Roofing

Yesterday the builders took delivery of the "Battening Plan". This is a guide published by the tile suppliers of where the horizontal roofing battens should be fixed. It has enabled them to start positioning the horizontal battens onto which the tiles will be hung :

You will notice the key thing here is that the battens are not evenly spaced. This is why you need a battening plan. The tiles of the existing roof are laid in a randomised pattern (apologies for the oxymoron) presumably to mimic a rough cut stone roof. The modern equivalent reconstituted stone tiles come with a battening plan that tells the tiler how to create a random appearance.

Believe it or not, the part of the roof that we have had stripped and salvaged for re-laying comprises 29 different sizes of tile. Here is just one of the two storage areas, stacked according to size :

Presumably a similarly sized set of additional tiles have been ordered to mix in with these older ones for the new roof.

Rather naively, at the beginning of the project, I was trying to find out which manufacturer the existing tiles came from. I removed one and noted that it had a number embossed onto the reverse side of the casting. When I phoned round the manufacturers and suppliers, I quoted this number to them. Not one of them let me into the little secret, that this is a sizing number. Now that lots of tiles have been stripped off I can see that the numbers 1 through 29 are all represented here !

The battening plan sets the horizontal sizing (height of the tiles) in each row. The chosen width is down to the layer, so this is truly random, though of course should follow the rule that a vertical joint between two tiles should fall at or near the centre of the tile below it.