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News
from a tin roof 20th September 2019
There’s
a woodpecker laughing at me overhead. I’m using the
wrong size drill bit, AND I’m trying to drill elm.
The
Orchard Barn office/mobile home is taking shape. I’m perched
on my sleeping platform above the office fixing fillets onto the elm
rafters
that snake around. Who in their right mind would use wobbly posts in
their
roof? Ms Woodpecker is right. These materials are a joke!
Yet
there is much in my use of round wood elm that is sane
and sound. At 4-5” diameter they maybe small but they are perfectly
strong
enough to support the tin roof panels. Roundwood is much stronger than
its milled
counterpart because its structural integrity hasn’t been compromised by
a mill.
These elm poles have been cut from
the orchard in which they
are being used. We carried them yards from where they grew, debarked
them with
a draw knife, chose the straightest plane and repurposed them on the
roof.
Simple?
That is until you want to fix the battens. At this
point I need to explain that the battens are preloved. Not so long back
they
held the slates on my parents’ stable block. It’s important to me to be
incorporating something of their home into my new one.
Straight
battens on a wobbly elm roof require packing to level
them up a bit (understatement – thank-you Marcus for your patience).
Previous roofs
have wobbled up and down and accommodated shingles. This roof needs to
be
flatter for 3’ wide corrugated tin sheets.
Wobbly
story. Short. We got half the roof fitted this week,
and weather permitting the other half will go up next week.
Down on terra firma I stood back to
admire the new roof which
is both beautiful, organic AND undulates gorgeously in a way we could
never
have engineered. I had to laugh. Ms Woodpecker was right all
along.
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