Getting it up ...

This is where I've got to with the stairs, here seen from above:



The actual treads are only loosely placed, and not yet wedged in, and the risers aren't there at all. That's because I'll need to take it all down to make some final adjustments. One stringer - the upper one on the left - is about 5mm higher than the other, and I think I can correct that by taking a small piece off the bottom edge where it meets the lower stringer.



You can see at the inner angle of the sideways "V" formed by the stringers that there's a small amount of wood that could be removed to drop the upper stringer by the required amount. I'll probably need to re-align the edges, but that's fairly straightforward.



The stairs are held together by (again, temporary) wooden pegs where the stringers meet the post on the left. I'm pleased that it all feels quite solid: I've tried my own weight on the steps that are there and it felt OK. Once all the rest of the structure goes up it should be at least as solid as the rest of the fort.

I don't think I'll be putting any banisters between the two flights at the lower level: the upper flight provides enough of a barrier to falling through. The upper flight will have banisters on the left (only). 

 

Snug

Actually just a little too snug. As the mortise is so nicely cut, I'll trim a bit off the tenons with a shoulder plane. If I can find it ....

This is the first joint for the stairs. I cut the tenon with the router and a jig from either side, and the mortise with the router. It's 35mm deep, which is just about the limit of the router cutter.

Up the wall

The jig I cut to give me the correct angle for cutting the ends isn't right for cutting at any other angle, so when it came to taking a bit of surplus height off the stringer I had to go back to a handsaw.



I'd had some trouble getting the saw to start in the right place, but I remembered an old hint: cut a starter groove with a wide chisel first (which ensures a straight line, hopefully one that you get in the right place) and then put the saw in that. I was quite pleased with the fine cut - I wanted a small amount of the stringer to project above the level of the very top step.

Eventually, when there are some steps, no doubt it will. For the moment I have to content myself with seeing it in position. This is only a temporary fix, as the plasterboard needs to go up first.



It arrives on the level I had marked for the floor of the landing about two centimetres too low. I think this is because the lower floor has a slope down from the right to the left. I had taken the proposed height of the landing from the floor level: measured down from the floor above it's exactly right. I'm pretty sure the stringers down to the ground level won't need to be adapted. But we'll see.

Cutting the beam

The stairs go through between the ground and first floor, where - against the wall - there's an old beam - probably one of the fort's original ones, so maybe 700 years old. It has an outer layer, maybe a centimetre thick, heavily attacked by woodworm and quite friable, but below that the wood is like a newly cut beam, except that the colour is a little darker.

I've been cutting a diagonal rebate into the beam to let the stringer sit tightly against the wall. The beam overhangs the finished wall surface by five or six centimetres, and like almost everything else it's neither square nor vertical.



I've attacked with a saw, a hammer and chisel, with two different hand planes and with an electric plane. That final surface is the hand plane and chisel, and it's as close to square and vertical as I've been able to make it. Working at this angle results in all the woodchips going down your (left) sleeve.

I'm fitting it to a plywood template that I hope is an accurate copy of the stringer I've made. I wanted to be sure that I didn't cut away too much, and that I got the angle of the cuts right.



The next job is to cut the two ends of the stringer to fit between the cross-beam here and the newel post at the bottom. I'm not confident of getting a clean cut with a saw, so I'll try using a jig and the router to get a good edge. Of course, the jig needs to be a nice straight line, and that took some work.



Using this should also let me do the tenons that are needed at the newel post ends of the stringer. It should work better for that than for a complete cut - for the latter, once the router has taken me down the first few centimetres, I'll probably have to do the rest with a saw.

  

Getting it square

I'm working on what will be the fourth stringer, the last of the ones for the downstairs part of the staircase. 

The planks I've bought have been rough-sawn on a big band saw, and after that they have warped a little, leaving one side dished and the other..... er ... convex. The big band saw obviously has a couple of misaligned teeth, so the result is that there's a series of gashes across the wood at regular intervals. I have to plane both sides far enough to be able to take out these saw-cuts.

It's ironic that it's only the very big bits of wood that I have to work by hand, with old-fashioned planes. The thinner ones will go through the planer on the machine. These have both their weight against them, and their width - the planer would in theory manage up to 20cm, and these are 25cm. But I don't think I'd want to risk them in the machine anyway.

The wood has also been of distinctly variable quality - the third stringer was very difficult, cross-grained on all four edges, so that it had to be planed in different directions. This one, however, was an ideal piece: all the grain in the same direction, no knots to speak of: just those band saw cuts to be removed. It started like this - I've put in a couple of strokes of the plane to show the wood surface:



After about twenty minutes with the small coffin plane, it looked like this:



I couldn't quite bring myself to finish the concave side before starting the convex one, so I was turning it over from time to time:



Later on, I'd got it looking pretty clean, except at the edges:



And by the time I was properly satisfied, I think I must have taken about a millimetre off both sides. And that took most of the afternoon. But it won't be long now before I start putting up the newel posts and trying to fit the stringers into them. That would be a milestone.

