Blenheim Grove video 11 – Sloping roofs

Gus takes us around as the bricks are going up on site, and we see the difference between the engineering bricks and facing bricks, take a look at the struck pointing, and find out why we need expansion joints!

Check back often as we will be posting videos of our progress throughout the build.

Video transcript:

Another site visit back to Blenheim, and it’s been a couple of weeks, so I think it’d be good if we go in and look around, see what’s been going on.
The exciting thing today is the brickwork going up. And look at this, if we walk around the outside of the building, the first bit of brickwork is coming up, looking very nice.
You’ve got the engineering brick down there, which is the sort of darker one, has a high density and that sort of stops water and stuff getting in.
And then you got the sort of what we call the facing brick. This is what you see, because the other stuff gets buried underground.
And you can see, beautiful job. This is what’s called a struck pointing. And this is where the mortar comes out. It’s kind of smooth to the touch there, and that kind of comes up to the top. But you can see there, there’s a bit of sort of reveal, that’s why you can sort of see the shadow.
Here, this is what’s called an expansion joint. Because sort of buildings materials, all building materials sort of move as things like the ground dries and things move around. So even though these are on huge piles, what you’ll see is that buildings generally have to have an expansion joint. Otherwise you end up with cracking and all sorts of nasty things.
Here we are on top of the development. You can see the tops of the houses. Here are the first three basically up to roof level. You can begin to see that this bit is the sort of sloping bit. This will get covered in a roofing material. This will have insulation over the steel. Beginning to see a bit of felt there. That felt probably comes over this, then this gets covered in a kind of concrete.
And down there you can see that that terrace is sealed. The first of three layers of what they call felt. So it’s a three layer felting membrane.
So we’re now up at second level, this is House 58, you’ve got something called a firebreak there, which is to stop fire spreading from one place to another.
So here are the guys, doing their thing. Piles of bricks ready to go up. Whole pile of mortar, looking like salted caramel ice cream.
This is a wall tie, so that gets fixed onto the building, and then this bit here goes into the brick.