Roof with a View



The view through a Velux



This morning - roofers arriving. The tall ladder to the left is their lift.



The battens going on the roof



Cor blimey it was like Euston Station on that scaffolding today. Roofers on one side, R and a mate on the other and the timber frame erectors in the middle. The last filling in gaps where the roof panels met the walls. Quite big, see-the-trees-through-them gaps - now sorted.
Very professional roofers whizzing around in a rather dizzying way up and down the slopes. They have a natty device which looks like a ladder which carries tiles up. R is putting up bargeboards (the diagonal bits of wood at the edges) and fascias (the horizontal bits of wood at the edges).

I have a problem with roofs - they are complicated and fiddly, with many bits of wood stuck on apparently at random. Luckily R is quite good at fiddly things - he usually sorts them out by doing a drawing. We had a dispute about the eaves - he wanted false rafters, which are bits of wood which stick down to look like real rafters (they can't be real rafters on account of we have a panelised roof made in the factory so no rafters as such), and I don't like false anything. After a lot of wrangling we settled on false rafters as long as we could put little ledges between them for the birds to nest on. So he calls them false rafters and I call them real built-in nestboxes.

Windows are coming in September - boo! But they have to come from Lithuania. Plenty to do in the meantime I guess. We can't render till they are in and we can't do the insulation, which is blown in by machines. But we can get the battening up for the render board to go onto, also the all-important taping of the joints inside for airtightness (that word again). And the roof and the kalash and the electrics and plumbing and the guttering.........