First steps

In Aurillac there's a timber merchant with a fine supply of oak, and I've been buying some big planks, in thicknesses up to 54mm (2 1/8th inches). The thick ones will be the stringers for the staircase: the sides of the stairs which the treads and risers slot into.

The first job is to cut them up to an approximate size. As they're pretty heavy, it needs two people to do this, so here is Alan - dressed appropriately for November - giving me a hand.



As neither edge starts very straight, it's usually an iterative process: a bit off one side to give a straighter edge, then a bit off the other. This does make some waste, but perhaps the thin strips will do for the wedges needed under each step.

Some of the big planks had warped a little, so I had to plane each side to get a reasonably flat surface. As the stringers will be just under 25cm wide, they won't fit through the planer/thicknesser. And even if they did, they'd be a bit to heavy for it to do a good job. So it was planing by hand. I was surprised to find that the best plane for the initial cut was the old wooden "coffin" plane, but I am learning a lot.



After that I cut a jig for the router-work on the sides, and spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure I'd laid out the steps properly. The jig has a batten underneath to keep it at the same angle and the same position for each step, and one on top to prevent me cutting down too far - the rebates need to go right to the edge of the stringer, as the stairs will be slotted in from behind.



You can see a partially cut rebate in the picture.

After that was done, it didn't take very long to cut the stair rebates for the whole stringer:



The end nearest the camera was cut with a hand-held circular saw - only just big enough, which is why it shows burn marks rather than a clean cut. I haven't yet plucked up enough courage to cut the tenon on that end: a job for tomorrow.

The router produces a very clean cut:



During the day I also glued up another step (only another 24 to do) and cut a second thick plank for the matching stringer. The second stringer looks like a good piece of oak: quarter sawn so with very little warp in it, and once I started planing it the oak grain - with its characteristic medullary rays - showed very nicely. 

Final measurements .... I hope

Back over at the Fort this afternoon for a couple of further measurements - the depths of the old beams holding up the floor.



I've now drawn the designs at as a large a scale as possible, spotted a couple of problems and re-drawn them, and I'm reasonably sure I know where to start: at the top, and against the wall. Everything is then worked back and away from the stringer it's impossible to put in afterwards.

Oh well, I know what I mean, even if I can't explain it..... 

The beams are now all a little cleaner, after being sandblasted, and - from my particular point of view - it should be possible to see the old nails in them before using a chisel. 



Removing several centuries' worth of dirt has revealed some very interesting grain - and a lot of very old woodworm - on the things like this doorframe.

And now, or at least very soon, the first bits of the stairs - the low plinth they'll stand on, to spread the weight over the floorboards - will be cut, sanded, routered, shaped, and installed. And then it'll be the first newel post and stringer.

Gravity

Sometimes I wonder what is holding the Fort together. Probably just gravity .... the gravity of what would happen if anything shifted.

Take this beam:



There's a large cross beam (underneath the camera) and the large beam with the remains of junction box fastened to it is about four or five metres of 250mm by 250mm oak. And it has a convenient notch cut out of it, just where it ought to sit on the cross beam. I think another beam - coming in from the left - with a corresponding notch used to sit underneath it, but at some point in the past it has been moved away. Probably to make the unfeasibly steep staircase a better fit.

The lighter-coloured wood at the end of the notched beam is a bit of scrap wood nailed onto it to support a couple of floorboards above that would otherwise be floating at that point. When we remove the unfeasibly steep staircase we'll put some sensible joists in place there.

I'd been cleaning up along the top of the cross beam when I noticed that here was an accident waiting to happen. Fortunately there is quite a bit of old (and new) oak around on the site, so I cut this one and shaped it roughly to fit:



It needed a bit more planing, as the gap under the beam wasn't quite square - for that matter, the top of the cross beam wasn't particularly level either.

And in it went - with the aid of a mallet - a good snug fit:



Much better now.....  

In the meantime, I'm just starting work on the staircase. I've bought a few rough boards of 54mm thick oak: here they are as they arrived, with Mike's dad John about to help unloading. These are heavy, about 30cm wide and 2.6m long.



I wasn't able to get large square section oak for the newel posts, so I have sliced some of the boards up into pieces about 100mm wide, and then glued them together, with the aim of getting a post that's about 100 by 90 mm. It will actually be a bit smaller as it goes through the planer a few times to get nice flat surfaces to glue - and then afterwards, to get nice flat edges. Here's one in process. I'm short of sash clamps, and one end didn't quite close up, so I am regluing just that bit. It's the bit furthest away from the camera in the picture.

