 20k staircases in 30 years .. we make 1200 stairs a year from basic rubbish to get up to a mezzanine to 50k full curves and none of them faze me chiz ... show me a hipped roof and the fat kid starts to quiver and shake 😆
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Every job you learn something. When you've done masse of roofs or staircases you've built up an approach knowledge base you don't even know you have and your routine is fine-tuned.
 
The skitz said:
Strokes for folks innit a roofing square on a roof is near identical to marking a stairs out but im fucking useless at roofs having done so few of them but I have made probably made 20k staircases in 30 years .. we make 1200 stairs a year from basic rubbish to get up to a mezzanine to 50k full curves and none of them faze me chiz ... show me a hipped roof and the fat kid starts to quiver and shake 😆
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Had a fella from the London loft staircase company on site one day, he measured and drew out the staircase, no calculator involved at all. Watched him do that and got chatting, he'd done something like a 50k staircases in his time and said his margin of error was less than 1%. Big call but I believed him and wasn't disappointed when the stairs turned up mm perfect. Used that company dozens of times over the years with no issues.
Me, I find staircases are a dark art, a bit like electrics! I can almost get my head around it but prefer not to!!!
 
Chizel - Founding Father said:
Had a fella from the London loft staircase company on site one day, he measured and drew out the staircase, no calculator involved at all. Watched him do that and got chatting, he'd done something like a 50k staircases in his time and said his margin of error was less than 1%. Big call but I believed him and wasn't disappointed when the stairs turned up mm perfect. Used that company dozens of times over the years with no issues.
Me, I find staircases are a dark art, a bit like electrics! I can almost get my head around it but prefer not to!!!
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I'm measuring so long now i know the minute I walk into a house how the stairs will or won't work,we do a minimum of 400 attic stairs a year so repetition is massive.. I calculate everything in my head and often get asked how the fuck are you able to calculate rises and goings from sizes on a tape ? I'm decent with maths but it's mostly ive seen those exact measurements hundreds of times and it's probably mostly memory now rather than me being rain man .. I love being a chippy it's what I always wanted to be from 8 years old .. I obviously own my company and have 10 staff but I still help and manage all our fitting jobs as I still love being on my tools ... I hate the office and I detest paperwork so my accountant does absolutely all my business dealings.. im better at making money with my hands 🥰
 
Gimlet said:
Nails ain't what they used to be either. Galv batten nails I used 30 years ago on roofs never used to bend as easily as they do now. They're sold by weight and I swear they've got thinner.

And talking of 30 years ago, you chippie kids don't know you're born. Back in the day blokes screwed everything on site together, including entire cut roofs, using one of these - all chippies had them. There was wasn't a battery drill in sight:

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Still have one in a draw in the garage
 
Chizel - Founding Father said:
Love stories like that. I'm quite capable when it comes to cut roofs but I couldn't do it without my ready reckoner and roofing square.. well, I could and have but it takes a lot longer and makes what can be a frustrating job even more so! I love doing cut roofs though and apart from stair cases they are one of the most technical tasks for a chippy but very rewarding. The objective being no daylight in plumb and seat cuts/birdsmouths. Not entirely sure why as once covered they will never be seen again but I lose sleep over stuff like that!!!
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Had a mouse issue in the loft, found daylight above the porch (built using original cottage stone) bit of mastic and expanding foam an no more mice 👍 the rest of the house is factory prepped so should be sound - proper tradesmen wouldn't have had those gaps
 
The skitz said:
I'm measuring so long now i know the minute I walk into a house how the stairs will or won't work,we do a minimum of 400 attic stairs a year so repetition is massive.. I calculate everything in my head and often get asked how the fuck are you able to calculate rises and goings from sizes on a tape ? I'm decent with maths but it's mostly ive seen those exact measurements hundreds of times and it's probably mostly memory now rather than me being rain man .. I love being a chippy it's what I always wanted to be from 8 years old .. I obviously own my company and have 10 staff but I still help and manage all our fitting jobs as I still love being on my tools ... I hate the office and I detest paperwork so my accountant does absolutely all my business dealings.. im better at making money with my hands 🥰
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Knowledge through experience. It's like dart players in the pub who can barely read or write but they can add and subtract every possible three dart combination in a split second becuase they've done it thousands of times and know every combo. I'm average at basic maths. I was in the top set at school but bottom of the class. When they moved me down to the second set it was too easy so I sort feill between the cracks. I've always admired beered up dart players who can crunch numbers like a super-computer.

It's the same with my brickwork. Much simpler trigonometry than chippying but you getto know all the permutations. I know what the measurements will be when setting out without using one of those stupid brick layers tape measures whicb have brick curses marked on them. In fact I can't use them. They throw me because I want to see the numbers.
 
Gimlet said:
Nails ain't what they used to be either. Galv batten nails I used 30 years ago on roofs never used to bend as easily as they do now. They're sold by weight and I swear they've got thinner.

And talking of 30 years ago, you chippie kids don't know you're born. Back in the day blokes screwed everything on site together, including entire cut roofs, using one of these - all chippies had them. There was wasn't a battery drill in sight:

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Gimlet said:
That is very true. I've known many a perfectly good chippie who didn't know where to start with a cut roof. I worked for years with an old school chippie, Dave. I think he's about ten years older than me, so late 60's now, and time-served. When he was doing his apprenticeship on Fridays they stopped work at 4:00 because that was "sharpen up " day. No chuckaway saws. They resharpened them and reset the kerf, and sharpened their plane blades on oil stones etc. And the foreman checked them.

