It is a truth universally acknowledged that roofing takes absolutely ages. At least it does when you are two amateurs working weekends and evenings.

The good news , however, is that the rain has held off. This long dry period that has left us all sunburnt and exhausted, and killed off half the plants in the garden, has also meant our house didn’t flood while the roof was open.

Finishing off the second side of the roof was very much the same as the first, except with no extra pairs of hands and much less free time. Overall, the second side needed slightly less work, with fewer rotten rafters, and less stonework in need of repair.

One added complication was that the roof overhangs the wall more on this side of the house as, as Chris says, this is the way the weather comes. In practicality this meant a good foot and a half gap between the edge of the scaffold and the start of the wall, which I was constantly worried about falling through. We also had to put one of our scaffold legs on the top of an old garden wall, that was just in the wrong place. Technically ok but also kind of scary to look at.

Due to impending weather we also decided to put half as many batons on the second side, so as to get the membrane on quicker. We’ll be filling in the other batons when our new order to nails finally arrives. Much cheaper via the internet, but also much slower.

Another complication of the roof overhanging the wall was working out where to locate the first baton. We think we got there in the end… but we simply won’t know till we start putting in the slates.

The final roof section to work on will be the hip, however to start this we need our new purlin to have arrived, so for now we are getting on with other jobs, such as cleaning out all the rubbish that fell into the house from the roof, and filling our second skip with all the rotten wood and debris we removed from the roof.

The funniest bit of past DIY we’ve found is a pipe that pops out in the ceiling of our kitchen. Finally removing the shower tray in the bathroom we can see whoever installed it had to cut a hole through the ceiling as the pipe was put in too low.

A job that we were worried would take forever, but has been surprisingly quick, is sorting the slates. Each slate needs to be cleaned of old mortar, and graded as, in good condition, in ok condition and in poor condition. Slates graded as perfect can be used on the edges of the roof where we will use nails. Those in poorer condition can be used on the rest of the roof, where we will use wire hooks. And the worst condition slates may be cut and used in places we need half tiles. This sorting process will also tell us how many new slates we need to buy, meaning each broken slate has a price tag. While sorting the slates we also encountered all the insects that had made themselves at home in our temporary bug hotel.

Next weekend we have a few days off to go chase butterflies as an early birthday present for me. To make up for the days off though it’ll be busy evenings instead. After all, as the summer is slowly finishing, conditions for DIY will only get worse. The clock is always ticking on our renovation project.