Category: Roof

Gutters, Porch and Windows

Monday was a wet day so we did other tasks inside the temporary quarters finishing off repair work caused by the Flood.
Tuesday was a nice lovely day so we got outside and finished mounting the oak pieces to build the gutters, for the last three sections of the roof, joining back to the very beginning when we started all those months ago.

FG-H-gutter-woodwork-finished

Wednesday saw the glass-fibre and resin applied to the three corners (two outside corners and one inside one connecting to the downpipe channel) before the rain came at 5pm!

FG-GH-corners-fibreglassed

Second-half-of-HI-Corner-fibreglassed-8-months-later

Thursday: Inspected the new gutters and analysed the flow of the rainwater along the side door porch’s gutter to see if we needed to jack up the middle of the beam supporting the porch’s fascia and guttering. This was all done before we put up our new aluminium support arm. The results were that nothing was adjusted as the rainwater flowed at optimum rates so we simply screwed the diagonally mounted arm into place.

Middle-porch-support-installed

Blocking-added-to-EH-corner

The afternoon was spent in the workshop processing the oak timber that forms the octagon side pieces for each window. We hadn’t attended this task for a while and we discovered that some of the oak pieces had warped very slightly and we are wondering whether that will badly affect the quality of the join when we make the octagon joints. So we took four pieces, 2 wide and 2 narrow ones, and sliced them down to the required widths of 97mm and 70mm. there are two straight ones and two of the slightly warped ones. We will then put the pieces through the router with the special cutter to form the tongue and groove joint angled (at 22.5°) and learn how they fit together with different conditions.
Friday morning duly saw the test pieces processed and the tongue and groove seem to be working just fine, including the ones that were slightly warped. This meant that we could and did carry on and we processed all the other fifty pieces of oak timber, slicing a new 45degree angled slope at a consistent width, a wider one of 97mm and a narrower one at 70mm.
On Saturday, we got on with the job of cutting the 22.5° angled tongue and groove special joint on all the pieces of oak and also rounded off the sharp edge on the wide pieces. We have two sets of oak pieces with quite a series of cuts and slices.

Window-octagon-parts-to-cover-cladding-ends

Tounge-and-groove-octagon-joints

Test-octagon-parts-glued-up

For next week, the weather forecast is for dry but chilly days so we will be working out on the roof to get the rubber liners in the gutters and then get the breathable membrane strips up and all the wooden battens nailed into place too.

26 October 2019
Gutters Covered and a Good Half of “D” Roof Section Covered in Slates

For this week of many disrupted days, we managed only to get a little progress on putting the slates on the roof. We didn’t get going until mid-week where we finally got enough dry weather to complete the repair work on the corner of the gutters, the C-D outside corner of the front porch. This finally allowed us to complete the task of installing the metal mesh onto the guttering plus also mounting the oak strips to clamp down the mesh and rubber edges, finishing off the “B” section, the “C”, “D” and almost all the “E” too.
We then put on the first two rows of slates along the bottom of the “C” section to protect the metal mesh and got started on the “D” side section of the front porch module. We did managed to get two solid days of work in and we mounted about 500 slates on to the roof. A slow task as we have short diagonal strips with the valley and hip ends fairly close together, so lots of cutting and moving equipment many times.

Most-of-D-slated

Next week, we hope to get much better weather, hence less interruptions and get more slates on the “D” and “E” sections.

5 October 2019
New Roof Covering on Store Room and Living Quarters!

The start of the week saw the roofs of both our Store Room and our Living Quarters get new coverings. The picture below is the image of it all before hand ..

Store-room-old-felt

Temporary-Living-old-felt

Garden-shed-old-felt

On Monday, we got on with the Store Room, putting on five new strips of the standard cheap roofing felt, using the black bitumen glue and some nails around the edges. We released the transparent corrugated plastic sheets so we could slide in a new strip of the felt and then refitted the foam and screws.

