Repairing a slate roof
How a two-hundred-year-old roof was stripped, sorted and relaid with the same slates, in the same order...
A slate roof does not wear out. Its nails do. After two centuries the iron has gone and the slates slide; the slates themselves are fine and will be for another two.
Stripping
Every slate off, numbered, stacked by course. The roofer's apprentice spent a week with a paint pen.
Sorting
The broken ones out, about one in twenty. Replacements from the same quarry, which still works the same bed, so the colour matches once it weathers.
Relaying
Copper nails this time, which will outlast the slates. The same diminishing courses, larger at the eaves and smaller at the ridge, which is how the old roofers did it and why the roof looks the way it does from the lane.
It took six weeks. From the ground you cannot tell anything happened, which is the whole point.
One building a month, by email
A photograph, the plan, and the reason. Nothing else.
Hana Sato
Architect and one of the four partners. Writes most of what appears here and draws the plans with no furniture on them.
Folio
An architecture and interiors journal: houses, rooms, materials, and the reasons behind them.
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