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Our ridge beam is a glulam, about 7 meters long and weighing 160 kilos: not that much as far as beams go, I would think. The sensible answer to problem of getting it up to the ridge is to hire a crane and a guy who knows his stuff. Cost £500. In the current context, that's a bit of a problem. This thread will simply document what we did, the problems we came across and how we sorted it out. We would not have considered doing this had we been richer, not had a digger, and not had some form of scaffolding under our direct control: in this case Kwikstage - other types are available. Our aim is to do this exercise in a completely safe way , lifting it, one small bit at and time such that one person can lift it on their own, and lower it to a position where the beam is completely safe. Your comments and criticism is more than welcome. In fact, it's part of the process. The 7m beam hasn't been delivered yet: I want to trial the whole process with a smaller 5 meter beam first. The 7m beam will stretch from the ridge peak at the top right, to the peak you can see on the left - the steels peak. This is a general view : first we need to lift the beam from the ground up to the level of the guttering This first photo shows the first of three bays of Kwikstage being lined up carefully outside the house. I found that setting the feet level across the entire 'installation' with a batten and a level helps greatly if you do that before putting in the standards. The construction process is greatly helped by putting in the diagonals before tightening up the pegs. (It also helps greatly to do this when you aren't tired) ( ) Doing a quick check just before coming in for lunch -luckily- I noticed these...... Notice the pegs (at an angle at the back of the staging) not hammered home. It's so easy to forget one or two: I always forget at least one. Now I touch each peg before finishing any section of the build. More to follow later this afternoon, and subsequent bits of the experiment. PS I would have used the digger to hold the standards while building the staging, but Debbie popped out to help.