Installing Skirting

click here to watch the video

I just want to take you through the process of installing skirting in a room.

So here we have a fairly simple room and where we start we always start on the wall opposite where you enter the room or the doorway.

We are just going to cut a piece of skirting in between the two wall, square cut on both ends,

like that, so square cut on this end and square cut on the other end as tight as you can get it without damaging the adjacent walls.









That’s the start point and once we and then we can move on to the two side walls and we are going to cut a scribe on this end.









So although it looks like a mitre when it’s together a scribe is just basically the profile of the skirting cut into the end of the adjoining skirting board on this side. So we are not going to mitre our internal corners it’s just going to be a scribe. Now the reason we do that is that it limits the amount of gap when our skirtings shrink. Scribe vrs Mitre

So that gets scribed over there, so you can have a go and cut that as many times as you like and then once you’ve got your scribe nice and tight on the other end it’s just cut to length with a square cut tight into the corner.

Then again we repeat the process on this one so we are going to scribe over this board and then square cut against the architrave.

Flipping around to the other side, again, scribed cut on the corner butting into the skirting that is already in place and square cut into the opposite corner. So that board goes in there.

So every time we are doing a board we are only scribing one end and square cutting the other so same again here and there is our room complete.

So the whole reason for this is that by scribing the boards this way we minimise the amount of shrinkage you actually see. If you were to place the skirting in the opposite order when you stand at the door you would be looking directly into the gap.

So there you go that is the procedure for installing skirting in a room.

Scribe or Mitre

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There has always been a debate about whether it is better to Scribe or Mitre your internal corners when doing Skirting or Mouldings. Now to me there is no argument, scribing is the way to go, however, some people obviously think mitring is easier but a scribed joint is just more professional and it demonstrated more pride in your workmanship and more professionalism. So the whole reason came about was because when we use natural timbers for our mouldings they are obviously going to shrink a little bit over time and when they shrink our corners will open up and we will get a gap. The Scribed Joint just shows or it helps to disguise that gap better than a Mitre Joint will.

So let’s have a look at them, this is a mitred joint a the moment and if I move these boards 1mm in either direction just to simulate a little bit of shrinkage on either board

you will see that quite a substantial gap opens up between the two boards. So they have only shrunk a millimetre away from the corner but obviously, that gives you a 2mm gap or more and it looks quite obvious.

So let’s compare that to a Scribed Joint, the same corner,

we are going to move both boards a millimetre each again and you can see from this angle there is hardly any difference.

If I move into the corner you can see that this board has shrunk 1mm this way and this one 1mm this way but because of the scribe you can’t see it from this angle in fact it’s not until you get right round sort of at 90 degrees to it you can start to see that gap open up.

So I hope that demonstrates why we scribe our internal corners rather than use mitres

Roof Components

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In this post, I just want to take you through the main components of a typical roof in this case we are going to have a Broken Hip and Valley roof. I’m just going to take you through and show you all the members. So in this picture, you can see the entire roof









So I will take it back to the Wall plates and then build it up from there












So the first member is the Ridge. The Ridge is the highest member of the roof should always level and parallel to our external walls












and in this case, we have 2 Ridges one for the larger part of the Roof or the Major Span and one for the smaller part of the roof or the Minor Span.








The ridge is basically held up then by our Common Rafters

and as the name suggests they are pretty common, they are all the same and again we are going to have common rafters for our major span and common rafters for our minor span section of the roof.

As you can see we have sort of made up most of the roof with those so rafters always run at 90 degrees to our external walls up to our ridge, they make contact with our ridge.

Then we are then going to have our Crown End Rafters, they are very similar to our common rafters except they are a fraction shorter just because of the shortening associated with the intersection at the ridge, you can see more information on that in other videos, and again we have a crown end rafter for the major span and a crown end rafter for the minor span sections of the roofs.

Then have our Hips, so our hips bisect our external corners at 45 degrees on plan, with a 90-degree corner. They always bisect our external angle here and they run up to where the common rafters and the crown end rafters intersect

and again we have a Hip for our major span and a Hip for our Minor span.

We also have Valleys, so valleys are fairly similar to our hips except they run up from an internal corner of our wall plates we get a valley instead of a Hip.

We then have our Creeper Rafters or jack rafters so just like our common rafters our creeper rafters run at 90 degrees to our plate but in this case, they intersect with our hip instead of our ridge and they are cut with a creeper cut so they fit into the Hip nicely. So that is a Jack rafter or a creeper and you can see them on all four corners or every hip is going to have a set of creepers intersecting with it

In this case, because we’ve got two different spans we end up with a Broken Hip. If you were to extend the line of the Broken Hip all the way through it would line up with where this wall plate would extend. It's part of the Major Span but because it’s intersecting with this minor span area it doesn't need to go all the way so this is a Broken Hip

We then have to infill this area around the Broken Hip so we end up with Valley Creepers so you can see these, these are cut into our ridge and down into our valley so they are Valley Creepers,














We also have Cripple Creepers these are cut into our Hip at the top and into our Valley at the bottom. So they are Cripple Creepers because they are cut with plumb and bevel cuts on both ends.













Then on the larger part of the roof, we have a Purlin now this may be necessary on our minor span area of the roof but in this case, it’s not. Now the Purlin what it does is because our rafters are spanning such a large distance they may need extra support so you may end up with several rows of purlins but generally, at the midspan of the roof you will have a Purlin supporting your rafters where it’s deemed necessary.




















and obviously, that just doesn't float there in mid-air it’s got to be supported down on to our wall frames with Struts.

There are 2 types of Struts, Fan Struts and


















Straight Struts. The Struts transfer roof Load from the Purlin down to a Load Bearing Wall or if the is no wall available then we need to install a













Strutting Beam to transfer the Roof Load across to the Walls.









The final member of the Roof is the Collar Ties which tie the Rafters together and are installed on every second set of Rafters.











So now we have covered all the member that go into making up the Roof Frame and while every roof may have a different combination of members they all have some of these members in common

Stepped Strip footing

To watch the video on this subject go to “Stepped Footing”

When we have a block that is not level we can either level the block or we can work with it.

To work with the slope we need to step the footing down the block so that it remains in the ground. This will mean that we will have to start the footing lower in the ground and then when they get to around 1 course of brickwork (86mm) from the surface then we need to step down.

Each step should be made so it works what ever you are going to use for the Dwarf wall. For example with a standard metric brick you can step down 2 courses (172mm) at each step so that the bricklayer won't have to cut a brick lengthways to suit the step.

Remembering that we need to maintain a minimum of 400mm under our bearer this will set the minimum height of our dwarf wall.

The changes in heights won’t affect our engaged piers as they are tied to our Dwarf wall.

However we will need to keep an eye on our Isolated piers. A 230 x 230 pier (1 bricks x 1 Bricks) can only be a maximum of 1 metre high.

Once it reaches a metre the size of the base needs to be increased to 350 x 350 (1.5 bricks x 1.5 bricks). Once the pier gets to this size it would be worth looking at other options such as steel as a more economical option.

With the Dwarf Wall constructed we now have a level base on which to construct our Floor Frame.