Third bit from the right

Over Easter we finally got around to moving some stuff out of the garage and into the roof space. It’s so clean and tidy up there these days it makes me proud to be, er, a perfectionist.

Mid-2011 was roof re-tiling time. Our terracotta tiles were brittle and the roof leaked during heavy rain. And the whole roof frame needed strengthening and straightening. And the old insulation had to be cleared out, and the ceiling surface vacuumed and tidied before new insulation could be put down. The project was finally wrapped up in January 2012. Gotta love the scheduling blowouts on what you think is a quick home renovation project.

Job number 1 was installing attic stairs because getting everyone up into the roof via the small hole above the shower was never going to work. Roof tilers, structural engineer, builders, insulation guys, electrician … and us.

The roof space was absolutely disgusting. Ninety years of fine dust and muck covered every surface.

Call us mad but the first thing we did after the stairs went in was to sweep the dust off every roof beam. We suited-up in full breathing masks, goggles, overalls and gloves. These photos give you some idea of what we were dealing with.

Roof framework strengthened with cross-ties and extra props

Then the roof frame repair work and re-tiling were done. I say that in one short sentence but it was a stop-start drama. It included weeks of delays while waiting for the power company to commit to a date for disconnecting the mains power for a couple of hours. Oh, and we got the guttering replaced too.

The giant vacuum hose and all those bags of old insulation and rubbish

Finally it was time for the clean-out. The enormous vacuum hose stretched all the way from the far end of the roof, down the attic steps, through the hallway and out to the truck on the street. Talk about powerful suction. The insane thing is the two guys doing the clean-up didn’t wear any kind of breathing mask even though you could hear them coughing like consumptives (and then they’d go outside for a smoke!).

While you can pay someone to vacuum your roof (and I’ll say now that it was money well spent – and not a lot of money at that) they’re never going to love your roof space as much as you do. We wanted ‘thing of beauty’, not ‘somewhat clean and mostly tidy’.

So between the old insulation going out and the new insulation going in we spent 4 days of our lives crawling around up there, dragging a hired industrial vacuum behind us.

Not only did the vacuum look like a dalek, it behaved like one – it didn’t climb stairs on its own and it didn’t lift itself over joists. Do you know how tiring it is moving a vacuum that size in a confined space, with no even surfaces? And all the time we were getting bruised knees, bruised elbows and bruised heads, and swearing a lot. And then there was carrying it down the steps and out onto the nature strip to empty it and whack the filter bag against the street tree.

The professionals hadn’t seemed too keen on sucking up all the dirt at the far edges of the roof, where the pitch was low and you needed to lie flat on your stomach – or back – depending on which position you could make work.

Rat droppings, rat carcasses, broken tiles, old wooden electrical conduit and piles of fine dust …

These two photos show what we took out and how the roof space looked after we were done.

Sarking and new tiles on, wiring and cabling re-organised, dirt (mostly) gone

It took about 30 minutes for the new insulation to be installed. So white and fluffy. (Hey, if you’re easily impressed by this, I highly recommend you also take a look at the magnificent graph of roof vs study temperatures. We love our house!)

Fifteen months on, it still looks this good. The new sarking under the tiles is doing an excellent job of blocking out dust and leaves.

I can tell you that I’m now cured of ‘roof fear’. But I’m still not shining a torch down the old chimney holes. Way too creepy.