Roof done (except for a couple of small things)

The south roof finished

The roof is finally finished - almost. The 'almost' is because there still are a couple of things that need to be done. A support for two satellite dishes still has to go through the roof on the south east. For that, another "thru' roof tile" is needed. Stuckenberger's workers will do it at some stage - it isn't a priority (the satellite dish for downstairs in temporarily mounted on the wall as it is and upstairs won't have a television for quite a while yet) and they can do it without a crane and without a scaffolding. Speaking of crane, it is officially gone - the owners took it away today. That is the first real sign of progress (well, apart from the roof being tiled, that is).

Where the glass roof  meets the tiled roof

Other things that had to be done in order to get the roof finished were e.g. that the 'Spengler' had to come (again). That's the guy who does things like drainpipes, eaves, cladding on the roof etc. The major job he had to do this time round was to ensure that the crossover from the main roof to the glass roof worked properly and that no water would get in there. There are always issues where a roof with a slighter slope than another meets the other roof - and even more issues where the higher roof is tiled (because of wind driven water). I was a bit sceptical about this, but looking at what the Spengler actually conjured up, it does seem as though it will hold out against the worst of weather (which we've been having here for the last couple of weeks, by the way).

And speaking of the glass roof, the glass company guy came around last Thursday. You may remember that one of the panes of glass had broken. It emerged that it was not due to too much pressure on the pane - it was due to the apprentice stupidly putting his foot through it. The same apprentice dropped his phone from our roof the same day - he got to keep the pieces. All in all, not a good day for him. Come to think of it, he wasn't there on the second day, to repair the pane. Perhaps that was the end of a promising career as a glass guy.

Niedermaier was there as well on the last day on the roof. His workers needed to drill two holes in the roof and fit the holes out with "thu' roof tiles". One hole was for the bathroom (some kind of ventilation) and the other was for the solar panels so the pipes carrying the water to the 1000L tank actually go through the roof. When I went up into the attic today I was glad to see that the hole in the roof was pretty much directly overhead the 1000L tank. This means that there is a very short distance from energy generation (the panels) to energy storage (the tank). The pipes are insulated, but from the documentation it seems that they lose power at a rate of about 10W/m - that's not much, but the shorter the distance, the less power loss. One of the next jobs is to organise with Niedermaier when he's going to come to hook up the tank with the solar panel and the tank with the heating pipe from the other house. All of that kind of work is not really dependent on anything else (except on me drilling a big hole from the first floor down to the ground floor so the heating pipe can be brought up) so can be done before or even parallel to any underfloor heating.

Network cables from four rooms - at least another five need to be done

Has to be hooked up to the WC as soon as we're ready for that kind of work

Not really ideal, but the only way to get the potentially noisy (drip drip) rain pipe to ground without going right next to a bedroom window

The snow barrier to make sure nobody below gets avalanched in winter

The pipe that carries the hot water from the solar panels. It obviously does not need to be this long