There was no paperwork, no inspection, no photographs just a chat on the phone with some figures from our builder with a cost to repair and then a “Yes Mrs Caller that’s completed, the money will be in your account on Monday”… WHAT WHAT WHAT?

Yep that’s it! The quote from our builder has been accepted and he’ll be starting work in the next few weeks to repair the roof on the house and the grange (again) and this time they’ll be using a different technique to make sure the tiles stay on since this will be the 4th time of securing them. Maybe lessons have been learned.

I LOVE OUR INSURANCE COMPANY and that’s something i NEVER thought i’d say about any insurance company.

You can read the original post HERE and see latest pictures of the roof :

Here’s a quick picture of the hole we now have in the barn and the damage to the grange will look all to familiar to regular readers as these are the tiles that were repaired and replaced previously. It’s no surprise the insurance company and the builder are now looking to use a different technique to make sure they stay on this time for good, a welcomed bit of logic.

Total price of repair just over €1300, thankfully we’re fully insured.

The Barn

The Grange

I’ll post more pictures next week when we are on site so keep tuned

Previous storm damage posts can be found here : http://www.montpillard.com/?s=storm&x=0&y=0

Here are some before, during & after photos with the bigger sets below.

With the roof now cleared you can really start to get a sense of size of the space we will have available to us. The timbers that we removed we are offering for free to anyone who wants to collect them (see HERE) and the cattle feed rack on the left we’ve given to Jean Luc our farming neighbour so he’s got use out of that. We are also trying to rescue the trough (at the bottom of the picture) that has a water irrigation system still fitted but given the time it’s stood unused and the rust its infested with it looks like it’ll only good for junk, which is a shame. Also not sure what we’re going to do with the old tiles as yet but i’m hoping i can at least crush them down and use them as hardcore rather than taking them to the dump.

Below are the remaining photos from the work carried out by Dad and I, unfortunately the two photos which would have proved popular if we’d captured it we don’t have…

These were :

1. I slammed my head off the main roof beam
2. One of the beams rolled and slammed the side of my head…

How i wasn’t knocked spark out is beyond me, but more to the surprise of Dad i didn’t lose my rag.
There must be ZEN in them bits of wood

And that’s it. That’s where we are at the moment, we’ve got the wall to remove of course but i need to figure out what to do with all those bricks we’ll remove. There isn’t such a thing as a skip hire company around here and taking it all to the municipal dump is going to take many many trips with a car and a trailer so I need to get my thinking cap on!

Do you have any ideas?

The weekend rush to the house produced some news both good and bad but none of it terrible which was a big plus.

The house and the grange have both suffered damage from the storm. For the most part it’s lost tiles and flashings.  The shutters did their job and all windows and doors survived.

Unfortunately the outhouse attached to the North end of the house took a bit of a battering.  We had to remove the roof from it sometime back as it had collapsed but how it’s really starting to lean out. This will need to be dismantles brick by brick and rebuilt.  The very unfortunate side effect of this moving is that one of the beams that was attached to the wall of the house has collapsed and this has moved the wall to the house with a rather large crack appearing in the North wall.

Now normally the house cracking would be a devastating blow and this is of course not the best news but the house is standing and has been for 300 years so we’ll just need to deal with it.

The good news is that we are fully insured and have started the process of claiming and getting someone to assess the damage.  This could of course end up being a blessing in disguise as I wanted to put a door in that end of the house over time and while they are repairing this i’ll see if they can do it now.

Below are some very quick pictures from my iPhone that shows you what I’m on about.

This is a great time to ask you for your continued help with the site and the renovation of the house by clicking the Google ads that you see top right and below as this generates a small amount of revenue and right now it’s going into buying tiles

I am now tonight (Friday 13th Feb) booked on the late ferry to drive to the house and inspect any damage, but here is a report from out neighbours in Montpillard.

“In the early hours of Tuesday 10th we had a massive and very destructive storm with unbelievably strong winds. All electricity supplies were cut off in the night. We got our electricity back on last night but there are still many villages and hamlets without any power.

Our house and our neigbours escaped lightly – just a ridge cover on ours and a few tiles on theirs. Our grange lost about 1 metre of ridge and lots of tiles have slid down taking the battens with them so that will need attention when the weather is better”….

Being in the UK we are somewhat isolated from this and had heard nothing so this came at somewhat of a shock. The photo’s (for us at least) were promising however it looks like others were not so lucky.

A full report when i get back on Sunday night, but here are the images we’ve been sent :

As i said earlier at present none of these are our house and we have high hopes that we’ve escaped the major damage. But i have a very anxious 12 hours ahead.

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