Naaah mate, roofers round here don't use that....

[ToughButterCup]

3 hours ago, PeterW said:

[...] and battens at 90 degrees to them [...]

 

Batts ? (sheets of insulation)

[PeterW]

nope... 50x25mm battens that run at right angles to the rafters at 400 centres. 25mm Kingspan friction fitted between them and then the batten and the edge of the insulation sealed with 100mm foil tape. Plasterboards are then fitted to the battens directly. Gives a very "firm" finish with no flexing of the boards when they are fitted.

[Moira Niedzwiecka]

48 minutes ago, PeterW said:

So I struggle with this one...! you can still be profitable doing it to a higher standard as your remediation costs are lower. I've got zero tolerance for trades who don't want to do it properly, and yet when you get to the end of them whining and bitching about having to do it "right" then they actually accept its easier to do follow on when its been done properly in the first place...

IMHO it takes as just as long to do a bad job as a good one.

A good job actually saves time as you don't have to beggar about making things right before you can proceed with the next stage.

If you are doing the follow on work yourself it has saved time & made life easier.

If you are paying someone else to do the next stage it saves time and money as they can get on with the job they are meant to be doing straightaway.

[nod]

19 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

 

So why are commercial housing sites of such questionable quality?

 

On the numbers, my current potentially large - 3-4k repair job is looking at a day rate of about £135 per man through the books on a local roofing company.

 

Not entirely convinced by your numbers @nod. 14k Tax a year is just into the higher band say 52k income for what you say is a 6 or perhaps 7 day week. 

 

If we take 130-135 at 275-300 days I am not sure it is that different once the swings and roundabouts have been swung and turned.

 

F

 

I think the point I was trying to make is Say someone is earning only 130 per day They're getting the holidays transport etc paid time and a half for Saturday morning and double for Saturday afternoon and Sundays with continuity of work

Why would they want to bother with weekend work or full time on a self build? 

I'm not saying it’s right but it helps explain why self builders have problems getting good reliable trades 

There’s loads of skilled trades out there But they are kept busy by the companies they work for or subcontract to

 

 

[Ian]

7 hours ago, recoveringacademic said:

Do I need to seal the overlap (150mm - proud of the fact that I worked that out for myself) between the  layers of Permo Forte?

Or can I let the wind blow under my skirts as it were?

I would say that you definitely don't need to tape the overlaps unless your Permo Forte is also acting as your air-tightness layer.

 

Roofing underlay performs 2 main tasks:

1) It acts as a secondary barrier to rain & snow

2) To reduce the effect of wind uplift on the roof

 

For neither of those tasks would you need to tape the overlap joints. Normally the overlaps are dealt with by battening the lap joint.

 

The guidance with regard to overlaps for the product is in the BBA certificate.

http://klober.co.uk/media/uploads/573ef4e58dbd2.pdf

Relevant extract below:

 

Note your product is the Permo Forte NG (not the NG SK2). The SK2 version has an integrated tape and is the type of underlay you would use if you are using it as an airtightness layer.

[Ian]

Edit to above comments:

I'm guessing that the tape can be used instead of using a batten at the overlap position.

 

Extract from BS 5534:2014 'Slating and tiling for pitched roofs and vertical cladding — Code of practice'

Edited June 28, 2018 by Ian

[Ian]

and your site is zone 2 so even with local topographical anomalies you're nowhere close to the wind pressures of zone 5

 

 

Edited June 28, 2018 by Ian

[newhome]

17 minutes ago, nod said:

I think the point I was trying to make is Say someone is earning only 130 per day There getting the holidays transport etc paid Time and a half for Saturday morning and double for Saturday afternoon and Sundays With continuity of work

Why would they want to bother with weekend work or full time on a self build 

Im not saying it’s right but it helps exsplain why self builders have problems getting good reliable trades 

There’s loads of skilled trades out there But they are kept busy by the companies they work for or subcontract to

 

It sounds like a massive issue just now and one that will always be an issue when  house building is in full flow. When we did our main build it was 2009 / 2010 and the housing market had all but collapsed. We had multiple quotes for every one of our jobs (didn’t stop us from engaging a few knobs however ?) as they were crying out for work so getting trades in wasn’t difficult at that time. 

