For the last few years the home of Cowshed Works has been a small home-made office building inside our cowshed. I say 'home-made office building' but what I mean is a simple stud walled room at one end of the shed!
That has served us very well and provided a nice environment for developing our platform and product line. With growing interest in the business and the need to take on more developers and designers fast approaching we decided to instruct our builder to renovate the entire Cowshed to make it a new home for the business. We thought that we'd share the progress reports and photos on here...
After clearing out the cowshed and re-housing all of the clutter that had built up in there it was on to the first job... repairs to the roof trusses.
Roof truss repairs
The first job the builder has taken on is repairing the roof trusses, some of the major sections had to be taken down and repaired. The wood used was reclaimed from a local source, we're very very happy with the results... have a look...
Work in progress...
The finished roof
With that done it was on to the next job, replacing the floor slab.
Replacing the floor slab and adding underfloor heating
We decided to go with underfloor heating in the Cowshed studio as we've got it in our house and it's a really lovely way to heat a house/room, the whole feel is totally different to a radiator heated space. Whilst the initial cost is high we've seen a significant reduction in energy use as a result, so in the long run it's win win. It should be even better in the Cowshed as the concrete floor won't be covered, it'll just be a polished concrete surface, so no resistance/losses for the heat.
The builder had to dig out the entire old cowshed concrete floor, it was a fair bit more work that he'd anticipated but two lorry-loads later it was all out and ready for the new floor.
The later stages of removing the slab
Materials for the new floor ready to go in
The new floor is over-spec'd in terms of insulation, there's 100mm of it going between the water pipes / concrete and the hardcore material beneath. It's also all completely damp proofed and sealed up. It's great to see the building go back to the soil and be rebuilt back up!
The heating system installation
The pipework for the underfloor heating system has just been installed today (5th May 2017) - they've done a great job of it...
The electric cable is also going across the lawn into the shed today...
It's looking great so far, the concrete is being poured in on Monday so we'll update after that.
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