Store-room-new-felt

Then on Wednesday, on the next dry day, we then put on four and half strips of the roofing felt on the Living Quarters, making sure we overlapped the old original joints of the old felt with plenty of bitumen glue plus plenty of nails too around the edges and along one of the joints near the ridge line that does feel the force of the prevailing wind coming from the south west.

Temporary-Living-new-felt

We ran out of the bitumen glue so we are awaiting for more to come before we can finish this task of protecting our temporary structures, the last one being our garden shed, sometime next week.

2 October 2019
Slates on Section B, Mesh Covered On Gutter plus Repair to C-D Corner

A very disrupted week with a major family commitment and duty to perform, we got only a couple of days of work done. But we managed to complete the “B” section of the roof plus also a repair job on the corner of the guttering.
We did some slates on Monday morning and then resumed Thursday and Saturday, to install a further 700 more slates. It was quite tricky leaning over the very steep side of the “C” roof in doing the edge and also putting on the flashing slates too, but it is all done now apart from just a dozen flashing slates along the ridge line towards the skylight.
We also put on some of the metal mesh covers on the gutters, just enough so we could complete this roof section but still do some further work in another part of the guttering.

B-Slating-Finished

During the week, on one of the odd mornings, we noticed that in the C-D corner of the gutters, there was a crack in the fibre glass which was caused by the whole fabric being stressed too much when the joint of the D side of the guttering had warped. We had fixed that problem last week and it seems to be holding now, but the damaged was already done to the fibre-glass layer over the other side of the corner. It was leaking rain water and that how we noticed the fault. So after filing away the fibre-glass and resin material to a width of about an inch on each side of the joint of the oak underneath, plus also grinding away a shallow gulley into the wood itself, we then cleaned out the joint with the compressed air, blasting right through. We then push an amount of our PU solid glue and worked it into the joint on both side and including the fascia joint too and left it to cure and set rock hard.

Repairing-CD-corner-gutter

We will put on a final coating of resin with glass-fibre to recombine the original membrane of the glass-fibre resin layer and resurface it back to a smooth finish and then put on more mesh covers on the rest of the gutters.
That about concludes this week’s work and we say a sad goodbye to our Aunty Melba whom we all said our farewell on Tuesday, and we will continue next week in her honour to get on with our house.

28 September 2019
The Roof Felt Getting Old and Brittle plus Rolled up the Sun Shield

On Wednesday, we performed a quick and dirty fix to our roof over our temporary living quarters and rolled up our Sun shield tarpaulin covering over our corridor.
We suddenly sprang lots of leaks on Tuesday morning during some heavy weather and discovered on the following day that the strips of the roofing felt had shrunk enough to pull apart at the overlapping joints. So we applied a quick fix by inserting a long narrow strip of rubber in between the two layers of the felt and that would hopefully stops most of the water from entering our home.

We then rolled up the Sun Shield tarpaulin off the corrugated plastic roof and put that away, plus also completely removed the mid-section support arm and their concrete blocks (all stored on our main garage roof for the time being), so it is ready for the whole roof to be recovered in a brand new layer of roofing felt when the weather is dryer and less windy. We also inspected the roof over our store room and the garden shed and decided that both needed recovering too.
Therefore we ordered 13 more rolls of felt plus a tin of glue and roofing nails and we will grab any portion of any day that is dry, to put on as many strips of new felt each time. we are unlikely to get a whole day or so of dry warm and calm weather so we have to take this approach to grab each moment as it present itself.

25 September 2019
Roof Section D and E Covered in Membrane and Battens and Slates Coverage Progresses on Section B.

For the start of the week, under a damp chilly sky, we gave our nail gun a inspection and discovered that it needed oiling in the drive piston chamber. It was rather dry and sticky with old oil. But the air line should be supplying a tiny amount of oil every time the gun is fired but the device is not apparently working. But at least after cleaning and oiling it , we now have a fully working gun back again!

