A huge thanks to Colin, who was back to help out on Monday and Tuesday. After finishing off battening the front of the roof, Monday's job was to 'bump' the stacks of tiles up onto the scaffolding and distribute the piles across the roof. We hired a 'Bumpa Hoist' which is a nifty conveyor belt for tiles. Colin loading at the bottom and Kai unloading at the top. The machine has three settings - fast, very fast, or aaaaaarrrgggghhhhh! Colin showed no mercy loading the bottom, leaving Kai running around the roof whilst the machine spat tiles off the end of the belt. Needless to say at the end of the day Kai was 'beat'.
We had seven pallets of tiles in total. Each pallet is nearly a tonne, and Colin+Kai took thirty minutes to get each pallet up there.
Below, the tiles all bumped. This helps to get the roof to settle under the load. If you start laying tiles while the roof is not equally loaded, it might all go a funny shape...
Starting to lay the tiles. Not all of them have to be nailed - just every fifth row, and the the edge tiles. We're choosing to nail all the edge tiles and one adjacent for peace of mind. That's only about two thousand nails...
Put to the test!
The valley areas are annoying to say the least. It slows you down to about half the speed, having to mark out and cut each valley tile. You have to be quite accurate getting the cut at the correct angle, otherwise it looks rubbish from a distance.
There were heavy showers on Saturday so Kai worked inside fitting the windows. It wasn't long ago we were doing the same thing whilst renovating a Victorian terraced house - and boy that was a lot harder. Newbuild = straight lines, right angles, precise measurements, secure fixings. Five windows and one set of French doors took Kai about 6 hours to fit and glaze.
It's a lot quieter inside the house now that the windows are in, they block out most of the road noise from the front.
Much better weather on Sunday so it was back to laying roof tiles. One or two more good days next week should complete the tiling, but there are an awful lot of small finishing details to be done - grouting edges, soffits and fascia boards, rainwater goods....
It doesn't look to me as though the weather has slowed you down at all! Glad house is now watertight and a complete shell. Ma
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