We ran out of the stainless steel screws for fixing the battening and we ran out of staples for securing the insect mesh to the battening but Jeremy managed to finish adding the last of the battening to the South wall whilst Andy and I started chopping the cladding to length. Hopefully it will suddenly appear on at least a couple of walls tomorrow.
Apologies for the quality of the images - contrast was a bit out on the camera
Kingspan have called to say that a truck is leaving Yorkshire at 4am tomorrow morning so that it will arrive mid-morning. Unfortunately that truck doesn't have a Moffet on the back (the mobile forklift that you see on the backs of some big lorries) so another lorry is going to meet it here. That means that I have to guide TWO 40ft articulated lorries down our narrow lane and it will really block the road for a while. Odd that it takes them a minimum of 5 weeks to make these panels when you order them but that miraculously they can make them over night when they need to.
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!
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.
