Battening, taping, meshing

75mm stainless steel mesh is stapled to the top and bottom of
the battening to keep insects from getting behind the cladding

Two days of relentless screwing in of battens for the cladding, taking up insect mesh and painting the Steico Universal sarking board with what appears to be PVC glue before applying a blue Profil tape have rather taken it out of us. First, we ran out of the Profil tape (which is supposed to water tighten the boards plus prevent air gaps - always theoretically good for thermal performance even if we have huge gaps around the doors) which required a repeat order from our least favourite on-line builders merchants then we ran out of stainless staples which Andy, Jeremy and I have been using to fasten the stainless steel insect mesh to the top and the bottom of the battening to keep the critters out and then today, no more torx head 5 x 80 stainless screws. All are now ordered and we should have them tomorrow.

The western face of the building, full battened out.
The big board on the front is to take the door handing

The taping is nearly done - all that remains is the 14m run across the "ridge" which will annoyingly leave us with 20m of a 30m roll left. The battening is nearly done - we just have the secondary battening on the south facing wall and the little porch wall that sticks out on the south wall that isn't really part of the fabric of the building. Then we shall be adding the Siberian Larch cladding as fast as we can go.





We ordered 65 sheets of 75mm Ecotherm UFH insulation to go onto the floor. If it arrives on Friday then we'll spend the week-end fitting it. Over £1,300 on underfloor insulation! Still, Covers did us a good price so thanks Dan and Gary.

Met the concrete man that we've been talking to about the power float finish. Seems very confident and sensible. Lets hope his price is too.

The rest of the Siberian Larch arrived from WL West & Sons. The pile of cladding is now pretty big.

Finally, the news that we've been waiting for - are the 6 missing roof panels going to appear tomorrow? Well at 4:30pm we were told that they were on the truck and would be with us between 9 and 9:30am tomorrow so I got Peter organising his "crane" and Jason and Dan geared up to come over in the afternoon. Then at 5:20pm, Kingspan rang to say that they hadn't put them on the truck because of "quality issues". I nearly fell off the chair... So no roof panels tomorrow. Let's hope that they arrive on Friday!