If I were a carpenter...

...I'd be fully employed, I think, since apparently it's hard to get chippies at present.  What with the appalling weather and a shortage of manpower, we're currently running behind schedule - roof should have been finished by now.  Yesterday however there were swarms of chippies all over the roof and now most of the insulation is in place as well as some of the roof membrane and it looks like this:

 The right hand end is overhang and so not insulated, but the middle gable still needs its insulation:

Roof structure or hull?

Given the weather over the past few days, I wondered if we needed to do turn it upside down, clad it and add sails!!

Nice weather for ducts

The wet weather isn't helping with the progress, but they've finally completed the roof structure.

Work is under way on the roof insulation. Once that is done they can fit the slates. Hopefully by the end of next week we'll have sufficient roof to keep the rain out.

Meanwhile inside work has started on the ducting for the ventilation system.

Pole position

Today the Electricity Boardmen came and put up the pole.  Alan watched them do it and apparently when they're putting a pole on the bank as here, they work as if the bank is not there - so about 3m of the pole is below ground level and we need fear neither tempest nor torrent affecting our power supply.  The pole is in the extreme SW corner of our plot and in the longer run there will be a tree next to it screening it from view - although perhaps instead we'll just carve totem shapes into it...

Inside and seaside

The chippies are - rainy days excepted - working away to complete the roof frame.  You can see the construction of the gable ends here - double walled and insulated with an air gap between, then there is battening and board on the outside and the zinc cladding goes on top of that.












Here is the ducting for the ventilation system

and here, entirely incidental to the blog but I thought you might enjoy it, is a pic from Wednesday when we sneaked off for a day walking round the west end of the Isle of Wight - the Needles with Hurst Castle in the foreground.  (foresea?)  What a nice day out!

Raising the roof

Building the roof is taking a bit longer than planned, but it's starting to take shape now. The carpenters are nailing it together using big gas powered nail guns; Ray (the builder) says they are onto their fourth box of nails. And there are 2000 nails in a box.

The front gable is complete (views inside and out):
 

They have also started adding the insulation to the gable end walls. If you come and visit us when it's finished (please do) this will be your bedroom.

Hole-y cock-up gasman

The gas tank arrived yesterday... "That's a big hole," said the installers "never seen one that big before"

I suppose they had a point.

After forensic examination of the surveyor's installation specification we decided he probably meant to write a length of three metres, not five. But his hand writing was so bad we couldn't really be sure.

It's a sign...

...or to be more accurate it's actually two signs. It seems both the architect and builder have now got sufficient confidence in the project they are willing to advertise their involvement.

You can see work has started on the front gable. The roof is proving more time consuming than planned. They've deployed an extra carpenter - it would be more than one, but they (selfishly it seems to me) insist on going on holiday.

Otherwise it is mostly on schedule. The only question is will I be able to persuade Southern Water to connect the water supply (or even return my calls) before the house is finished. They've only got four months, it's not looking good so far.