I was waiting to be completely done with the roof before posting, but since it’s ALMOST done and we’ve already moved on to other things, here’s the final installment.
Last you read, the roof panels were up and the gutters put in. We could have left it at that, but to better protect the roof and also to make it perty, we added tiles. T saw a sign on the side of the road a few months ago: “Tuiles à vendre”, so we were able to get some cheap used tiles. New ones would have stood out too much, and did I mention they were cheap?
They were just 10 minutes up the road, sold by the brother of our wood guy. There were 1300 of them to somehow get up to the house. The first attempt was in my Clio with our neighbor’s trailer.
I have no idea how to drive with a trailer, and the extra weight meant that we couldn’t take a whole lot at a time. We wound up putting down the back seat and transporting the tiles directly in the car. After consulting the owner’s manual on weight limits for my car and doing a bit of math, we figured we could take about 150 each trip.
Since my car can’t make it up the path to the house, we stopped at the bottom and wheelbarrowed them up to the water tower.
Our very helpful neighbor got the tractor of another very helpful neighbor and helped us get them all the way up to the house.
The roofers left the scaffolding in place so that we could get on to the roof. To hold the tiles in place on the panels, we used hooks that I didn’t take a picture of. We started by drilling a hole 9 cm from the bottom of each of the rows for the first hook.
The tile slides right in to the bottom hook, you add another hook to the top and then slide on the next tile.
Easy enough, until you get to the top of a line or around the skylight and a whole tile won’t fit, which means it needs to be cut. Also easy enough with a circular saw, except that we don’t have electricity. So we went out a bought a generator.
The hardest part was actually getting the tiles up to the roof. I could only carry three at a time up the ladder, but we still knocked it out in about 3 days. We wound up using around 800 tiles.
We still need to finish the edges, but the roof is 99% done.
Right now we’re finishing cleaning out the debris, and picking away at the rock to make it as uniform as possible. We hope to be pouring the foundation in about two weeks, which means putting in drainage, deciding on where to put pipes, and way more stuff I’m sure!
The Fait Maison 