   

The oak looks very  nice once it's been planed, so I am hoping for some good results.

All trimmed up

After quite a bit of chipping out and sawing we put the trimmer into place, together with the new joist it will be supporting. There was quite a lot of trial and error - despite all my careful measurements - in getting the short beam to fit across the opening and into the two mortices that I had cut.



It looks a little lower than the beam against the wall - and in fact it is - but that's because the beam is several centimetres higher than the rest of the floor. The next layer of floor supports will be cut away at the wall edge to give a floor that is level all the way across. For the first time in four or five centuries, I'd guess.

It all had to be done from a step-ladder, as seen in the picture below, and there were one or two wobbly moments. The new beams are oak, and they're pretty heavy, and they had to be put in and taken out repeatedly.



The other end of the new joist simply sits on top of the big old cross beam  - as do all the other square timbers holding up the floor. It's lucky it didn't have to be cut to fit as that end of the beam had a few splits in it.



You can see how the new beam is supported at the other end in the picture above. Now these are in place we'll be able to get on with the floor in the other half of the room. We'll not be able to finish it, though, until we're able to take the old rickety stairs down.

The curve on the underside of the trimmer in the picture above is where I took out a bit of slighly spongy sapwood. It means we'll have a nicely rounded edge to hit our heads on rather than a sharp one.....

Chipping out at the Fort

Work on the Fort's new staircase is just starting. We've taken out one beam to make room for it, and the next job is to put in place a trimmer and a curtailed joist, after cutting into the trimming joists. I wasn't originally quite sure which is which, but putting these in let you have a space for the stairs that is bigger than the gap between the floor beams.

Our neighbour supplied the oak that will be going in, and it's been sitting on the floor underneath the opening while we tried to work out the exact size of the new stairs. As we've now taken that decision, we've marked the beams for the mortices and I have just started cutting them.

This one is in progress:



The beam is about 25cm square (10 inches as we used to call it) and the oak it's made of was probably felled five or six hundred years ago. It's not impossibly hard, and once you cut through the outer layer - with a little bit of worm - the rest of the wood is very nice. It cuts very cleanly with a chisel. 

Here's one I finished earlier:



You can just see on the left side of the cut where - many years ago - a wooden peg (I think these pegs are properly called "treenails") was inserted into the beam to hold down the floorboards above. This is a little deeper than needed: the "trimmer" will sit partly into the mortice, and partly on top of the beam, in order to have as much strength as possible in both the old beam and the new one.

The work is made just a little more difficult by the fact it has to be done on top of a stepladder two metres up off the floor, weilding a wooden mallet and a chisel. But that's easier than trying to perch on top of the joists, and involves less bending, too. 

Reprofiling ...

Now we own a small bit of the neighbouring field, we can do something about the bank between it and us which is far too steep. It's difficult to mow it, even with a strimmer, as the grass is slippery both wet and dry.



This picture was taken from a way down the slope, so the bank doesn't look as steep as it really is.

However, I passed the local groundwork contractor just along the road today - he was digging out a hole for a neighbour's new septic tank. I asked him if he could quote for the work. Very good timing, as it turned out. Later that same afternoon:



Apparently getting rid of the soil is usually the problem, so kind M Veissiere will let us have the fill for free: the charge will only be for bringing his digger over and smoothing it out.

So far we've had three lorryloads.



We'll probably wait a few days - or weeks - for some more, but whenever there's a bit of digging going on locally it'll be brought here. To my surprise, it's actually quite good earth: better and with fewer large rocks than what we already have.

I'd guess we need a good ten loads more to make much of a difference to the slope. In the meantime we may well be out with a wheelbarrow and a riddle to improve the quality of the existing garden.

Big beam - my eye!

Today Mike and I shifted a big beam. It had to be removed to make an opening for the new staircase. Here it is where it started:



What we used was the modern equivalent of a block and tackle: a chain hoist. It made the work a lot easier than trying to lift the beam (I think it weighed close to a quarter of a ton - old oak, about 20cm by 30cm, and more than 4 metres long).



Here it's being lifted out after being cut to length. Then we moved the hoist - a couple of times in fact - ready to put it back in the fireplace:



It will support the new hearth - to be cast in concrete over and around it - and make it possible to have a fire in the big fireplace for the first time in a century or so.



It had to be notched at both ends and over the concrete wall, to make it possible to have a sufficient depth of concrete on top of it. Too thin and it will crack. We might get that done by the end of the week.

