Next house job planned

The ladder that I bought from Brico Depot to put up my satellite dish isn’t long enough to get me safely up onto the roof of my house so I’ve had to think of another way. I thought that I’d do an internet search for roof ladders – ‘échelles de toit’ or ‘échelles de couverture’ in French – and came up trumps. My thinking is that I’d rather buy the tools to do jobs myself instead of paying someone else to do so because then you’ve always got them should similar problems arise in the future. Or you can always sell them again and get most of your money back, which will always work out cheaper than having someone else do the work, which I’m generally always capable of doing myself. Plus I’ve got the time, of course.

Anyway, I found just what I was looking for on, surprisingly, Amazon.fr, where I can buy a roof ladder of just over 5 metres in length for less than 120€ including delivery. A wooden one is fine for what I want to do – replace some ridge tiles, re-render my chimney and fix some tiles on its top – a fancy aluminium one would cost a lot more and only be worth buying if I was going to use it regularly, which hopefully I won’t be. The ladder doesn’t come with a ‘hook’ to hang it from the ridge by – a ‘crochet de faîtage’ in French – but I can get one of those for just under 60€ without wheels, or 90€ with, from another supplier in Bordeaux.

So I’ll be getting those delivered next week and then I’ll be all ready to do the work. I was quoted a starting price of 400€ by a contractor last year, depending on what he found when he got going, so the saving will leave me with a handy contribution towards my 56NE fuel fund – I’d rather be flying after doing the work myself instead of standing on the ground watching someone else do it. And I’ll have the ladder afterwards so I’ll be able to fix some broken tiles I’ve got, clean moss off the roof, stuff like that. All round I think it should be a ‘win-win’ situation 😉