When and how do you make the decision to actually tear something down?

The overriding desire for our renovation is to keep as much of the old house as we can where possible and where that isn’t possible we want to restore the section in the same style, after all we fell in love with the way the style of the house when we bought it however we’ve already had to take the decision to remove a part of the house for the safety of the rest of the house.

Failing Roof!
Along with the main building we have two out houses attached at the end of the house where the kitchen and chimney currently are, however over time the moss that has grown on the roofs of these outbuildings has bought down one of them due to the extra weight of the water that is held in the moss. At some time during the empty period of the house this extra weight has moved a beam attached into the wall of the house causing a major crack in the house and this is why we decided to remove the roof to release the weight and stop any further damage.

As you can see from the photo on the right you can see the amount of moss on this roof and due to the weight of this and with the added rotting of the wood there was going to be no way I could save all the tiles as putting weight on the roof to retrieve them all was not an option.

Removing tiles
We allocated a whole day to take the roof down as we didn’t want to just smash away for a few reasons.

1. The safety of myself, my dad and of course damage to the house
2. We want to reuse the tiles
3. Respect for the house, just plain respect!

So armed with a ladder, gloves and a whole load of naivety ( I didn’t have my boots on) we started. I realised pretty early on that we were only going to save half of the tiles as many were cracked already and you would remove one tile and two would fall through and smash. Armed with this knowledge it was time to “gear up”. Boots and gloves on away we went getting most of the roof cleared within an hour. We were amazed just how the house continues to just give itself up and the roof was coming away and soon we were down to bare beams with a clump of unstable tiles and we just had to come to terms with they weren’t going to be saved. Before this it’s time for a cup of tea and in I went.

Then came the crash!
The tea hadn’t even boiled and there was an almighty crash. Looking around I could see Dawn but I was missing my dad. Running out I found my dad standing there looking guilt with a big stick in his hand! He’d gone and pulled on the main rotten roof beam and everything came down.

Now I know I’d resigned myself to loosing those tiles but this was NOT the way I wanted to do it, but this time luck was on our side and everything came down clean.

Overall

Overall I’m happy with the result as removing the roof means we have stopped it coming down in a (more) uncontrolled manner and damaging he house further.

The great news is the crack on the outside is just superficial and will be repaired as we restore the house, the tiles we saved on this roof means that we can restore another roof with them without things looking out of place, I’m sure we could have saved more tiles and going forward it’s time to be a little more patient and with another roof next to this to remove we’ll soon get to see if we learnt the lessons.

The 2nd roof if due to come down next time we are out there, this we’ll be doing on video :)