We got all the trusses up on the north wing that we could, 31 in total. That leaves 8 more that will have to wait until we have the front door stonework completed. We over-ordered by two trusses, I was not certain of the length of the north wing when I ordered them.
We nailed battens across the rafters in preparation for a storm that did not really materialise, although it was breezy throughout. Next up, we trimmed the ends of the rafters, routed notches in the ends of fascia boards and nailed them up,
Over the next four working days, we got both sides of the roof covered with sarking boards. They had dried out over the winter & spring and were easy to handle.
And that is all we can do on the roof without rooflights, which we order soon. We will leave installing them until Ric gets up on 5th May.
Ric had covered the west side of the east wing roof with sarking, to allow him to tie in the first 8 north wing trusses, using the joining kit provided by Stevenson & Kelly. He started boarding the east side and got about halfway up the east side before he moved on to building up windows on the walls of the north wing. He had not left gaps in the boards to use as footholds, so we dragged out a bay of scaffolding and our two roof ladders.Â
We started at the south end, working upwards with groups of four boards making sure the ends of the boards got nailed in to different trusses. We picked up Ric’s hot tip and used the blades of mortar trowels to form the 2mm gaps we needed between boards, then nailed down the top 3 boards. We pulled out the bottom, loose, one and gave ourselves a footrest to work up the next set of boards. As we got to the ridge of the roof, we nailed all the boards down, including a full width one at the ridge. This left a gap below that was less than a boards-width, we sawed a board to size and nailed it in. Then we worked down the roof, nailing boards into the gaps we had left.Â
We worked our way along the roof until we got close to the north end of the roof and cut the boards so that they stuck out over the gable-end blockwork and a bit over the parapet. We can trim them up when we build up the parapet and re-lay the stonework.
We had a couple of jobs in mind over Christmas/New Year. Firstly, to get a load of our possessions up and stored in our immediate neighbour’s large shed/garage. Secondly, we want to temporarily board up windows and doors in the north and east wings, so that as the roof goes on we can start to dry them out and create a reasonably protected working area.
As it happened the weather was unseasonably warm, still & sunny, so we got a small stretch of wallhead blockwork finished and the missing sarking board over the east wing trusses. So it did turn out to be a quite productive visit. It has knocked a week off our schedule for when we move up permanently in April 2019.
We got a Christmas bonus – our replacement big lintel, for the garage door, was waiting for us nine months after we ordered the original!Â
Ric stayed on after we headed south and concentrated on the roof over the east and north wings.
He got 6 more of the raised-tie trusses in place on the north wing next to the two we got in place just before we left. He had to puzzle out how to a) trim the ties and cut the birds mouths, b) hoist the trusses over the wall and c) get it placed on the wall. Entirely on his own and in a reasonably efficient manner. The first one took a couple of hours, the following 5 took 20 minutes each. He ran out of wallhead and turned to sarking boards.
We had moved one of the bales of 192 sarking boards round from where Ellon Timber had dropped them off, to a convenient place outside the east wing. They had been treated just before we got them, they were really quite wet and weighed a ton. Even with three of us it was miserable job. So, unsurprisingly, Ric had extra work to do to lug the boards up onto the trusses in order to fit them. He started at the bottom and worked up the east side of the east wing trusses.
He attached the rest of the fascia board and positioned it so that the lowest sarking board rested on the top of the fascia, lifting it up into a small ‘kick’. We will need this later on to accomodate the thinning of the slates at the botton of the roof, from two overlaps per slate down to just the top slate and the half slate underneath. He used a guaging trowel to form the required 2mm gap between sarking boards, but did point out that as they were saturated, they could not expand more that they were at the moment. When they do dry out, the gap will probably be bigger. Initially he just stacked the boards up the roof and quickly found he was having trouble getting usable access to get higher boards. So he decided to measure the boards out, but not nail every 5th board, which he took out temporarily to give himself footholds. Due to the irregular placing of the east wing trusses, through the need to accomodate the stair well, escape window and the jack rafters over the gallery area, he spent quite a bit of time trimming the boards to length. He got about halfway up the east side of the roof and decided he needed a change.
He headed over to the west side and decided to sort out the join between the north and east trusses. So he got some of the sarking boards built up on the north wing trusses, then ran boards all the way across the stair well area on the east wing trusses. He attached a ridgeboard to the end-most north wing truss, across to the tiny triangle of truss provided by Stevenson & Kelly, then a short length of ridgeboard from the other side of the triangle, terminating against the east wing sarking. He put a jack rafter each side on the longer ridgeboard, again with the ends resting on the sarking boards. This extended the north wing roof up the slope of the east wing roof. Ric trimmed sarking boards and laid them over the framework to define the valleys. He laid the rest of the sarking boards on the west face of the east wing roof, right up to each end, extending the boards over the inner edge of the gable walls.
On the north side we have a short length of fascia that runs alongs the east wing truss ends until it joins the valley between the rooves. We had calculated that the space below this fascia, down to the north wing roof, would be within the thickness of the wall at that point. On the old roof, the rafters were trimmed off at the wallhead, so the equivalend triangular space was bigger and was OK because there was internal rubble wall to protect from the weather. We got something wrong, though, because for some reason, there is a small triangular hole where the internal wall used to be. This is irritating, but we will fit some treated timber across the hole and it will be behind lead flashing.
On the south side, we of course have a much longer length of fascia but we have the same little wedge of empty space to fill.
There is loads to do on the roof next spring, but getting most of the roof boarded is a real milestone!
East Byreleask Steading 