I was working with Dave right up until I moved up north. Always cut roofs. I took pride in making sure my footprint was absolutely spot-on with perfect diagonals across the wallplates to make life as easy for him as possible. Biggest job I did was a four bed detached house with bay windows and 13 metres across diagonals. I got them to within 5 mm. Took all day to set the oversite out and the client was jumping up and down wanting everything done yesterday. It took time to get it spot on but that time was paid back ten times over when it came to fitting the roof and internal first-fix.

I used to love watching Dave work. It was like witchcraft. He's a fairly chunky bloke and doesn't do anything quickly. He ambles round the site, always with a pencil clamped in his mouth and the roof seems to appear like magic. When he priced off the plan he'd give me a timber list. I'd get it all delivered and waiting under a tarp and he'd turn up (pencil in mouth) wander round the scaffold with a tape measure and write all his measurements down on the back of a scrap of sandpaper. When he was done he set his trestles and saw up and cut everything down on the ground. Every piece was numbered and when he'd worked his way through the stack of timber I'd help him load it up onto the scaffold and it all just fitted together with a thunk with no daylight in his joints and just a ghost of a pencil line along his seat cuts and birdsmouths. I never saw him offer up a piece to check or cut a jack rafter twice. And I never saw him refer to a table of angles notebook either. Not sure he even possessed one. He had it all in his head. He did it all with tape measure, pencil and an adjustable square.
When his generation hang up their tools there'll be no one to replace them.
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The skitz said:
This was my first cordless and im 50 next year ... got my first cordless screw gun in my late teens that's when I decided to lift weights... it's was about 6 stone in weight 😆 the YANKEE was on our must have list of tools to go to tech .. I was only 14 start in Bolton street college of technology 🥰
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And you try and tell the young people of today that!
 
Gimlet said:
I hate using shit crews. I generally buy Reisser from Howdens because I have a trade account. Timco are OK as well. So are Spax but they're quite aggressive and dearer.
Back when I was building a lot of extensions, garages etc I'd reuse the screws I used for putting up the wooden profiles when setting out the site. The 4" ones in my screw box were always brown and might have been used two or three times. Cheap shit screws you've got a job to get them in once before the heads disintegrate, never mind get out again and then reuse them twice more.
Goes without saying (well, it should..) you need decent screwdriver bits as well, and the right ones...

Beware reusing concrete screws. They don't grip as well the second time because they lose the serrations on the threads, and don't make a mistake so you have to unscrew them and then refit them to the same hole. They rarely grip tightly the second time and if they don't engage in exactly the same way with the thread that they've cut into the masonry they'll rip it out and then it's fooked.
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Mostly use torx spax , just so much better as anything else👍
 
Coming along nicely Paul! Proudaya mate!
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NoGutsNoGlory said:
I’m not sure whether to build my own again or buy one of these?
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NoGutsNoGlory said:
Yes I priced it up if I build it and it’s quite a bit more. Different thing if I build it but hard to justify the time, effort and expense.
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I have looked at a lot of the off-the-shelf stuff like that but my problem is the ground area it’s going into isn’t a square or rectangle but a trapezoid, the back being shorter than the front if I wish to maximise the space. Plus, I only need 3 walls as I’ll be reutilising the wall of the existing workshop.

Plans are concluded, in my head, but not on paper yet (probably never will be), also, I can’t really make a start until the spring when we might have more than one dry day 🙁
 
West Cork Paul said:
I have looked at a lot of the off-the-shelf stuff like that but my problem is the ground area it’s going into isn’t a square or rectangle but a trapezoid, the back being shorter than the front if I wish to maximise the space. Plus, I only need 3 walls as I’ll be reutilising the wall of the existing workshop.

Plans are concluded, in my head, but not on paper yet (probably never will be), also, I can’t really make a start until the spring when we might have more than one dry day 🙁
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I can’t make my mind up at the moment so I’m just having the concrete base laid until I decide.
I can get the existing brick garage extended 4m in single skin brickwork with pillars for £11200 including the concrete base so I might even go that route.
 
NoGutsNoGlory said:
I can’t make my mind up at the moment so I’m just having the concrete base laid until I decide.
I can get the existing brick garage extended 4m in single skin brickwork with pillars for £11200 including the concrete base so I might even go that route.
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If you lay a concrete base put 4" of insulation under the slab. And do yourself a massive favour and pay someone to power float the base.
I built a large double garage a few years ago (cavity brick wall) for a mate who's a Landrover fanatic. He was keen to save any money he could but I managed to talk him into paying a couple of hundred quid in labour for power floating plus hire of the machine. Not a huge extra cost for a building that cost him 30 grand, and in the end he was so glad he did it. The floor slab was as smooth as glass and needed no sealing. He could scoot across it on a crawling board under his Landrovers with no dust or tamping ridges. And it was fully insulated so he didn't need rubber floor mats. You could walk about on it in your stockinged feet and it felt warm underfoot.
 
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