Morning Melodrama

When M.(our Romanian day labourer for the last few months) hadn't shown up by 9am, we started to worry. Our relief at hearing the door open at 9.05am, however, was vey short lived - M was upset, he had come to pick up his tools, return the keys, and leave, never to return. Isn't 9am too early for melodrama?! It was either a simple misunderstanding, or M. was taking the mickey and wanted more money—but we never figured out which it was, because by 9.10am, he was gone for good.

I absolutely could not believe it when I heard André say “It’s fine. I can finish the roof myself”. Fortunately, I didn’t have time to stand there getting stressed about the situation, since I had to go to work. But within a few hours, André had figured everything out!

As it turns out, laying roofing tiles is very precise, but relatively straightforward and light work, so it can feasibly be a one-person job (unlike some of the structural stuff we were doing earlier). It will go more slowly than if we had more than one pair of hands on it--but the money we will now save on labour will enable us to put more resources into the next big job, the plumbing. And André seems to be quite enjoying this work! He’s calling it methodical, but “meditative”. So it seems that in a way, M. walking off in a huff was, strangely enough, for the best.

After Six Weeks...

After six weeks (!) of not working, we’ve decided that the first order of business is to finish the roof—both for peace of mind and, on a more practical level, so we can take the scaffolding down sooner rather than later! There’s still a ways to go, though: we have to lay down the battens that will support the slate tiles, and then lay all the tiles. We also have to re-build the eaves, replace the gutters, do the flashing and lay down the membrane on the flat roof.

Today M. (our day laborer) and I started by taking out the temporary battens that were holding the waterproof membrane at the dormer where the final counter-battens (vertical orientation) had not been installed. Once they were gone, we marked the location of the rafters so we could position the permanent counter-battens, and then finally installed them.

The starting point after 6 weeks...

Installing the final counter-battens

Before we could start installing the horizontal battens, we needed to have a clear starting point. Because the new insulation and decking added so much height to the roof, I realized we needed to have the new eave in place (we had had to remove the original one) to give us the new edge of the roof and starting point for the battens.

The old eave...

Old eave is gone - end of rafters exposed

View from inside - showing the openings after the eave is removed

Installing the new eave

After we installed the first few pieces of the eave, M. carried on with that job while I reminded myself how to install the tiles... 

Checking my notebook on how to install the slates

After a few hours - the final assembly