Today we primarily worked in the class room, working on a house plan. We did a materials and construction costing sheet based on a small 3 bed room house plan. To start off we drew a rough sketch of the house plan up on the white board with a few dimensions attached. This way all of us could see the whiteboard and any mistakes made could be easily erased as we moved along.
First of all we started off with the bearers. Keeping in mind that the bearers could only span 1750 maximum, we began placing in the "must" bearers. The "must" bearers are the ones that run along the edge of the house and also underneath all walls, this is because the weight needs to be directly run down to the stumps.
Once we had the must bearers in, we then segmented the house into different sections or rooms, and divided the space between the parallel must bearers by 1750. So say a room had a width of 3890, we would simply do 3890 / 1750 = 2.22, you then round it up to 3. Then the room would have two must bearers with three bearers spread evenly between them.
Once we had these wemoved onto stumps. Stumps had a maximum span of 1450. We put in the "must" stumps which were ones directly under walls and around the perimeter of the house. You then get the length of the bearer and divide it by 1450 and then multiply that by how many bearers of the same length there were. We followed this method throughout the house by using the segmentation idea used in the bearers.
Then we moved onto the soleplates, which is quite simple because the number of stumps is known and there is a sole plate for each stump. Each stump had to be 300mm length minimum.
All stumps and sole plates have to be H4 CCA treated pine.
We then moved onto joists, which followed the same method as the beares but needed to be 450 maximum span.