 

We actually got most of our extension built in 2015 using members of the fire service who all seem to have set themselves up as trades alongside their fire service job in the local town that I understand only requires them to work 3 days per week. 

 

Other fencing and landscaping work is done by someone who is now a salaried employee of a local (non building) company but he still does his landscaping work at weekends which is ok if you can wait for him to a. become available as he’s always in demand, and b. it can take a few weekends to get through the job so it has to be something you can live with in the interim. So there are options but those probably aren’t viable for the larger jobs. Conversely getting someone to do a small job is very difficult too. 

[lizzie]

I have been really lucky with my carpenter.  Out of all of them he is the outstanding one, without him I dread to think where we would have been.  Some of the others have just been total waste of spaces.  I am still trying to get grout and adhesive off 180m of porcelain floor tiles where the tiler did not clean them off properly when he laid them.  They were hidden for months under anti knox mats and by the time we saw the problem he was long gone...sacked  for other reasons ......tiler no2 did an excellent job and he did not leave mess on the tiles.

[nod]

15 hours ago, newhome said:

 

It sounds like a massive issue just now and one that will always be an issue when  house building is in full flow. When we did our main build it was 2009 / 2010 and the housing market had all but collapsed. We had multiple quotes for every one of our jobs (didn’t stop us from engaging a few knobs however ?) as they were crying out for work so getting trades in wasn’t difficult at that time. 

 

We actually got most of our extension built in 2015 using members of the fire service who all seem to have set themselves up as trades alongside their fire service job in the local town that I understand only requires them to work 3 days per week. 

 

Other fencing and landscaping work is done by someone who is now a salaried employee of a local (non building) company but he still does his landscaping work at weekends which is ok if you can wait for him to a. become available as he’s always in demand, and b. it can take a few weekends to get through the job so it has to be something you can live with in the interim. So there are options but those probably aren’t viable for the larger jobs. Conversely getting someone to do a small job is very difficult too. 

Good point

 

i think I’ve stated before A friend selfbuit in 2008 

Just as the recession was hitting

5 bed for around 135000

Labour cheap, suppliers falling over to discount

 

Prior to two years ago building trade wages were stagnant 

In 2008 I had to cut my rates by 40% and still do a good job

We got that back plus another 50 % Which is about 5% per year 

 

There's no easy answer 

 

What I would say is don’t get hung up with daily-Hourly rates

We charge around £30 per mtr for floor tiling I would expect a tiler working for me to lay 10 mtrs per day Even with having to lay matting 

But I wouldn’t pay the same tiler 300 per day on a day rate 

Most should want a price

[newhome]

1 hour ago, nod said:

Most should want a price

 

I operate that way at work mostly with fixed price outcome based arrangements for most IT contracts I pull together but it didn't always work for me as a (worse than novice) self builder. The worst example being the one I quoted above where a joiner charged me £1000 to do some relatively minor work here. He was the only person I could get out to quote and IMO because he was being paid a fixed price he rushed it to the extreme. He was here for about 2 half days, definitely not more than 10 hours in total. He cut where he stood covering several rooms in dust, dropped something in the vestibule and chipped one the tiles and clearly noticed because he shoved some silicone in the chip to cover it up. Maybe if he had been paid by the day he would have taken longer and taken more care. 

 

[ToughButterCup]

14 hours ago, Ian said:

Edit to above comments:

I'm guessing that the tape can be used instead of using a batten at the overlap position.

[...]

 

Meanwhile, back on topic......

 

Thanks @Ian for a thoughtful, well-evidenced set of posts.

 

I might by accident have a batten on top of an overlap, but the felt isn't part of my airtightness strategy. 

 

I'm guessing now that local roofers never use Kloeber Permo as part of the airtightness program for the houses on which they normally work. I am assuming that @PeterW thought that I was using KP for airtightness.

 

Frankly, I'd be surprised (and delighted) if local roofers were involved  in any work on airtightness.