Once the main structure of the garage was up, the focus was on getting it to the stage that the roofer could come and slate. Fortunately at the end of the week, the weather switched to dry and sunny – and whilst on a few days midges were fairly abundant at the beginning and end of the day, guess can’t have everything!
My main weekend task was to bash in all the truss clips, each with their 20 or so associated nails. I also made pretty good progress on the East gable – with Steico insulation, membrane and battens.
Once David was back on site at the start of week 2, we motored through the rest of the roof build up. And then it was on to the final stage of the slating prep: veluxes, fascias and barge boards.
Installing the veluxes was one of those things that I really wasn’t sure how would manage – not least because we had to somehow get three 56kg windows up the ladder. As with the trusses, fortunately the carrying part just wasn’t an issue for David, who simply put them on his shoulder and walked up the ladder with them!
Again it was the prepping for the velux installation that took all the time – actually fixing the veluxes in place was remarkably speedy. First up was to cut out holes in the the Steico fibreboard and sarking for the skylights. When you just have a sarking layer, it’s definitely easier to simply put the sarking across the whole roof and cut the holes out later. With the steico woodfibre, the cutting out isn’t quite so straightforward (it’s a pretty tricky thing to handsaw, and a bit thick for a plunge saw) – and given the cost of the material, it seems a bit wasteful to be straight away cutting away the big velux size chunk of it (even if has been saved and will be put to use somewhere else). However, to have incorporated the three holes into the roof build up would have been pretty time consuming, and quite tricky, so I haven’t quite decided which way I’d do it if we were doing it again!
By the end of Wednesday, the roof and three veluxes were all installed. That just left one final day on the Thursday of week 2 that I had David working with me. We needed to get to a point that I could finish off the pre-roofer prep, as well as being broadly wind and watertight.
There was a whole load of work that had to be done on the west gable – which I definitely hadn’t appreciated – to make it all level up around the steel, to then enable the whole gable to be racked with the OSB sheets. Once that was done, we then worked out widths of soffits and prepped one of the 38 truss ends needed so that I knew what I had to continue over the coming days. And in the final hour, we managed to get in the two downstairs windows and the glazed entrance door at the back of the accommodation part – amazing how quick this was to do!
(Fortunately before David left site, I also remembered to ask him to help move the 136kg Sunamp water heating unit into the house – definitely not something I could have done by myself.)
Then it was over to me – with visit by roofer expected the following week to check that everything was in order. In addition, the wood flooring was being delivered Thursday evening (all 2+ tonnes of it) and the house had to be cleared as much as possible ahead of the wooden floor fitter starting on Monday.