Sunday, May 9, 2010

Foundation for brick cladding


This is the foundation for a brick wall and there is outside of the foundation for wood structural framing. The width is 6 inches.

You can also confirm the thickness of the ferroconcrete in the photo.

It is enough to withstand the heavy brick wall to stand up vertically.

The nice thing about this brick foundation is to be on the same base as foundation of the building frame.

So, even if ground subsidence has occurred, brick wall and building frame will go down together and it does not cause trouble by the only one side subsidence.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Careful for the details


At last Weekend, a lot of customers came to House Open House in Moriyama-ku, C's house. Thank you.

I guess that they could see design capped with a considerable impact, it may be lucky.

Well, last week renovation in I's house has proceeded smoothly and I removed the old concrete roofing materials and installed the new asphalt shingle roofing.

Let me introduce a bit of the thing.

The roof, according to the shape of the house, is facing various directions. Joint lines happen on roof valleys and ridges where face a different roof direction.

There is a weakness at heavy rain and wind, so I put a waterproof metal sheet on. We call it flashing.

In this photo you can see that I installed a stainless steel sheet baking color paint as flashing under the roof at the valley.

The old flashing was made by a steel painted with a color and I could not use it because of fairly rusty.

The customer says that it has been re-painted six years ago, but I could not confirm the re-painted finish.

Accordingly, I discussed with the roof worker, I decided to use stainless steel in the future without fear.

Of course, It takes an extra cost, this is my conscience to do so. So, I do not request it to the customer.

As for flashing, two things are important: (1) that the asphalt shingle roofing covers it enough, (2) Waterproof adhesive called asphalt coulking, contains properly on the flashing at the part in contact with the roofing. They will cover up weaknesses at the roof.

Even at the Japanese concrete roofing, and this asphalt shingle guaranteed 30-year, such underlayment work (Flashing and Felt) will prevent a leakage basically.

Anyway, my blog is a maniac, so people reads this and he may become an annoying customer for ordinary Japanese builders.