After covid had scuppered his previous attempt to lend a DIY hand, my dad finally made it up for a weekend of roofing. This, after visiting one of my siblings to take the grandkids to a dinosaur park, and before taking another out for a fancy birthday meal. But who wants dinosaurs and cake when you can be scrabbling around on a roof removing rusty nails?

After an extremely frustrating evening for me and Chris, trying, and failing, to install a bonding gutter on the join between ours and the neighbour’s roof, we were looking forward to a more productive weekend.

While Chris concentrated on removing and trimming tiles to more successfully install the bonding gutter, me and dad went about taking apart most of the scaffolding at the back of the building and moving it to the side, the one remaining piece of roof in need of stripping.

While moving scaffolding may sound simple enough, I can assure you it’s surpringly tough and exhausting work. As well as the physical strain of heaving heavy boards and metal bars up and down, there’s the mental gymnastics, as you try to work out the best order in which to disentangle the structure. If at any point you get ahead of yourself, and miss a few steps, it’s easy to end up with scaffold boards stranded three levels up with no neighbouring structure to help you get them down. For example…

Having taken down and rebuilt the scaffolding, as well as sorted and cleaned the remaining slates, there was just time for Chris to ready a new lintel, taking out the two rotted pieces of wood, both seeming to have had some previous agricultural use.

We returned to the lintel day 2, to make use of our additional manpower to lift the two heavy concrete lintels into place. While we had managed just about with the two of us on the window lintels, those needed above the doorway were slightly longer and therefore a touch heavier. A third person made things infinitely easier.

Leaving Chris to prep the next lintel, myself and dad headed for our newly erected scaffolding in order to strip the last patch of slates, clear off the batons, and bag up any rubble that remained after the process.

Once exposed, we could see that only three rafters need replacing on this side of the roof, a bit of a relief after having had to replace so many on the other sides. Now that all the tiles are off, the next job will be to install the new purlins, something our neighbour, a farmer and roofer, has offered to lend a hand with. Having a expert along for this task will be a big help, seeing as it’s probably going to be the most technically challenging aspect of the whole renovation.

Finally, the roof ready for its new purlins, and the new door lintels left to set before the stones above can be replaced, we helped Chris remove an impressively large piece of wood from above the lounge window. Having pulled this monster out we realised it probably would have survived another 100 years as a window lintel. Still, with concrete lintels ready to take its place, we’ll reuse this mammoth, and probably ancient, piece of wood as something else. My vote is for a bench, but we’ll have to wait and see.