There were two big events for the day: laying out the sole-plates and the arrival of the roofing panels.
Whilst the laying out when smoothly and calmly (OK, there were the odd break for massive down-pours from the grey clouds) and Andy, Jeremy and I were quite happy with progress at dusk, the roofing panels didn't go so well.
After much deliberation we ordered roofing panels through a small reseller of roofing materials who then ordered them from Kingspan. Kingspan were seriously painful to deal with and anyone considering their products really does have to think very carefully about if they want to go through the pain involved. Essentially they wanted to deliver it all on the back of a 40ft articulated lorry that has a Moffett forklift on the back. The first problem was clearing the lane of parked cars (mostly successful except for some idiot who parked their car just at the wrong place rather than in the station car park so as to save on the £3.80 car park fee so it would have saved them right if we'd gouged chunks out of their offside) and then guiding the truck down the lane. Our primary contractor Peter (seriously good fellow, there will be more about him later) and I met the truck as it turned off the main road and guided it inch by inch down the lane. We had to stop by the previously mentioned idiot's car so that the driver could off-load the Moffett to squeeze by but that resulted in an irate neighbour shouting at us for dumping the Moffett in his drive. From there on it was pretty easy but whilst we waited for 20 minutes for the driver's tacho to catch up before he could offload, Peter and I counted the panels. There should have been 34. There were 9. Where were the rest? Apparently Kingspan ran out of materials as they fabricated our panels. The 9 that we had were done 2 weeks ago because they had skylights in them and needed to be made early. Some seriously irate calls to Kingspan and finally, they're now promised for Friday so we have to do the whole clearing of the lane exercise again. Maybe this time there won't be any idiots...
Other progress: we've ordered 1.4Km of larch cladding and 1Km of softwood studding, 157 sq m of sarking board and other bits and pieces. The softwood and sarking board (actually Steiko Universal - lets hope it's good) arrive first thing Friday.
