Week Forty-eight – Part Two

It’s Thursday morning and Andrew has arrived very sharpish, we haven’t even finished breakfast.

It’s very windy so we are having to change plans, we had hoped to finish roofing around the final roof window but it would be too dangerous. Instead Andrew is going to show us how to fit the gutters.

We start off by attaching a gutter bracket at the end of the roof away from where the downpipe is to be. From that we run a string line and estimate what the fall should be, check with the spirit level and adjust. Andrew now marks the fascia every 800mm where the brackets will go and attaches them.

Now we can start attaching the gutters, we use the Lindab guttering system which neatly clicks together with built in seals in the joins and end pieces.

We are now at the downpipe end of the roof and have to cut off the excess gutter and fit an end piece. Before fitting the end piece we need to retouch with paint where the gutter is cut.

We’re on the last stage for today which is to cut the hole where the downpipe will be attached to the wall and retouch it with paint. We can’t fix the downpipe because we haven’t clad the wall yet. The down pipe will be placed above the drain we installed way back when we were working on the foundations.

Before we can have lunch we are fitting the last pieces of ducting for the ventilation system.

It’s still too windy to work on the roof so this afternoon we are going to tackle the boxing in of the roof window. It’s going to be a bit tricky and we need a lot of input from Andrew to work out how to do it.

We start off by agreeing what we want to achieve and then attaching battens to match the ones on all the other trusses so when the plasterboard is added everything is at the same level and nice and neat.

We need to insulate around the window and in the gaps between the window and the roof. We are using insulating foam in the narrowest gaps, insulating foam and fibre board in wider gaps, fibre board on the trusses and glass wool in the widest gaps. Roof windows are a weak point, creating thermal bridges and airtightness leaks, so we need to take care and do a good job.

Satisfied with the insulation and the battening we can attach sheets of OSB to box it all in and a final bit of foam, and later more taping, finishes the job.

This was quite a complicated bit of construction and we certainly needed Andrew to work it out. We probably could have done something on our own but we don’t think it would have been nearly as good. Thanks Andrew for bringing all your experience and puzzle solving skills to the job. We love it.

Andrew has gone now so we are reorganising the mega-shed a wee bit. We are storing all the remaining OSB on our cutting table with a view to finishing the boarding of the internal walls in the house next week.

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It’s Friday morning and we are going to do a few wee jobs then head off to Oban for a shop. We have Zadjil and Carolyn arriving tomorrow and then on Sunday Ross is coming to help for a few days so we need extra supplies.

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We’ve had a lovely day off. After doing a big clean-up of the mega-shed attic and caravan, Zadjil and Carolyn arrived in time for lunch. In the afternoon we had a lovely walk up a farm track exploring how we might be able to approach the Dalmally horseshoe, a local walk which is part of the Cruachan range.

After a quick cup of tea we headed to the Portsonachan Hotel for dinner where you get amazing views up Loch Awe towards Ben Cruachan and Glen Strae.