Roof

I haven't mentioned our roof so far, which I'm insulating myself. Where i first got a number of quotes from various contractors before discovering I could get the materials from a specialised store for half of the cheapest quote. It's not very complicated work as such; it just takes a lot of time.

Above is how far I got things at the end of last summer: wooden border on the edge and some 280 foam blocks laid down. I'd used thin plastic film to keep the morning dew off everything and then covered the lot with some huge tarpaulins to wait for the return of warm and dry weather.

The plan had been to take a couple of weeks off from work this Spring and get it finished, but alas, the colleague who would meanwhile take care of my clients decided to leave the company thus leaving me with no backup. It took several months to find a replacement who then turned out less than ideal, so I'm now taking odd days off and every sunny weekend to continue.

I'd reached the stage of installing the seven lenghts of EPDM rubber cover but these are heavy. The idea was to hoist them onto the roof while folded double and rolled around a length of plastic rainpipe but that was undoable. 

My eldest is kind enough to lend a hand and today we both came up with the same idea - put the roll on some sort of supporting frame to hold the weight and then pull it off the roll onto the roof. My eldest thought of using parts from my student bed made from scaffolding and I then had it set up in no time.

As an update, we've laid the lengths of EPDM over several weekends and now it's just a matter of adding flashing strips as extra protection for the overlaps and then adding rubber sealer to the edges of those. Then attach everything round the wooden border, and then put up the aluminium trim. Still a lot to do but the heavy lifting is (literally) done!