St Dominick SnookerWith the floor repairs complete, work on the walls has been progressing. The east end of the hall has new stud-work where the old cladding used to be. Much of it is plasterboarded, ready for skimming. With the curtains open on a bright, sunny October day, it’s looking pretty good!
After a long day on Sunday, the floor repairs are now complete. The final section in the east, front corner was challenging due to the weight of the table sitting on the joists that needed replacing. We took the opportunity to put in extra joists running right under each leg of the table to ensure the floorboards weren’t supporting the weight. The load-bearing wall plate has also been replaced around the entire room and now sit on a proper damp course.
In total, 60 metres of damp course was installed, 200 metres of new 50×100 joists, 25 sheets of moisture resistant chipboard, 90 coach bolts and hundreds of screws!
In addition to the flooring, new armoured cables have been laid under both tables for the later installation of sockets and table heaters. A new ring main cable has been run around most of the room so extra sockets can be installed where required and the light meters can be rewired into modern electrics. When the walls are complete and the carpet tiles laid, the club should be a safe and enjoyable place for many years to come.
Weekend two of the repairs started, where we left off, at the western end of the building. The roadside repairs are complete but the rear side still has a large hole in the floor. The reason for this hole still being there is that the floor under the table has distorted where the weight of the table sits on it. With the new floor hopefully being down for many years to come, this was a valuable opportunity to get new joists pushed through under the table to take up the load. As many of the joists we’d removed were riddled with woodworm, it would have been bold to assume the joists, with several tonnes of table on them, were good!
Despite considerable effort by Adam and myself to push new joists under the legs, the distortion in the floor, caused by the table weight had us beat. In the end, we left it until Saturday when Nick Shapland came to our aid, armed with a hefty Land Rover jack! The jack enabled us to take just enough weight off a table leg that we could hammer a new joist through.
With the joists in place, the floor could be screwed down and work moved on to the east end of the building. First up, the area inside the fire escape door. This was in a terrible state, but, with the table being set further towards the front of the building, there was no weight bearing issues to contend with here. Adam laid the new joists and cut the floorboards to fit. We left the boards loose for now as they provided a means to push joists right across the room, under the floor, to the front of the building.
With the fire escape area complete, that was three corners down and one to go. Little did we know that we’d saved the biggest job until last! With the outer row of floorboards removed, it was obvious that the joists had been badly attacked by woodworm. In fact, none of the joists were even touching the wall plate! This led to considerable head scratching (and a cup of tea) while we tried to figure out what was supporting the table. The conclusion was that the joists passing under the table were cantilevered on the single supporting dwarf wall that runs the length of the room. This was easily demonstrated by standing on the floating end of the joists and seeing the entire snooker table move. At this point, nobody was keen to get too close! The jack came to the rescue again, enabling us to support the weight of the floor and table while new joists were slid into place. We got enough timber under it to give us confidence that it would still be there in the morning and called it a day.
It’s late Sunday afternoon and the first weekend of work is complete. As the following pictures will hopefully show, the work was very much needed and even though it’s a considerably larger job than we originally anticipated, it had to be done before the new carpeting went down. Before running out of materials, Adam, the carpenter, got far enough around the room that there’s plenty of completed area for the wall and plastering work to begin next week.
For those who had noticed the springy area of floor in the middle of the table, all became clear when the floorboards were removed. One of the joists had broken in half and, in some distant repairs, a little wooden leg had been inserted to prop it up. Over the years, the bottom of the leg has been eaten away until it only touched the floor when it was stood on. The broken joist can be clearly seen at the top of the leg.
In some instances, the table legs fall perfectly between joists, so that all the weight bears on the floorboards. Next weekend we will try to push new joists under the tables, between the dwarf walls, to add extra support under the legs.
New armoured cables have been laid under the table so power is available if the club decide to install heaters.
Work started on Friday evening to repair the weak areas of the floor. The initial area tackled was the corner on the road side at the west end of the hall. The floorboards close to the wall were in a very poor state, having suffered considerable woodworm damage. The joists had also suffered where they sat on the stone ledge that runs around the inside of the building. The ledge appears to have once had a wooden wall plate on it but this has virtually disintegrated which explains the bouncy floor in places! Our carpenter, Adam Green, is cementing in concrete blocks to support the new joists in areas where the ledges have deteriorated to the extent the joists can’t sit squarely on them.
Work on the first corner was completed on Saturday afternoon and we moved on to the rear corner. With a few boards pulled up, it became apparent that a significant area of the floor would require replacing. Previous repairs had taken place in the distant past and many of the joists were propped up on blocks and stones with sections of timber balanced between them. The original timber wall plate had completely disintegrated.
While the woodwork is in a poor state, it appears to be encouragingly dry. The ends of the joists and the wall plate appear to have been victims of woodworm rather than rot! The replacement joists, kindly donated by Bond Timber, are tanalised for protection against the wicked worm!
