And that is just to generate enough paper to file the consent!
For those of you that are curious, the process of designing our own barn- and then filing a complete building consent application, is still ongoing. About 10 days ago I had another meeting with someone at BCLS (building consents and licensing services). All in all it was an encouraging and productive meeting. He was impressed by the plans I had generated. He wanted a few more figures, and he wanted some of the figures I had done rendered differently, but that is easy enough with a computer.
We will need an engineer to come and look at our slab. Why? Well, all structural components must meet a durability requirement of at least 50 years. Concrete slabs meet that requirement. The problem is, our slab is about 20 years old. So we just need a structural engineer to sign off that it has at least 50 more years of life in it.
But… when going over our plan he noted we had a load-bearing wall without sufficient support beneath. By code, to put serious weight onto concrete it must be at least 200mm thick and have 2x 12mm reinforcing rods in it. That portion of the slab, while plenty thick, didn’t have reinforcing rods. Now, I could juggle the design to move the load-bearing wall 1.5 meters onto a reinforcing “beam” built into the slab (which is extra thick and has the 2 x 12mm rods). But that got us thinking, why not approach the problem with a blank sheet of paper.
All along our designs have looked at the barn as a 3 bay structure, along the lines of the so-called “American Style” barn (http://www.fairdinkumsheds.co.nz/store.php?cPath=1).
But our reinforcing beam runes right down the middle of the slab, so now we are looking at design options that treat it as two halves, rather than 3 thirds. Hopefully we can get a design we like done and approved soon. I am getting better and faster at generating barn designs using sketchup, with all this practice.