We proceeded to cover the “D” and “E” sections of the roof with the breathable membrane and put on all the wooden tile battens which makes it now waterproof and ready for slates to be mounted. This took the whole day Monday, the mornings of Tuesday and Wednesday plus morning of Thursday to complete.

D-E-partially-battened

D-E-fully-battened

The latter half of Tuesday was spent making the third aluminium support arm for holding up the Side Porch. The new length of the 2inch square tube arrived last week and we were able to complete this task of reinforcing the roof of the Side Porch.

Center-porch-support-made

And the latter half of Wednesday was spent making stainless steel support posts for our skylight to attach a hook wire around for safety and ladders. We needed one more pillar post as we seemed to have mislaid one or miscounted when we made the original set.

We continued on Thursday afternoon and also most of Friday, putting up more wooden battens that forms the structure for holding the flashing slates. We used the string to maintain a straight line, but the right hip has a slight curve in it so we had to follow this curve. It probably wouldn’t be noticeable unless one looks very carefully. We had to skip the remainder of Thursday afternoon so we resumed Friday (and took most of the day) putting on the rubber membrane band and the bull-nose wooden strip which was then covered in the fibre-glass + dark grey resin coating.

Rubber-and-bullnose-on-BCD-hips-and-ridge-

For late Thursday afternoon, we needed to do the valley trough, installing two full lengths and a specially modified shorter piece that fits right up where the ridge and the skylight meets together. The modifications were done late in the workshop after 6pm so that would be ready in the morning.

Top-of-DE-valley-trough

We also (again late Thursday afternoon) completed putting up the flashing rubber membrane strip along the kerb of the skylight and covered it up with the aluminium protection horizontal band.

Skylight-kerb-flashed

The next job, after finishing the flashing protection strips, from mid-afternoon of Friday, was to cut strips of the metal mesh off our supply roll. We finished off the entire roll and we now have a pile of mesh with a bent bump near the front of each strip to act as a rain water drip deflector. We hope we have enough to finish the job of covering the remaining gutters from “C” to “H”.
On Saturday, we did a little repair job on the C-D corner of the gutters where the joint has warped a bit and there wasn’t enough PU glue in first place. so we clamped the oak timber back into shape again and filled all the gaps with more PU glue after we had sanded and rubbed inside the joint to get some clean surfaces again.

So we decided that because the glue and clamps are in the way, we would instead continue on putting up slates. We got back to the “B” section of the roof and spent some time marking out the initial positions of each row going up the valley using our large framing square and string to get a vertical line to project back on each row to the valley to mark the regular nailing points. Then we also did the same on the “C” section but this time, exactly in the middle so we know where to start the slates from when we want to cover the roof and generate our special pattern.
And finally, for the rest of the day, we started putting up more slates, on the “B” roof portion, another 150 slates, going up the valley, doing all the angled slices in the slate hanging over the valley trough. It is a long laborious job but we got there, right to the top!

Slating-started-on-B

C-Roof-slate-alignment-marked

So for the start of the new week, we will put on the metal mesh over the gutters and then continue putting up a further 3500 slates to cover all the roof sections from “B” to “E” we have prepared.

21 September 2019
Preparation of Hips and Ridges All Completed, Gutters Installed and Rubber Liners Inserted In Gutters

The start of the week was a bit damp with a very light rain falling almost all day Monday. We resumed work on our roof by nailing and gluing the layers of plywood strips to make up the flashing structure for the Hips and Ridge that goes up the Side Porch and up to the Skylight on the E-H corner. We had to saw several lengths of plywood strips from our left-over pile (to make the 175mm wide pieces) and cut three more 100mm 15mm thick strips. But that is all done now and that also see the completion of this job of putting up these flashing strips as there is no more to do!!

