The Roof Tale

When we bought the house the roof was in a lot better shape than others we had seen but not great. We had hoped to make repairs, rather than replace it.

Perhaps we were being a bit optimistic, especially when looking at the chimney:

In the end we decided that a total replacement (keeping just the A-frames) was the best approach. The pool got put back a year or two and we got 2 quotes, one from a local French roofer (recommended by a neighbour) and the other from an English builder. The quotes were within a few thousand Euro of each other and we decided to go with the higher quote from the French roofer as we felt he had been working on these roofs for 25 plus years!

The work should have started on 16 Jan so we called on the Tuesday evening and ‘A problem‘, we were told. Expecting some lame story we were surprised, and in fact pleased, with the ‘problem’.

Turns out the lorry delivering all the new materials could not get down the track (chemin) to the house. So without the materials they couldn’t do the work.

In France the local mayor has the responsibility to maintain all these tracks. The roofer (apparently a friend of the mayor) called the mayor, who came and inspected and said the problems (poor surface and trees growing into the track) would be fixed within the week – and they were!

So work started and on 26 January we received this photo to prove it:

I visited a few days later and took the following two pictures:

In the photo above you can see the ‘space age’ insulation we had fitted. This is equivalent to 25cm of fibreglass insulation! The underside of the roof will be fitted with plasterboard with 40cm of insulation. So the roof will be tiles / air gaps / insulation / air gap / insulation.

The a week or so later the roofer emailed a few more:

At the beginning of March Sue and I went out for another visit and while the roof should have been finished due to the weather it was delayed but good progress had been made:

Then we had confirmation at the end of March that it was finished!

On April 4th we arrived for a 10 day visit and were very pleased with the result:

Apart from the light being let in by the 8 Velux windows (3 bedrooms and 2 baths to follow) the other big difference was to the temperature of the house – it was much warmer and the heat retention was significantly better than before. We had frosts most nights but the house (with no central heating) didn’t drop below 15 degrees and quickly warmed up to 20 with the electric heaters switched on and to 25 with the woodburner in full swing!

We are very please with the results.