The diary of a self-builder – Winter 2016

Week Ten: Raise the roof…

The roof trusses are up in place, and our builders are busy putting the roof boards and waterproof membrane onto the roof. They put battens in place ready for the roof tiles until snowy weather stops work for a couple of days - no-one wants to work on a roof when it's covered in snow and ice!

Our builders got back to work once the snow had gone, and got the soffit boards in place. They put the ground floor insulation and floor boarding in, put the doors and windows in and the first fix is underway!  Lots of decisions to be made at this first fix stage about bathrooms and lighting, and we made a last minute decision to add outside lighting to the electricians workload (26 extra lights!)  Luckily he was really good and put them in.

We also realised we had complicated our plumber’s life by having a bath with a free-standing bath filler, as he had planned to come through the internal wall not the floor for the bath filler tap. We'd also ordered a back-to-wall toilet but the dimensions on the website for the toilet didn't make sense. But by being on site daily and being at the end of the phone helped a lot as we could explain what we were planning.

Week Eleven: Tile styling…

The roof tiles arrived this week and we're really pleased with them.  They look like a thick slate, with a line down the middle of the tile, giving the impression of 2 smaller tiles, rather than one big flat tile.

The roofers carried them up the scaffolding and started stacking them up on the roof, ready to lay them.  The weather has been really windy at times, which has stopped work intermittently, but gradually over the week the roof tiles were clipped as well as nailed into place - it's looking fantastic!