Today the the twenty fourth of September . A friend came to join me down in the woods today. I was in the process of slowly adding more shingles to the roof extending the northside wall line. Due to him being a far better tree surgeon then me I figured I would ask help making and getting the exterior rafters in place. A job that required a good bit of balance and leaning out away from the building. So below shows the progress made. Enjoy.
The shingle making progress is going well. I am speeding through the logs and making good progress. I would estimate I am about a third of the way done on the roof. The photo above shows the tools I typically use to make shingles. A big froe, a silky pruning saw, a small and large hatchet, a maul and my knife (my drawknife should be in there but it was on the shave horse because it was getting used. I would split out shingles radially using the large froe and the maul. I tend to do 2 full logs into rough shingle blanks then move to the axes. Once I think I have cleft out as many shingles as I think is possible from the split blanks I turn the rough splits into rough shingles. Once all the shingles have been stacked into the wooden box, this box means they are ready for smoothing, I take them over to the shave horse and smooth them off and make they uniform and use my knife to take off any bark left on. Once all of this is done the shingles are stacked in the cabin loft ready to be nailed down onto the roof.
Four new rafters have been put up today. These will make the overhang for the veranda porch. The gap between these is far less then the standard rafters meaning I should be able to use the off cuts from the last coppice to fill these in. This will be a good use of my large pile of off cuts. The porch will be one of the last things to do as it is none essential and can wait. However, if the ground bogs over again as it has done for the last 4 winters then I may come up with a sort of none permanent platform there. This means that the rafters are officially finished and will hopefully require no more work or adjustment for the life span of the roof.
Future plans. The next couple weeks will be spent using the final logs left from the coppice work in February to make as many shingles as I can and then getting them up onto the batons. I then plan to finish off the batons all the way across the roof including the new front porch rafters. Once they are done the tarp will be pulled over for the winter. The rain and temperature over the last few days have acted as a stark reminder of the cold bad weather that is on the door step. After that the winter plans will be back to intense forestry. I will need to set the willow coppices, the hazel coppices, the next lot of chestnut to put into rotation and then selectively fell the timber for the rest of the build. Hopefully before that I will get some work on the back wall and the uprights for the wattle and daub side walling. I will soon be posting a den wildlife blog update and a future builds update.
Thanks for reading. Any questions comment down below. 🙂
The Den workshop 