Week 5 - Starting to take shape...

Ok my 3 week timescale to finish the roof may have been a bit optimistic... although this are looking good... I would say we are about seven days away from completion. To be honest though in that timescale we have also started other projects. 

The cistern is almost complete and we just need to poor the concrete to finish the top and we also started work on the little two room building at the back of the property. I wanted to get this done as I wanted a watertight and secure area to lock all my tools up.

It doesn’t look much at the moment but we have almost finished the roof for it and the rest of the block work will be completed shortly. I am turning it in to a little studio room with bathroom and a separate store room.

It is a very simple construction so all we need to do is add the electrics, plumbing and finish with plaster and it is pretty much complete.

At the start of the week we began to lay the bricks in the roof, the colonial style roofs here are petty simple, you just have to lay the bricks on top of the 2x4’s then cover with cement. Luckily we managed to save enough bricks from the old roof to cover just over half of the roof which saved quite a bit although I did have to buy another 45 m2 to finish the other side yesterday. 

The guys are working well as they have to ensure that the water runs into the outlet pipe when it rains but it is quite a slow process. We have to use a pulley to get all the materials on the roof which is backbreaking work. 

So as it stands we are two days away from fully completing one side of the roof and I would say another week to complete the other side. I will be so happy when it is finished as thats most of the heavy lifting out of the way. 

So next week while the guys are working on the roof me and Rudolfo will be putting the new beams we made for the floor in to place. I know this will be a slow process as you can get away with the roof beams being a couple of centimeters out but as we are laying the wooden floor directly on top of the floor beams it needs to be perfect as this will be the floor for the bedrooms.