Another hot, hot day. The temperature on the ground is over 30. I don’t know what it is on the roof, but I can’t touch the tiles for too long. I can manage about 40 minute in a session, then I need a break. It is preferable to the rain.
I made good progress today. I start tiling up toward the finished part of the roof. I was shocked to discover that when I reached the existing tiles the bond was wrong. I needed to be half a tile over? I was sure I had checked everything when starting tiling at the bottom. The feeling of doubt in being able to get anything right was compounded by the horror of the whole roof being wrong. How could I have got this so wrong? I contemplated cutting half tiles, but a prototype soon proved this hopeless. Monika came out and I tried to explain. As usual, explaining the problem to someone else help. It wasn’t my fault! I had kept my vertical lines of tiles straight. The “pros” who tiles the other side had not. Looking down the roof I could see the lines wander over to the left by at least half a tile.
After some swearing, and some thought, I stripped two lines of my tiles and shifted over by 15mm on each row. Over the next three rows, up to the existing tiles, I made up the remaining millimetres. Phew…. It all looks fine. The shifting lines don’t catch the eye. You need to know to find the horizontal shift in the bond.
With the problem solved, I turned to the dormer. I fixed up the gutters and started the tiling in the full heat. It was clear I needed more tiles, so I started moving packs up. By mid afternoon, the dormer was finished. At last.
I need to sort out the Velux in the morning.
Gargoyles:
The term originates from the French gargouille, originally “throat” or “gullet”; cf. Latin gurgulio, gula, gargula (“gullet” or “throat”) and similar words derived from the root gar, “to swallow”, which represented the gurgling sound of waterGargoyles are said to scare off and protect from any evil or harmful spirits.
A grotesque figure is a sculpture that does not work as a waterspout and serves only an ornamental or artistic function. These are also usually called gargoyles in layman’s terminology, although the field of architecture usually preserves the distinction between gargoyles (functional waterspouts) and non-waterspout grotesques