Roofing came with a choice to make: To loft space, or not to loft space. More of a debate than it sounds given our open plan living space… Do we sacrifice storage for increased ceiling height? Yes, yes we do.
The loft space would have been tiny, costly and hard to access vs. much higher ceilings in all of the upstairs rooms. Lots of visitors have commented upstairs looks small from the outside but is actually a TARDIS. This is largely thanks to CAD’s clever design of our windows. It’s deceptive what’s upstairs and down. Keeping the proportions of the house in keeping with surrounding properties, while giving us enough space for our dream family home.
Rich opted for Travis Perkins to manufacture and supply the roof timbers flat packed, with his team fitting them. For felt & battening, supplying and fitting tiles he chose Forrester Roofing. Pleased with both choices. The roof came in less than we expected, even with the unplanned for ‘slightly big‘ garage glulam. The tiles look great and match with the surrounding properties well. Special note that the Forrester Roofing guys worked exceptionally hard and impressed us all. Rich will be using them again, and we’d certainly recommend them. Edit: Shortly after, Forrester Roofing went bust.
The garage glulam makes a big difference. The garage’s roof is now joist free. Giving a much cleaner airier look, and leaving more space for a ramp. Watching Grand Designs suggests glulam are a pretty vogue thing. Given what they offer us in the garage and bedroom it’s not hard to see why.
Getting the roof on was a significant milestone. I’m finding it hard to get excited by individual milestones, and don’t step back enough to take it all in. The pressure of the next thing looms large. As soon as one task is done the next tasks are rapidly upon us. Milestones blur into an amorphous blob of progress, challenges, and slowly but surely our dream house. Credit to Rich for his project managing. Keeping tasks lined up and flowing far faster than I can blog about them. Our non-fixed cost and agile approach hopefully helps. I get the feeling we’re not nightmare customers… Yet :D.
Hang on a minute, none of this sounds very Eco? Where are the Eco features?
As with the block work we’ve gone heavy on insulation: 175mm of Celotex in the roof, and the ceilings are further insulated with Rockwool. In addition to the insulation, the garage roof’s pitch is deliberately 35°, and the roof is south facing. Making it ideal for Photovoltaic Solar power (Solar PV). After getting a few quotes we elected to go with a local firm, Natural Generation. They proposed 12 LG panels with optimisers allowing for the panels to work independently as some could be in the shade at various parts of the day. More on these in a later energy-related blog post. Conveniently, the panels are hidden from view on the back of the garage roof. 
In addition to solar PV, I’m eagerly watching the Tesla Powerwall. What a genius idea. Hope they’re as good as they sound.
Olly Brand 