THIS week's article was supposed to be a heartwarming, feelgood article about two people battling to rescue a building from imminent catastrophe and give it a new lease of life. In many ways it was. From the first day when we stripped off what was left of the old roof, things were looking good.
At this point I need to explain a couple of things about old stone buildings. In the good old days before cement factories and delivery lorries, people used to build using whatever was at hand. Around here that was stone and a bit of clay and dirt.
This actually makes for quite an effective building - so long as it is kept watertight. The problem comes when the roof is removed, or commits suicide under the weight of two feet of snow, as was the case with our building. This allows water to penetrate the walls and turn age-hardened clay back into live mud. Couple this with irregular rounded stones and you have a recipe for a return to earth of the carefully assembled materials.
This destructive process was well under way. It was my ambition to call a halt to it before the winter, when further torrential rain was likely to be the building's final nemesis.
As I said, things looked good as we stripped off the old Roman tiles and carefully stacked them ready for later re-use. Just by the way, the perceived wisdom about the shape of these large clay fluted tiles, seen all over Southern Europe and as effective today as they were 2,000 years ago, is that they owe their shape to having been moulded on a woman's thigh. This is quite a romantic thought when you pick up a beautifully-shaped smooth tile, but frankly I wouldn't like to meet the woman who lived next to our local kiln on a dark night.
The slightly hair-raising process of removing the old tiles without falling through the gaps in the roof, and avoiding leaning on the rotten timbers (which was practically all of them) shed light on a few more issues that this building had, not least of which was the rotten charpente.
The main roof structure on one of these buildings is held up by a ferme (an A frame that holds up all of the principal bearers) and our ferme had serious issues: it was compromised in its effectiveness by being rotted away at the end that is supposed to be anchored into the wall, and snapped in two at the apex.
In fact, I don't really know how it was still at the top of the building and not on the ground. Seeing as it was there, it seemed rude not to give it a coat of chainsaw surgery, coupled with a generous bit of new wood, and send it into the next century, to carry bearers for the next 100 years. And put new bearers on it, we did - fine new straight lengths of Douglas fir ready to support the new roofing panels.
I am a big fan of mixing new and ancient technologies. The new roofing panels are a composite of plasterboard on the underside, a thick layer of foam insulation, and waterproof chipboard outside, all ready for battening and tiling.
The tiling now there's a thing. We were champing at the bit: new tiles at the ready to go on the underside, reclaimed tiles to go on the top, giving a well-insulated, sound roof that looks as good as an old one. All we needed was a bit of fine weather. Almost as soon as the last panel was nailed into place the rain began, and has barely stopped since, showing up one small flaw in the roofing system. Aesthetics dictate that the panel has to stop halfway across the top of the wall, giving way to timbered eaves. This also means that if it rains before you can tile the roof, any water that falls on the roof gets directed straight into the middle of the wall. "Oh, dear," I exclaimed, or words to that effect. I have every confidence that the sun will shine again tomorrow - if not, can I interest anybody in some old clay-covered stones and some slightly bent second-hand roofing panels, one careful owner?
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