Leaderboard

So the roof is now totally finished- was a beast of a job and having finished the ridge I felt as though I had been riding a particularly fat horse all week. Physically tough doing it without help and using just a ladder, but I'm impressed with the corrugated steel and would happily use it in future. I would seriously consider it for wall cladding as well, as it was much quicker and not any more expensive compared to my larch. I had made a start on the larch wall cladding a few months back, fixing the first layer of boards on the gables. I'm now comfortably past the half way point with the cladding, with only the seaward walk not yet started. It's been a process of trial and error to find ways of getting each board in place ensuring that it more or less plumb and with equal gaps either side. Part of this learning process has been judging what kind of tolerance to work to. The boards are highly variable, from less than 95mm width to over 100mm, sometimes tapering at one or both ends, and often with a bit of a curve to them. So my first idea of using a long spirit level and a wooden block as a spacer wasn't going to work. The first layer was done quite carefully with markings on the battens; temporary nails on these marks located each board whilst I used the coil nailer to fix it in place. For the top layer, I didn't want to use that method as it would leave nail holes in visible parts of the cladding. So the best method for fixing the long boards of the gables seems to be to put small marker nails on the reverse side of each board, spaced to match the gap that is being covered. It's obviously a lot of prep time, but I can do that inside the house during bad weather (it is February in Skye after all), and then when the weather allows I can literally just shove the boards up against the wall and they will be in the right place. Unfortunately my progress is now going to be rapidly curtailed as I become the stay at home Dad- SWMBO has gone back to work, so my day now revolves around the couple of hours nap time that let me sprint down to the house site, baby monitor in my pocket, and feverishly nail some boards on. Next project: self build baby pen...

Thought I'd start my "outside toilet" thread after the previous thread involving getting the first fix plumbing outside. Basically take one disused log store lean-too on the side of the garage and add the lack of desire to hire a portaloo for the build and the bog project was born! Ive actually only used 2m of the 6.5m length so might have to imagineer other uses for the store as it's currently filling up with crap! P.S. The chickens love a bit of DIY, especially where sawdust is created.

That's unreal - really sorry to hear that, you know I feel your pain. I could go on and on about the appalling service from BUildstore but would be saying nothing new - a lot of my work is around process design and in short - they have none. No proper, consistent processes. No case management system. No effective SLAs. No proper customer service. Lazy staff is a large part of it I suspect as well. I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions in this regard - our experience was so bad that when the barn fell through, we decided that we would never use a mortgage to build the house. For a start, you have the mortgage fee. Then have to take out the warranty. And pay a higher interest rate. And are constrained by state payments (in our case only arrears)....you can easily add £10k on just in mortgage related fees. It might not be what you and your wife want to think about - but - seeing your daughter pitch in with the garage - is a true self build an option for you? Okay - it'll take longer, be hard graft, BUT it will cost significantly less and, arguably - be less stressful because you don't have the serious constraints of mortgages, warranties, stage payments etc etc. Also, it means you work at your own pace as and when financing allows. It's not something to take on easily, more of a life choice than anything. But you are out the ground. How much to get wind and water tight then finish the rest yourself? Have a think - it might take you twice as long but you could finish by having no mortgage....

The deck of a boat I owned years ago was just waxed gel coat with a bit of sand added, painted onto the roughened fibreglass deck with a roller. I owned the boat for around 10 years and that surface was still in good condition when I sold the boat. You could choose to paint the gel coat on a fibreglass roof with a tough floor paint if you wanted an alternative finish. I've only done one fibreglass flat roof, and that was on a friends garage, but it was pretty easy to do. We used a kit from CFS that had prefabricated mouldings for the edges etc, which made the job a fair bit quicker. You just need a dry day that's not too hot, and make sure you get the resin out of the mixing bucket and spread out onto the roof pretty quickly, as it starts to cure a lot faster when it's in a bucket, because of the heat build up.

Yep its the rain water gully for the log store roof. Which of course has never got as far as having a drainpipe anywhere near it! but its only been there circa 3-4 years so lets not rush eh!

If you cut firings for falls and fit the osb 3 I have a local contact for doing the fibreglass who did a very tidy job at my place. Easiest way to cut firings is with a track saw. Interested in your balcony glass detail as well as I still need to get round to ordering that.

No need for ply or anything then, just nail the felt on?

East Coast Fibreglass and CFS are two suppliers who I use. Both sell flat flat roof kits and have decent tutorials too online

And also suppliers of the glass etc. BC have conditioned ours as they want full details and although we have a few quotes real life examples are better.

Any chance of some pics as you progress please @jack ? Be a good resource for anyone doing the same in the future. .

The few bank/building societies I spoke to say that self build lending is a small component of their business and makes it expensive to have in house expertise. Normal mortgage underwriting (risk assessments) are mostly automated and in some instances where an 'exception' occurs, a human looks at the application. But normal mortgages are just tick box exercises - income - affordability calculation - house value - past history of payments (ccj, other repaid loads etc) each lender just assigns a different weight to each component with self build, development risk comes into play, more worryingly is development by a complete amateur. By using brokers like BuildStore, they relay on their 'expertise'. More importantly, if buildstore referred borrowers exhibit higher than expected defaults, the lender pulls the self build mortgage or revises its relationship with the broker. Much much easier to sit in a board room and blame the other guy (brokers) i am am not a broker

I discounted a GSHP when I found the cost of the pipe you have to bury, and the cost of the antifreeze to put in it (which is supposed to be replaced every 10 years, where are you going to dispose of it?) Even having my own digger so the install cost would have been minimal.

Very crisp clear lines, you see a lot of horrid modern log cabins that do not sit well in the landscape but this works really well, i used a dark green corrugated iron to help blend a roof into a hillside and was very pleased. Compared to a lot of sites the mess you have got is no more than a few hours work and it will be "good to go" Great job and good luck getting ready for opening.