Roof progressing rapidly

All of a sudden the roof seems to be coming on in leaps and bounds - so fast we can hardly keep up!

The roof is now almost weather tight, with Fakro quadruple glazed window being fixed into place and taped up.

The front gable is also wrapped and taped. Be sure to employ a builder who can do origami!

Quite how air tight our very traditional but overly complicated roof structure will be when finished, I'm not sure. My best advice would be - buy a house with a simple up and down roof with gable at each end, or put in for planning to make the roof so! Avoid dormers, overhanging gables over bays, and so on!

The back gable is taking shape too - and we're finding that to be a much easier shape to make air tight and without cold bridges. It might not be that long before we have 180mm of insulation all up the back gable wall to join the insulation above the rafters.

It is looking increasingly unlikely that we'll be close enough to EnerPHit to be worth trying for certification. With the benefit of hindsight, there are various things we could have done some time back to make it easier.

Workshops and SuperHomes events

If you live in the Nottingham area and would like the chance to visit this house and find out more about it, March 2012 would be a good time!

On 3rd and 10th March there will be a set of 4 workshops for people looking to make modest or major home improvements of an energy-saving nature. This house is one of the case studies. For all the information, look out for the Homes Behaving Badly workshops on Transition West Bridgford's Eco House Group blog.

Then, on the weekend of 24th March, as part of SuperHomes open homes week, we'll be opening our doors to visitors. To book on a tour, just go to the SuperHomes website and look for Nottingham's Aspiring Superhome, or follow the link to the Homes Behaving Badly workshops and book your place that way instead.

And now the real thing...

Vapour permeable windtight roof tile underlay (Solitex Plus) fixed firmly to the wall, where 180mm of external wall insulation will eventually cover the join. (And yet another air brick to seal up just beneath.)

Once fixed to the insulation board, it just needs the rest of the underlay over the top now. The bottom strip of underlay and the main sheet that goes over the top will be stuck together with a strip of double sided Pro Clima Duplex for air tightness.

All the way round....

Mocking up the roof insulation at the eaves

With the roof structure up, the builder and the wall insulation team have been working out the eaves detail.

For ultra-low energy buildings, it is extremely important that the roof insulation meets the wall insulation without any gaps. And if you need to achieve air tightness as well, more interesting still.

The best way to figure it out is to mock up the various options. First 100mm of insulation above the rafters, with a pretend bit of weatherproof membrane to fix to the outer face of the brickwork (for air-tightness).

Then wall insulation, and a second layer of weatherproof membrane (stuck firmly to the first where they meet). This second one diverts water into the gutter, so must end up above the counterbattens.

Glad we've got that sorted.

And then it snowed

Climbing the stairs felt a bit like winter mountaineering...

The latest in bedroom decor

Air tightness not quite there yet, but it looks pretty.

New roof in progress

A lot has happened since the last post. The old roof structure (complete with dubious looking worm-like holes) as completely gone.

As we need insulation above and between the rafters, we have dropped the height of the brick walls to compensate. The top of the new rafters sit below the bottom of the old rafters!

Floors insulated, roof next

We are following in the footsteps of many other home owners in this street by converting the loft to an attic room. Due to the very poor state of some elements of the roof we will take this opportunity to renew the whole thing - and this means that we can add a lot of insulation and make it as air tight as possible.

Had the tiles and roofing felt been in good condition, we would have done something less drastic, probably placing a high spec insulation between the existing rafters and getting to modern structural standards by adding extra joists and rafters as required.

In our quest to create an ultra-low energy home, we are also blocking up other holes - including the two chimneys and the many air bricks that seem to abound in every room. (There will be ventilation - but it will be controlled using windows and a ventilation system with heat recovery, not through gaps in the building fabric.)