This morning I have to make a difficult call. I have to tell our roofing contractor that our supplier of roofing might not be fulfilling the promises that they made to us last week.
Dan, walking on the top of the frame
It all started to go wrong on Thursday morning. Jason and Dan finally manage to get to site (they have other projects that have delayed them and they're blaming the rain - seems rather plausible) and they started un-wrapping the roofing panels that Kingspan managed to deliver in two chunks in week 1. I got a call from Jason: "I'm not happy with them rooflights. They're cr*p!". I took a good look and I had to agree. The rooflights are supposed to be "factory fitted" and thus of high quality. They weren't in straight; they had roofing tape all over them that had been trimmed with a knife cutting into the painted finish of the roof panels; there was horrible gunk on them; the finish was poor. I called the head of customer services at Kingspan and sounded off (politely, mind you - this is my holiday and I only get rude when at work). She promised to despatch someone to come and take a look. Whilst we waited for him to arrive from Sittingbourne (somewhere near where Kent and the River Thames meet the North Sea) I also called the technical pre-sales guy at Kingspan who had helped earlier and, on my description, he admitted that the rooflights sounded appalling and that we were right to be upset. Shortly after, the local rep appeared (he must have driven fast) and after much deliberation we agreed to ditch the roof lights, and to put up the rest of the roof with some special cramps that Jason had been told weren't necessary. No sooner had Jason and Dan walked up some boards onto the roof (carrying panels 9m long and 1m wide on their heads up ladders to perch 4m off the ground) than we discovered dings in the underside of the panels and damage to the edges. More anguish later and now Kingspan promise to send round some magic touch-up guys who will somehow fill the dings and paint, patch up the poor joints and generally make it better than new... (well it is new and it's not good now so it had better be somewhat better than new).
Friday saw Jason and Dan return and Peter back in his beloved digger lifting the remaining panels onto the roof for Jason and Dan to bolt into place in next to no time before disappearing to "another job" (probably in some pub if they had any sense after the days that they had had).
So we have 10 out of 14 roofing panels on the eastern part of the building and 12 on the western. It's almost dry but not quite.
In the meantime, Andy and Jeremy cracked on and got all the sarking boards up (amazing stuff, the Steico Universal sarking boards - I'll put more about them in later). So we would be properly walled and dry if the roof had been on.
So why the call? Well, I thought I should email Kingspan on Friday morning confirming the points raised on Thursday. Their reply was less than 100% compliant and maybe the replacement panels promised for Thursday may only have been promised for sometime "after" Thursday but I'm sure we'll get over that. If we can get over the sudden extra dent in our budget (alternative rooflights being very much more expensive than the apparently good value "Upstand Rooflight" that turned out to be so shockingly poor) I'll let you know how we got on.
