More...well..floor really?

OK! so it's a big floor and these things take time. Today I finished off the floor round the fireplace. I was a bit stumped at first and it's taken me a few days to work out what I was going to do. I put in the floor either side of the chimney breast with the solives next to the chimney sistered up to carry a solive across in front of the chimney. When I looked at it, the span across all six foot of chimney, looked a bit wide for one solive to carry the ends of the other beams. To solve this I've taken one of the shorter solives through into the chimney to support it and thus halved the span. Well it feels pretty solid; I can stand and jump up and down on it and it doesn't bounce. In addition I've mortised the solives in to each other. There is a tendency to do a straight halving joint but to my mind this would weaken the beams to much (although on a shorter span this would probably be fine). Instead I've notched the male 1/4 of the thickness and then cut the female mortise only 30mm into the 100mm thick beam. This way neither is significantly weakened. As a belt and braces the middle solive/beam has a ledger stip for additional support. Well right or wrong (comments welcome from any experience joiners out there..Darren?) thats how I've tackled it and short of an earth quake that's how it's staying!
Here's the view from the kitchen

And from above. If you squint it almost looks like a room!

A close up of what I've been rambling on about;

The other thing I did today was convert my trusty generator to LPG. Running on good old petrol is OK but expensive and a pain to keep refilling. So god bless that lovely internet if I didn't find a company doing garret regulator conversions. As far as I can make out this works in a very similar way to a divers demand valve. Took a bit of fiddling to fit since the holes in the gas adapter collar didn't line up with the studs on the carburetta and you need ptfe tape for all the connections. Drilling out the holes in the collar was fine, but could I find my ptfe tape! It's there somewhere but I'm blowed if I can find it (like my meter long rule and spirit level!!!!!). Fortunately Andy down the road in the village came to the rescue with some tread sealing gunky-stuff. That said works a treat and I'm now cooking with gas...well sawing and drilling and lighting and generally power tooling it up. Here's the finished installation. Oh and of course you need to make sure you've drained out all the petrol, thus avoiding making a fuel/gas/air bomb!


P.S. For those of you who know our neighbour Guy, he had a heart attack on Wednesday night and had to be taken by helicopter to Caen. Touch wood he's making a good recovery and was well enough to be moved to Flers today. Our thoughts and prayers are with him.