Leaderboard

I had the offer of some help from a neighbour so decided to crack on with the roof sheets. These are corrugated sheets 4x1m and in the thicker 0.7mm spec, so fairly heavy and awkward things to handle. I did get the first sheet up and fixed by myself but am not daft enough to turn down an offer of help when it appears! When I bought the roofing, I had recently read @ProDave's less than glowing review of Jewsons' plastic headed roofing screws, so made a point of asking what would be supplied. The guy at the BM was adamant that everybody these days prefers the plastic headed stuff, quicker to install, no caps to come loose, just a question of getting the right bit to drive them in with. He even did a straw poll of the people in the shop at the time... Anyway, how do the screws work in real life? They certainly do not self drive, not by a long shot. And so far I have stripped the heads off two of them, although in both cases I was able to back the screw off and remove it using pliers. So it seems you need a decent hole punched in the sheet, which slows down installation somewhat. Getting the sheets up on the roof wasn't too hard once I figured out a method- I built a 'stretcher' to hold each sheet, and this is then run up a pair of wooden guide rails onto the roof. Doing the last sheet will be a bit tricky as we will have to pull the 'stretcher' out from under it, instead of moving the sheet to the side as we have been doing so far. In other news, the hole for the flue is now made- a bit daunting cutting a whopping great hole in the roof! I'll write another blog post about that as part of the stove installation,

Well, we finally started real work. Fortunately the snow melted yesterday, but the sun shone on us today and it was perfect weather for setting out and stripping the site. We finally found a good builder with a lovely attitude and a fair price. I know these folks by reputation so was pleased to find their quote was competitive. Just the owner was on site today along with a digger driver from a firm he uses, and what an enjoyable day it has been. The two of them taking the mickey out of each other most of the day, but very,very competent guys. The archaeologist we have had to employ for the day as part of the planning conditions was just as nice and fortunately we found nothing more than a few shards of medieval pottery - which as he says, in a medieval village is to be expected. But an interesting guy to talk to as well, so I was very relieved we didn't come across anything that would have stopped the work (though I'd have settled for a golden coin hoard of course) . So all in all, a really satisfying day. Tomorrow comes trenches and hopefully the start of foundations, and I meet the BR guy for the first time.