My biggest awning on a house to date...

The 'Fitz's' had a beautiful house, in a beautiful street, with tastes and class that I could only dream of having. The task here was not only to deliver on practicality but with a serious measure of creativity thrown in. To make matters slightly more difficult, the awning was to be a whopping 8m long!

The building was a timber clad structure with an internal felt damp-proof course that we simply couldn't puncture. This rendered using the solid frame out of the question. We hit upon the reasoning that, although the outside may well be too weak individually, collectively they held up the house. We decided to install the awning on to a strong 2" timber board and attached the board in as many places as possible along the building with short strong screws. It's not really as simple as it sounds and we had to provide additional strength, but I'm not giving away all my secrets to the masses! Let's just say that there's an art to screwing and I'm not being crude.

There are special brackets and SPECIAL brackets

Mr J is a lovely chap, he's an ex-engineer though and through experience working with engineers can be a trifle difficult. Not because they're an unpleasant bunch, far from it in this case, but because they know exactly what they want. Almost, but not quite, as demanding as architects.

Having said that, without the knowledge of his property that Mr J possessed, we would almost certainly have encountered problems. The property was a stunning early 1900s place and yet the sun lounge that we were installing to was an extension. Mr J advised that we were not to install the awning on to the building and that he had calculated how the awning could be fitted 'free standing'. We were to excavate a patio again (not for the first time!) and install two 60mm x 60mm stainless steel posts with an 18" x 18" steel plate on the bottom. The plate would be sunk in to the ground and would have a yard of concrete laid over it to secure. It worked, and the awning looked great. The most satisfying thing was that Mr J didn't realise the brackets were in place after we'd filled the patio back in, they blended so well with the wall.