It's taken a while but I've finally got a roof on my little straw bale house. The whole process only actually took 3 short days of work, which were tiring but satisfying given the end result.
I had a professional builder do most of the work, I was really just the helper, and this arrangement actually worked out quite nicely - saving money and learning something at the same time......
Day one - Lugging and taking the tiles off!
The first day was unexpectedly busy for me - I had expected the builder to turn up with an assistant, but he turned up on his own, so I ended up being said assistant!
This was fine by me, so I helped lug the scaffolding up the hill - the back access to the land was out of action due to a freshly plowed field, so it meant carrying everything up 150 metres of hill.
Once the scaffolds were up, it was simply a matter of taking tiles off - I let the professional do the walking around on the roof, i just did the offloading of the tiles, ended up with quite a few stacked...
Besides this I left it up to the professional to jiggle around the roof battons, some of them needed realigning.
I also had a long lunch this day, a friend of mine coincidentally was in Penamacor when I got back, so by the time I got back I found all the thing strats for the roofing already off and the afternoon was just a matter of an hour taking nails out of these and tidying up.
Day two - new roof supports and getting the Chappas ready.
Literally the only thing I did on day two was take plastic off chappas - this took me about 3 hours - said plastic was not very co-operative, it only pealed off nicely on 2 sides out of 14 - the rest in bits. What a shit job.
Meanwhile my builder put up the main beams for the roof - six in all, which took a while as this prep is the most important bit of the build!
We had a late start due to having to wait for the main wooden beams for the new roof.
Day three - Getting the chappas on
This was the main event and went pretty quickly.
We got two of the boards up first of all and lined them up to see if they sat correctly with the line of the house, then secured these two down (it's nine bolts per board) then got the other 5 up - they just interconnect with each other.
NB this was a little hairy - getting these heavy boards up between two of us, initially standing on scaffolding and bending over to pick them up, thankfully no accidents.
The end result - looks OK!
And closer - probably could have gone with more of an overhang, but these boards were large enough from a handling perspective!
Next steps...
The roof isn't finished yet - it still needs a central support putting in place, just to be on the safe side, the top edges of the walls need filling in, the ends need capping and i should really put some tiles on top too, for sound proofing and aesthetic reasons, BUT it is now waterproof, which is the main thing, so the rest can wait.
Then it's just a matter of finishing off the rest of building!