Proper job

It had been a cold night with quite a heavy frost but the roofers were back on site this morning at around 8.00 am. When I looked out of the caravan a bit later, a ladder was already up against the back wall of the house and they’d already removed the shuttering put in place by the builder’s ‘maçon’ two days before so they could get cracking on sealing the roof with the waterproof plastic membrane and fitting the tiles.

With the plastic membrane in place and fully secured by vertical laths nailed to the roof joists they could then go ahead and attach the battens on which to hang the tiles. One of the men had already replaced the front edge tiles at the living room end and they began hanging the new tiles on the back of the roof starting from the same end.

Once they’d started hanging the tiles one of the men attached the new edge tiles on the front of the roof at the bedroom end while another prepared the metal trays to be installed in the valley of the join in the angle of the roof.

The gent in the orange overall trousers seemed to be in charge providing the supervision of the other workers that I think was lacking the last time when they messed up fitting the roof too far forward, but that’s just my own opinion.

You can clearly see in the next pic how the overhang on the back of the roof at the living room end matches that on the front, which was far from the case originally.

They hung the tiles starting from the bottom and as they proceeded, one of the workers began to cut back the new tiles on the back of the ridge with an angle grinder ready for ridge capping pieces to be added later to complete the structure.

By mid-afternoon the living room end of the roof was completed all bar one edge tile and the ridge and the team had also made good progress on the bedroom end. Work had also begun on creating openings in the tiles for the house’s ventilation system.

In this shot you can see the white round polythene ventilation tube being put in place on the front of the roof over the separate WC.

In the next shot the holes for what I think are the main air inlet pipe and another vent are also visible on the rear of the roof.

And that’s about as far as they got, so they’ll probably be back tomorrow to finish off. The last few shots show the roof as at the end of today.

I’m really happy. The roof is now an enormous improvement on what was there before and I’m only glad that I was on site to make sure that the builder wasn’t able to continue will-nilly with it as it was. The house’s general appearance would have been very badly affected and it would have been much too late to do anything about it if that had happened.