Moving to Orkney

So there I was looking at something on my PC with my son and I commented that the wind sounded a bit odd, he said "No it's just the wind". I wasn't convinced so we opened the manhole to the "attic" (it's not a proper attic as there isn't much room between the ceiling and the roof in old croft style houses like ours) and to myhoror discovered that we could see the sky!

Houses like our have very heavy roof trusses with random cross pieces, purlins in a normal roof, to support the heavy stone slabs that form the roof. Anyway, one of these had rotted at the end and given way allowing one end of one of these stone slabs to drop about 8 inches. Fortunatley, very fortunately, the overlap with the next slab hade prevented it dropping further.

So, major repairs. I evacuated my office and set up camp in the lounge. We then took down the whole ceiling and jacked up the errant slab with an akro prop and replace the rotten timber. We also fitted a few more new timbers just to make sure.

The cold water tank is in this same area as well and as this was an old galvanised tank with an open top (I don't even want to think about what could have been lying in there!). So that was duly replaced with a new building regs compliant sealed plastic water tank while were at it.

So good job all round if and unfortunate starter.

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