We had decided to use a warm roof construction, which meant the insulation had to go in before the tiles. I did the maths and worked out I wanted at least 130mm of Kingspan in the roof. Some goes over the rafters, and some between. This means that all of a sudden you are trying to put 8x4 sheets on the roof, and any slight wind picks the whole lot up, and you are about to start flying away.

As with everything else, the insulation is delivered to a field 1/3 of a mile from the house. The car and trailer look totally inadequate to move the lot down to the house, a job that took most of the day to complete.

A picture of the first of the insulation in place, over the rafters. In this cases its 85mm thick. The design was to put 50mm between the rafters, but we will be putting in more than this. 85mm over the rafters was chosen as it was the thickest we could use, and still get fixings at a reasonable price. Any thicker, and we would have been looking at over £500 worth of fixings.

Here we see the insulation, covered with a breather membrane, and counter batons. The counter batons are fixed to the rafters using 175x8mm coach screws, spaced every 9 inches. This makes about 800 fixings on the whole roof. I started off fixing these down with a ratchet spanner, and soon purchased the best battery drill I could afford, which speeded the job up no end.

Here we can see one of the valleys, with the valley boards in place. The battens are on. You can see the heads from the both fixing the counter batons onto the rafters. At times the coach screw heads would be in the way of the batons, which meant moving the coach screws.

My daughter having a rest from battening the roof. She enjoyed helping with this job. You can see some traditional roofing felt, in place to protect stuff as we climbed all over the roof.