Hips-and-ridges-for-EFG-H-1

Hips-and-ridges-for-EFG-H-2

So for the following day, Tuesday, we were able to get on with the job of installing the gutters, using our pile of Oak timber pieces, ready in their two styles. But we discovered that we are running out of pieces! We had only five and half lengths (2metres each) of our base boards and seven lengths of the front vertical pieces. This only allowed us to complete the remainder of the ‘E’ section and around the corner onto the ‘F’ (the Side Porch). We did have enough to continue around again to the ‘G’ section which is very short and has a downpipe channel located at the end but no more than that to enable us to complete the last section ‘H’ which needed three more base boards. So we decided to stop short on the ‘F’ section and make more Oak pieces in our workshop when it rains next time.
So we glued the base boards in and then got the front vertical pieces push on, glued and clamped, all the way to just short of completing the ‘F’ section, which now enables us to get the valley in the D-E corner to be prepared and get the Front Porch covered in slates.

E-Gutter-wood-glued-in

Half-of-F-gutter-done

Wednesday started a bit damp so we couldn’t get on doing the fibre-glass and resin process to seal the E-F outside corner so instead we got on with putting up the breathable membrane and half the tile battens on the ‘C’ roof section. It was very interesting as this roof is very steep at 60°!! We had more showers at noon so we came in for a discussion on slate tiling patterns and then had lunch.
Thursday was a lovely day and we got on with the task of putting up more battens on the ‘C’ and ‘B’ roof sections and they are now both complete and ready for slates.

B-battens-finished

C-battens-installed

During the day, after lunch, after waiting for the wood surfaces to be dry enough (after the rain we had yesterday), we proceeded to fibre-glass and resin the outer corner of the guttering, where the E-F sections intersects. With this done, we can now insert the rubber liner.
Finally, on Saturday (Friday?s work was lost due to other commitments), we indeed got our rubber liner inserted into the gutter running along the ‘E’ section of the roof. That was the morning’s task and after lunch, we then ran up a strip of membrane up the valley and nailed six lines of 38mm wide counter battens that supports the valley trough. And finally, we started putting up the breathable membrane bands across horizontally the ‘D’ and ‘E’ sections of the roof. We only managed to get one line up as our usual nail gun was playing up and misfiring the nails. We swopped over to our alternative gun that uses full headed nails held together in a strip by a plastic material moulded around the nails.
But then we tackled the first tile batten and the nail gun was doing funny things to the nail strips, this time they were the 50mm long nails. We had no problems with the 64mm ones! So we are having a jinx on our tools at the moment. Phew!
Finally, to finish off the day, we applied black mastic sealant to the ends of the rubber liner to make sure that water cannot creep in.

E-Gutter-done-and-start-of-battens

Next week, we will get on putting up the breathable and battens to get both ‘D’ and ‘E’ sections water tight and ready for the next load of slates to go on.

14 September 2019
Metal Posts Installed, Platform Modules Rearranged and Guttering Completed for E

Monday, we had a little quick job of making some extra shelving for our living quarters, made out of pieces of plywood lying around

New-shelves-for-Mum

Then we got on with installing the last two metal aluminium legs for the Front Porch and its roof. We managed to hoist up the beam running underneath the roof edge, using our car hydraulic jack to lift it up 10mm on the outer corner and then a more distance (30mm) in the middle. All three legs are now bolted down into the concrete foundation pads and the plain steel concrete bolts were covered in bitumen sealant to protect them from damp sand in the long run. The top of the legs were screwed into the wooden beam using stainless steel coach screws.

3-metal-poch-legs

Porch-leg-concrete-bolts-masticed

The final job of Monday was to clean out the man-hole chamber that got damaged several months ago by a delivery van driver. We used our vacuum cleaner to suck up the sand and then wrapped a strip of rubber membrane around the top of the chamber to cover up the broken edge to stop further sand and soil to leak in. we will do a proper repair later on when we get the driveway laid.

