The last part finished with the concrete crew departing, and the roofing guys supposed to start a few days later. As it happened, there was a delay of several days due to them running late on another job.

We did have 2 workers turn up about 5 days later, but they only worked a half day before the site was empty again. They started to weld the load bearing plates onto the top of the column rebar, which is a slow process as it involves getting every plate exactly level with the other plates.

After doing a few plates on their half day of work, they vanished for another 5 days before returning with extra workers, the pace began to pick up (slightly). At long last, on day 41, the roof frame started to rise :

Day 49 comes around, and I drive out to the site in the morning to see a roof in progress !

With a crew of 10 on site the roof went up quickly, one of the advantages of metal sheets over tiles.

We had chosen a greyish colour, backed with 35mm PU foam for insulation. Personally I would have liked a lighter colour but “happy wife, happy life” and let her choose this medium grey. The foam insulation seems to be doing it’s job as it was a lot cooler under the roof. I climbed the scaffolding to have a look at the roof fittings, the roof surface was too hot to touch but the underside was barely warm. The workers thought it was ok under the roof as they quickly moved their hammocks and chairs under it!

The next few days there was only 4 guys at work, fixing the fascia boards to the ends of the roof beams. This project has two speeds…slow with only a few workers on site, or sometimes faster with a full crew. And sometimes a dead stop with nobody on site except me! While we do want to have moved in before the rainy season starts in about 3 months, I would rather have a good job done than a fast one.

And then today when we were the only people on-site again, doing some landscaping in the backyard, we were surprised with this:

1600 AAC blocks arrived, and none of the building crew here to sign for them. A phone call to the boss brought him here, it’s his job to verify the order is correct and intact, not ours. Will the wall crew be here tomorrow ? Somehow I doubt it, as the roofers are still working overhead, but we will see.

OK, that brings us up to date here, which is more than I can say for my attempts at Youtube. I’ve only got up to the first pole day there.

A timelapse of progress so far :

https://www.facebook.com/mike.nottingham.52/videos/784570919753820