Week Thirty-six

Week beginning 6th February 2023

It’s week thirty-six already and we have made great progress but we are a couple of months behind where we had hoped to be. Today Andrew is here to measure both roofs for their corrugated metal roofing, flashings and guttering.

Before we can get started our delivery of insulation arrives and we have to unload it by hand, luckily it’s only 24 boards and twelve of them are half the thickness so are much lighter.

It isn’t taking long but we have to take care with the measuring and calculating where the gutters will lie relative to the roof. Thankfully Andrew has done this many times before.

With that done we are having a good look round the house and discussing whether to have a hot water tank or a heat battery. It’s not easy to work out if investing in a heat battery is a good idea for us as our hot water requirements are not that great and the investment would not be insignificant.

We’ve been discussing the heating requirement of the house and in theory it only needs a bit under 1KwH for the whole building. To test this out we are going to buy a small portable oil filled radiator and see how long it takes to heat the place up and if it can sustain that. If it works we can be confident about how much/little heating we need to install.

Andrew is suggesting that we may not benefit that much from having a battery to store the power we generate from our solar panels. This is another thing we will have to look at again because the battery is very expensive and our budget is running down quite fast now. Decisions, decisions!

Andrew’s gone and we have had lunch so it’s back insulating the final wall. We are adding more courses of insulation to the gable but stop when we get to the balcony door. We are off to Oban to get our shopping and ourweekly deep clean.

It’s Tuesday and it’s dry so we can get on with the final wall. Again we have to fit some OSB around the door frame before fitting the insulation. It doesn’t take us long because we have done it so many times before.

Insulating the gable is a bit tricky because it is a tight squeeze getting the boards in but if you start with the angled end and work towards the centre is helps. We are doing this with the boards that go over the door and are left with a small section in the middle to join the pieces from either side. To maximise our use of the materials we are using two off-cuts, one with a tongue on top but not enough height to fill the gap and another piece with a tongue along the top. To join them Pete is cutting a groove in the bottom of the top piece so the two will lock together tightly. The multi-tool is perfect for this.

It’s Wednesday morning and we are on the final push, the last few days saw slow progress but we’re determined to finish today.

We couldn’t get enough insulation boards at 160mm thick so the supplier sent 12 80mm boards which can be doubled up. At the point where we have run out of 160s and have to introduce two 80s we need to make the tongue in groove work. Our solution is to trim the outside groove of the back board and the inside groove of the front board. This allows the two boards to sit with the tongue of the 160 in the groove. We are having to use the trimmed bits and some foam to fill the gaps but it seems to be working well.

We also have to clamp the two boards together to make the cuts but that is not a problem.

Finally we get the last piece in. What a relief, it seemed to have taken forever to get this job done but that’s it, the house is insulated. Brilliant, we can move on to the next stage which is to prepare for the cladding and the tin roof.