Manhole-repaired-2

Manhole-repaired-1

Tuesday morning was spent going around the eves cleaning the excess brown glue away from the rafters coming down to the back of the fascia, doing about half of the circuit before lunch.
After lunch, we resumed our task of moving the platform modules to their new position.
Wednesday was spent all day adjusting the platform modules including moving the lift shaft into its final position (where it will serve us right to the end of completing the whole roof).
Thursday was another half workforce day, so the second set of the aluminium bracing support were made, this time for the Side Porch. These arms are angled at 53° from the wall surface about 6 feet off the ground and reaches out all the way to the corner of the framework beam.

We wanted to avoid having straight vertical posts supporting the porch so we can move vehicles around on our driveway without the fear of bumping into a leg and causing complicated damage to the overhanging porch and the roof. The angle was derived by calculation the stress and strain numbers on the 50mm square tube and the 53° position turned out to be the surprising optimum angle! Late afternoon, we installed one of the new arms on the E-F corner, all screwed using four stainless steel 80mm by 6mm hex head coach screws at each mounting plate.

Angled-porch-support-EF

Friday, we put up the second arm, similar to the first arm and it was screwed with more stainless steel hex head coach screws.

Angled-porch-support-FG

We had designed the porch with just two supports but discovered that we hadn’t fully appreciated in how flexible a 6metre beam would be and not having a third middle support point meant that we are likely to have a dip in our gutters especially after we have loaded the slates on to the roof! So we spent the day installing a middle horizontal additional support beam. We had to cut out a rectangular hole in the middle of the existing beam to allow a 89mm CLS timber to be inserted and a similar hole in the wall in between the Utility room’s window and door. That was the middle layer so two lengths were glued and clamped on top and underneath to stiffen it up. Behind the wall, we also put in a third layer underneath the two existing layers (of the top plate) and that was glued and clamped as well.

New-midspan-top-brace-on-F-porch

The last piece of structural piece of work to be executed was to provide a vertical post behind the cement board so we could screw the metal arm into place later on. This post forms the third side of the triangle that forms a combined structural element to hold up the middle of the Side Porch roof and gutters. The post is made up of three 95mm by 45mm regularised timber pieces, two of them glued together to produce a square core element and the third piece glued and screwed overlapping the front surfaces including the top and bottom timber layers of the original wall.

New-wall-post

Top-new-wall-post

On Saturday, we repaired the temporary Loke fence where some sections had torn the plastic webbing. One of the wooden posts proved to be fragile and rotten at ground level so we replaced that post with a new round post. Then using the left-over length of the fencing, replaced the torn sections and threaded a rope weaving in and out of the top line of the webbing to provide a stronger support for the plastic fence against strong winds.

Loke-edge-fence-renewed

The excess glue was cleared away off our new middle support beam and sanded it down hard to reduce the blobs of bubbled glue along the joins.

Finally, we finished setting up the platform modules with all the safety side strips and installing the motor into the lift shaft.

Scaffold-platforms-and-Lift-moved

We are ready to resume work next week on the roof now and get the Side Porch prepared for tiling and allow us to complete the Front Porch, at last!

7 September 2019
Roof Section A More or Less Complete and Three New Aluminium Posts Created for Front Porch

We had a bank holiday Monday to our week so we did a slow day of measuring the Front Porch various elements so we can adjust the level of the Porch with our new aluminium posts. The spreadsheet gave us the relationship between the three concrete pads we done ten days ago and they are now hard enough for supporting the load of the Porch and the roof with the slates, and the support beams and the gutters itself.
We used our laser level site to get the numbers and we now have three length to make our aluminium posts with top and bottom plates to help spread the load and fix the posts to the wooden beam and also keep it stable on the concrete.
The posts are in the order of 3200mm long, plus or minus 3mm.
It was very hot and we decided to avoid working on the roof until the next day Tuesday.
So Tuesday, half a day Wednesday (afternoon) and half a day of Thursday (morning), we got the rest of the largest ‘A’ section all covered in slates, an additional 1,200 of them, making a total of 2,500!
The temperature was still very hot and it climbed to 29°C on Tuesday but was cooler on the following days. We drank lots of water more or less every hour. Phew!

