Roofing and Tree-Felling

Well, we slated the roof last week, which took longer than I thought it would.  After Saturday doing the insulation and battens as reported in my last entry, I spent a day and a half (Monday and Tuesday) doing as much of the tiling as I could on my own as Chris hadn't shown me how to do soakers at the edge. I covered an area with diagonal edge from the base of the wall up to the level of the rooflight, which I reckon means I did over half of the total required (photo right).  I also fitted the rooflight myself before Chris came on Wednesday and we then spent a lot more time doing not much slating; the window was tricky to secure due to
being raised by the counter battens, and we had to go and buy the lead (mega £££ - at least Chris gets a good discount!).  Then on Thursday we ran out of slates, needing a extra 12 or so, due to the high wastage rate from the reclaimed ones I had bought; apparently 5% wastage is to be expected but ours was over 10%, so I got some more slates free of charge from the reclamation yard.  We mostly finished the leadwork but we were 2 metres short of 300mm Code 4 (***see below) and ran out of daylight as well, so it was another half day on Saturday to buy a bit more lead and finish the job completely.  Overall I reckon I probably did about 80% of the 420 slates on the roof (the easy ones!) which was very satisfying, and Chris let me do the last bit of lead along the ridge as well.

Friday was another momentous day - the tree surgeons came to fell the trees in the front (left).  This they did safely in about six hours (right), including chipping all the waste branches and cutting the good ones into 9 inch lengths for me to burn in a year's time on the two real fires in the house.  They left the stumps for Colin the groundworker to sort out with his digger next week.

*** Lead Codes are very simple.  The number is the weight of lead per square foot of sheet, so Code 4 weighs 4lbs per square foot and is thinner than Code 5.  We originally bought 300mm wide sheet of Code 4 in two 6 metre lengths; since a foot is almost exactly 300mm and 6 metres is almost 20 feet, that means one roll weighed about 80lbs.  I let Chris carry them (but even he didn't carry both at the same time).