The next job is fixing the shuttering for the concrete, with reinforcing bars .....

Another window ...

... how many more, you ask?

This one went in more easily. Using an amateur like me means that you get to learn from his mistakes (hmm - some pronouns wrong there).

This, though, was better. On the first one I'd tightened a couple of screws so as to distort the frame, and one half of the window is now a little stiff to open and close. We had some difficulty hanging that side on it's hinges. But it's a bathroom window and it's unlikely to get a lot of use. On this one we were able to fix the frame in place at the top and bottom carefully, and then gradually tighten the other screws. With the result that the two leaves of the window slipped very easily onto the hinges.

This one too we drilled the screw-holes from the inside (the room side), and were able to countersink them and give a nice clean result, which we'll use wood-filler on eventually.

Fitting the handle (posed)

I was pleased to find how accurately I'd levelled the concrete sill, though there is the rather curious effect that it looks well out of true, because the room and the window frame leans distinctly to the left. I was also pleased that I had managed to get the window dimensions just right, so it was a good fit:

The finished window

The next two will have to wait a bit, as we'll have to cast the new sills, and let them harden before we can fit the window. But at least the external side of the fort has two new matching windows.

New windows

Putting in a window doesn't seem to be rocket science. The most difficult bit was measuring the size of the aperture and making sure the window was ordered the right size to fit it.

Here's the opening:



I had previously cast in place a new concrete window sill, as the old wooden one had pretty well rotted away. A small part of the old sill is in the middle of the concrete.

The windows I ordered are designed to fit within a wall, rather than applied up against a face. So the drip moulding wooden sill was a shade too long.



The window has the outside face up in these pictures.



It was a little tricky to mark and cut correctly, as the wooden frame doesn't sit square - like everything else in the fort, of course.

But after trimming the ends off the bottom part of the window, it went in quite easily.



The present safety arrangements - to stop the grandchildren falling out of the window - are quite simple. I am leaving the handle off the window, so it can't be opened. Eventually we hope to get locking handles. Or more sensible grandchildren? Hmmm ....

Anyway, the window-fitter felt quite happy with the work:

On top of the wall, at last

We put in the last two courses of blocks, and here's Mike with the tools of his trade after we'd finished.



The wall follows the contour of the chimney on the right which should give it a bit more strength, and there are reinforcing bars drilled into the wall to hold it in as well as possible.

The view from on top:



We've laid the last course of blocks upside down, and removed some of the webs inside. The idea is to fill them with concrete - and some metal rebar - to provide a good solid pad for the beams to rest on. We'll make the upper concrete level a couple of inches above the lower edge of the beams.

Balbus built a wall

and so did I.

As you can see, intense concentration is required:



but the end result is pretty good: everything pretty well level (or vertical, depending), and solidly made:



It's a 20cm thick wall. When it reaches the beams above (another two courses), it will provide some support for a new beam, and take a lot of the weight of the new hearth. As the hearth is to be roughly 3.5m by 1m and will be concrete 15 or 20cm thick, the wall needs to be quite robust. The plan is to lay the top row of blocks upside down - ie with their open faces on top - and fill them with concrete and a few reinforcing bars to tie them together.

Back to the blogosphere

After a long gap, I'm posting again. There will be a mixture of goings-on here at Lessal, and updates from Jane and Mikey's fort at Leynhac.

I've recently attacked an annoying dip in the ground in front of our farmhouse: it had such a steep centre that it wasn't possible to mow cleanly across it. So I dug up the turves and saved them carefully, and started arranging some stones:



After that it was a matter of digging out some of the material that had come from the hangar floor when I had dug out the inspection pit last year. This turned out to be heavy work as I'd picked the hottest day of the year so far - 35 C though it felt like more. After that I put down a layer of old cattle manure, also from the hangar (dug out because I felt it was too soft a foundation for the concrete floor), and then replaced the turves.



I used a lime mortar around the stones to give a reasonably secure edge, and I plan to put a few small plants into the holes between the stones. Even now it looks quite natural, though when the grass starts regrowing properly it should be better, as the grass will make a better edge on top of the stones.



It is possible to see the joins, but I'm pleased with the result, and the grass is now much flatter on top. I can't quite mow it yet, and it'll need a few days before the mortar is properly cured. I plan to hammer down the grass to get a smooth surface, but I want to avoid knocking any of the new stones apart.

And as a taster, here's a bit of the hearth at the fort going out:



It looks as if it was once a proper piece of building stone, with edges that were meabt to be seen - perhaps the side of a chimney. Another small stone from the hearth was probably a small section of a window mullion. And yes, that stone really was very heavy....but not quite as big as it looks - the camera does sometimes lie.