Saturday morning and a trip to the builders merchant. I needed 8 lengths of bracing timber and another couple of joists. I needed the two additional joists because I had revised the spec of the stud-work since first drawing up the scheme. I had originally chosen 600mm centres between stud uprights but later decided to reduce this to 400mm centres, which resulted in the need for two more joists. These are 7x2" and are stocked in 4.8m lengths and I only need them about 3m. Quite handy actually as I can only fit about 3m safely in the car. But it did mean I had to cut these at the yard and no power tools allowed! So for once, so far on this job, it was manually cutting the two down though the guy there did help support when cutting. They had a very sharp saw so it didn't take too long. I put these into the car along with the 8 x 3m lengths of planed timber for the wall bracing.
Once arriving home I set about attaching the bracing timber to the back of the stud-work. Bracing is necessary because these walls are basically free standing and apart from being attached to themselves and bolted to the floor are not connected to the brick walls or existing ceiling. The ideal method for building the walls would be to construct each side away from its location complete with bracing, then bolt them to the floor fully assembled. However, because of the small size of the room and its shape, doing it this way would be nigh on impossible. Though it did mean I had to come up with a method for attaching the bracing behind the stud walls from the front. What I did in the end was cut and drill about 64 blocks to allow me to screw them from the front. This was quite a time consuming job but it worked very well. As a secondary measure I glued the bracing to the stud-work and glued each of the blocks before screwing them. The other advantage of doing it this way is that you really appreciate the effect that bracing has on free standing walls. Before attaching the bracing, these walls could be rocked easily but after bracing they are extremely stiff. Check out the:
The job didn't go completely according to plan as I realised that I couldn't get the bracing timber behind the doorway wall 
I completed this pretty well on Saturday and I thought I would offer up one of the joists in position on the top framework. All OK at each end nearest the walls with a decent 1" gap between it and the roof support. However, I slid it along the framework and quickly realised that the central roof support was a tad more bent than I thought, bowing down a huge amount. I had only moved the joist about a couple of foot before it wedged against the roof support!!! This was the end of the day on Saturday so I had to ponder this over night...what to do?
OK, I had come up with a few ideas but in the end I decided to cut some chunks out of the offending roof support where my joists would live. You might think that this is not a good idea but luckily, if you read earlier in the diary, I had added two additional roof supports before even starting the main build (there was only one support centrally in that direction originally). This saved me really and was not at all worried about cutting into the timber. You'll see from>> this photo << the solution. I also intend to jack this timber up slightly and attach a strengthening timber to the side later on to stop any more potential movement.
Not a bad weekends work and for me it's about ticking off each job but things are still moving along. That's probably it for the next couple of weeks as we are off on holiday on Saturday the 13th for a week to Southwold on the east coast. Though I'll probably finalise where the power will be entering the studio from the garage this week and there are a couple of little jobs I can do in the week. I also need to be thinking of the ducting and design for the ventilation system.