All trussed up - It looks almost like a house at last!

As you can see, our chippy - Pete Brooks - and his son Lee have made really good progress on the roof trusses. The crane duly arrived on Tuesday but at one stage we thought the wind would be too strong. Current health and safety rules have to be enforced by the crane driver and if he thinks it would be dangerous to lift the trusses because of the strength of the wind, then they don't get lifted. Fortunately the wind stayed at a level just below that "dangerous" point but the odd gust caused the trusses to swing about rather more than desirable. All the pre-made trusses were fitted by Wednesday, and then the remaining timbers were hand cut to fit. We do seem to have one problem by the rear bay in that the wooden pillar supports are not sufficient to carry the weight of the bay roof. So its back to the drawing board and the need (probably) for some steel inserts from the bay wall to the roof.

Now that the roof timbers are in place we can see the effect that the full height ceiling in the lounge will create - it really does give a very airy feel to the whole room. (Well it would, wouldn't it, with no roof on!!) We're pleased too just how big the area in the roof now appears, for even though the walls are sloping, there's plenty of space for our study come guest room.

It seems we have another little bit of confusion regarding finishing off the eaves. We had wanted as much roof overhang as we could get and after hearing that it was fiddly to have open eaves, decided that we would have a soffit board. However, the wall height and the pre-cut roof timbers are not compatible for fitting a soffit board and having a decent roof overhang. We have therefore opted to have open eaves that will allow us the degree of roof overhang we want. The down side is that we will have to get Dean and his bricklaying team to build up the walls in between the roof timbers - a bit of a time-consuming job. Once again we have issues with the drawings not matching our requirements and I've also discovered that we will need some more soft red bricks too. It seems such a waste as we've all sorts of other bricks coming out of our ears - engineering reds, cream facing bricks, plus left-overs from the garage build (before we bought the land). However. Roy our project manager is absolutely right - anything other than the soft reds wouldn't look right.

Pete Brooks is away on holiday next week but his son Lee will continue on Monday / Tuesday to complete all he can. Seems like we'll need a tiler quite soon now.

I've got a site meeting on Monday with Steve building surveyor and Roy. Hopefully we can sort out the remaining little niggles and keep the momentum of the build going.

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Well, that's another month gone - I know because another invoice for the chemical toilet has just arrived!

Jan & Rog