The work this week was to cover the next three sections of the roof surface with the breathable membrane and protect the wooden Oak guttering with the required rubber material.
The rubber membrane was the first to go into the gutters, doing our usual order of gluing down the bottom surface first (using the wet rubber solution), followed by the much slower use of two layers of contact glue on the ends of each rubber strip. We had to paint the glue on and dry the exposed surfaces using a hair dryer to speed this process up and then carefully smoothly iron the rubber into place (using our hands and fingers). We finished all three gutters on Monday.
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The subsequent days were spent laying on the dark grey breathable plastic membrane, row by row, around the three roof surfaces, fixing each section with vertical counter battens and a few lines of tile battens to act as a ladder for us to climb up and down easily.
One of the other jobs that had to be done was to finish off building up the hip and ridge layers of plywood strips to provide the fixings for the flashing slates, on the OP hip angle and the O Ridge line.
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Then we could complete the breathable membrane coverage on the N roof with a half width strip going over the ridge line and then doing the final strip of membrane on the M roof, a very long piece over 11metres (35feet) long and then a small 300mm wide strip to provide the complete protection up onto the kerb of the Skylight.
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This week sees the completion of fully waterproofing sections of the roof along the back the building that is served three downpipes, so we are now collecting approximately 130 square metres (about 1/3 of the total) of rain water from the roof when any rain falls out of the sky!! This amounts to 130litres of rainwater for every 1mm of rain fall recorded!
Next week’s set of tasks is to finish off the stainless steel brackets for holding the ladder support wire (then we can clear up the tools in the workshop), make a flexible fibre-glass plastic hip and ridge “hat” strips and then carry on putting up more slates on the K section!