Today saw the arrival of our Larch wall cladding timber! But it was most unexpected and the first sign that it was coming, was a phone call from the driver saying “I’m ten minutes away!” We were told delivery would be 2-3 weeks and it’s only been 9 days!
O boy!
The day was a very wet with virtually continuous rain all morning and we hadn’t planned to be out in it at all! But the phone call changed everything!!
We hastily got changed into work clothes, put on rain jackets and gloves and got outside into the rain!
The first job was to guide the lorry down our Loke, but at least and thank goodness, the driver was confident to reverse his soft shell high sided vehicle, all the way down to the bottom. The delivery truck had no crane and was expecting a fork-lift vehicle on site to unload the two pallets but alas we don’t have one of those!
This meant that the whole lot, all 5 tons of it, had to be unloaded by hand, plank by plank, a total of 600 Planks!
We got two trestle tables out to help organise carrying piles and several two by sixes to laid on the ground to support the larch out of the way.
The load arrived at 10:10am and we got it all unloaded by 12:40am, a total of two and an half hours of solid back breaking continuous effort without a single rest!
Larch-Delivery-1
Larch-Delivery-2
There are three different widths (145mm, 126mm and 95mm) planks and they came in various lengths. The narrow ones were the longest with most of them being nearly 6 metres long!
The-3-Widths-of-larch-rainscreen
The larch planks are very nice indeed, with hardly any knots and very smooth!
The first quick analysis of what we got, seems to suggest that we were delivered 870metres of the widest planks, and about 810metres of the other two planks each. We ordered 850metres of each width.
On the following three working mornings, Friday, Saturday and Monday, we moved all of them inside our main house so we could more precisely tally what we got, but also to stack them up in a much neater way, allow the planks to air and dry off from all the rain and get them ready for the two liquid treatment procedures they will need.
All-the-larch-cladding
The tally results for our timber were as follows:
* Widest (145mm) : 213 x 4 meter = 852 meters
* Medium (126mm) : 75 x 3 metres and 156 x 4 metres planks making 849metres
* Narrow (95mm) : 62 x 5.4 meters plus 90 x 5.7m and one 4.9m = 852 meters
This has meant that we were interrupted from our work on the roof and doing the windows! But it has to happen anyway.