Roof-A-complete

The remaining part of Thursday was spent tidying up our platform walkways, moving the trolleys of slates back to ground level, moving equipment and materials around so we could start undoing the modules along ‘A’ and the ‘P’ sections. We need to do this because we need to gain access to the other half of the main front roof, the ‘E’ section on the other side of the front porch.
For Friday and Saturday, while one half of the work force was occupied elsewhere, the metalwork was done on the posts for the Front Porch. There are three aluminium square posts, measuring 50mm a side and 3200mm tall. Each end has a flat metal plate welded, to help spread the load across the interface; the concrete pad at the bottom and the wooden beam up inside the porch roof. The bottom pad is a solid 150mm square and 6mm thick and the top piece is 75mm wide and also 6mm thick. The top plates comes in two shapes; a straight one measuring 125mm long for the middle leg, and two L shaped one for the corners. The first thing Stephen need to do was learn how to weld aluminium, this need changes to the welding machine and learning a new technique for the welding. This took up most of Friday morning (doing many practice welds and checking quality)!

Aluminium-welding-Cross-section

Then the plates were cut and butt welded. The on Saturday the plates were welded to the posts.

Porch-legs-1

Porch-legs-2

Porch-legs-3

We started installing them Saturday afternoon and we got one up in the C-D corner but we were trying to lift up the other corner, the B-C corner, to slide the metal leg under the beam, only 10mm to lift but it is proving difficult to do. We are using a car hydraulic jack but can’t get a stable base to apply the force to lift up the beam and the roof that 10mm.

Porch-leg-base

Porch-leg-top

We will resume on Monday! Once the metal posts are in place, we can rearrange the working platform modules again so we can get access to the whole of the ‘E’ section and around along the Side Porch too. Then we can do more guttering and inserting the rubber liner.

31 August 2019
“P” Roof All Complete, Mesh on “A” Gutter, Half of “A” Roof Covered in Slates and Flashing Installed Along Skylight

Another week is complete, with lots of Slates being mounted plus some little bit of work on the window’s octagon pillars.
The hip flashing was first to be done, with the bull-nose shaped fibre-glass covered in the dark grey resin, going up the P-A intersection of the roof.
Then we went to work on the “P” section of the roof and finished it off, as now we have means and support to climb up (on the “A” roof) to gain access to “P”.

P-Finally-finished

We also put up the Skylight rubber flashing along the “A” section to the “C” ridge line and put up the aluminium cover strips too.

We then installed the other half of the slating battens on ‘A’ (another 24 rows and about 260m long)

Roof-A-all-battened-up

Next, the metal mesh (for the guttering) was cut into strips off the roll, but with an additional modification applied at the same time. we put on a steel rod on to the jig so we could push and squash the mesh around the rod to make a “bump”, sticking up into the air. We are hoping that this will solve the annoying and troublesome rainwater from running across the mesh without dripping off into the gutters and dribbling over the edge down to the ground. This bump will, fingers crossed, interrupt the flow of the water and force it to drop into the gutter as it should do in the first place!
We then proceeded to cover all the way along the “A” section and half of the “B” section including the valley corner. We had already, by then, installed two 3metre valley trough modules up the A-B valley.

Gutter-Mesh-on-A

For the last two days, we got on with slating the “A” roof and we have managed to do about a one thousand three hundred slates.

A-Slating-Day-1

A-Slating-Day-2

There were interruptions during the week, some due to bad weather where we worked in the workshop on our windows and continuing with the task of shaping our octagon pillar pieces, but we had other little interruptions too.
Next week, we will carry on with the “A” section and put up another 1500 slates, up the valley and to complete that. Then will do the three porch metal posts and get them done before we start putting on more weight on the roof and the porch.

24 August 2019