48, More floor joists.

The fireplace brickwork erected to the joist level for the first floor, the central bed is formed to accommodate the upstairs hearth.


The view down the kitchen flue showing the angles required to bring it over to the upstairs chimney breast.


The need for the remainder of the first floor joists coincided with the arrival of my annual leave from work in late March, it was again time to start making large quantities of sawdust. The kiln and my stockpiles of sawn and previously dried timber needed to be unstacked and sorted, extracting all the lengths of 12 by 2's. These all had to be planed true on one face and edge and then dressed and sized to the finished dimensions of 290 x 45mm.
After machining, to give the wood some short term protection from the elements and longer term protection from the local termites, (which have already made their presence known around the place,) I am now painting all my timber with a concoction consisting of turps, linseed oil, paraffin wax, bee's wax and a product called permethrin, a residual insecticide. Into this mixture I also added some tracer dye to allow easy identification of treated pieces. The only cheap dye that I have so far been able to procure is pink in colour and made for weed killer, this stuff tends to fade out after a couple of days of exposure to the sun.


The Joists, all finally in position after nearly four weeks of toil, I had thought that I was going to have had these completed within the first week, but as usual, my guesstimations were again, way off.
Much of the time was spent having to continually re erect and re position the scaffolding to allow the correct positioning of the members.


The framework in place to allow the pouring of the concrete hearth, a couple of days were occupied cutting the wedged "tusk tenon" joints for the trimmers


On the last Sunday night of my holidays I had the concrete for the hearth mixed and poured, finally completing this stage of the construction
With the four weeks I had up my sleeve being almost entirely consumed with this, it was a bit disappointing for me.