I had wanted to be waterproof before the winter arrived, and I was running out of time. My luck was in, a local roofer came and slated the roof for me. This meant I had all the slates on in a couple of weeks. I had worked out there was a certain skill with hammering the nails in, too lose and they would poke through the slate above, too tight and I'd be smashing slates. I was not sure this was a skill I could afford to learn.

The slates came from various sources. I had purchased them in batches of between 600 and 1000, sourced via eBay auctions. This meant I have travelled a fair distance to collect them all. Each aspect of the roof is slated with slates from a single source, so they look even. This is how the original house had been done, the sales on each side are quite different. I could have purchased new from the local quarry, however I was very determined that the roof would not look new, flat & perfect. The pictures don't really show it, but the roof has a definite character with these old slates. The lack of a prefect roof caused extra work to fit it, but its been worth the extra work.

We had a naming session, each of the family painted the back of a slate, and these were fixed into the roof. Whenever the roof gets re-done, a bit of our personalisation will be found.

The slates with rain on them.

Ridge tiles going on. This was not a fun job, balancing on the ridge with heavy tiles and a bucket of cement. I sourced the ridge tiles from the reclaim yard. This way I got some lovely ridge tiles, at a reasonable price. Most importantly when cut the tiles are the same colour in the middle. The modern tiles I found were red clay with a black coating. Also the modern tiles were too square, too regular, too neet, not fitting the carefully worked on style of the slating we had done.

In this final picture we see one of the valleys. I found we had a leek, the bottom row of slates, was not complete. We had also done some damage climbing in the valley as we worked on the rest of the roof. I removed the bottom three rows, and replaced them. You can see the copper tabs used to hold the slates in, in this picture they are in the wrong place, I had to move them all around. The French use a similar stainless steel tab to hold their slates, rather than nail through the slates.