What has happened on the roof

Last week, the work on the roof has proceeded without big troubles.
While we are trying to sort out, what kind of metal we want and what color and which one we should change and which not, new roofing felt has been applied to 3/4 of the roof and almost the same amount has a new lath.
When looking at the postcards, we have realied that the metal has two colors. This because most likely the roof at the very beginning was not green, and hence, the metal components closer to the tiles are of the same color of them. The rest was possibly of a lighter shade, green, possibly, to resemble copper.
We have hence decided to have everything in dark green, zinc green (including the tower) as also some color sample is hinting us. While, some other parts as valleys and ledge should be verdigris.

On the north side, the chimney and some pipe necessary for ventilation have been sealed with cold asphalt.

Sealing asphalt

Sealing with asphalt

 There are a lot of discussions ongoing and decisions to make right now, and not just around the metal.
One thing I am trying to understand is how the chimneys should look like. If I look at the old postcards, I can clearly see that there was a "crown" on top of each of them, which today is not existing.
We have planned to add something there, while we are also refreshing their aspect.

The north chimney. Before.

Work ongoing

The plaster is already looking better

 When going around in Åkarp, I have noticed an house from the same epoch (and style) having something on top of the chimneys. But looking now at this picture I was assailed by a thousand doubts.
We had agreed that we shoud not paint the chimneys. It doesn't bring anything to the plaster quality.
That house has them white and the postcards seem having them in the same color as the walls. Were they painted and we are missing that? Or is it just a light matter from an old postcard point of view?
Nevertheless, I wonder if what they have on the chimney is metal or something else.

Villavägen 5 in Åkarp has a structure over the chimney that resembles what Bellevue had back in the days

 Another open discussion is concerning a methodology for securing the ridge tiles, so that they won't fall off with every storm.
We have also got suggested to protect the ridge board with a seal, but we have discarded the option.
However, we have looked around and seen that all our neighbours have the tiles fixated with lime mortar.  I guess we will go for this but possibly not at this point in time. Afterall, we have enough ridge tiles for the coming autumn/winter. We hope!

English red or white?

In the general chaos of these days, I am trying to perform a window restoration, for the first time in my life. At least I have managed to handle the first step in a decent way: it was just enough to remove the color!

Traces of red under the white

When removing the color, I could see that there are some traces of red under the white. Or at least, that is what I think.
In our attic there is thankfully a good collection of the original windows of the house - which is my dream to bring back in their place.
I went up to check the color of them and I have noticed a nice mixture that confuses me very much. We will never manage to choose which color our window frames should have!

Windows in the attic (and water in a box)

Some windows are white on the external frame, but brown/english red on the inside - others, viceversa.

English red for the mullions

Or maybe white???

Some window has even a special yellow glass. This is going to be a big puzzle to sort out!

And this piece, where was it!??!

We surely will not paint the outside frames green as some of our windows are painted today. The choice is between english red (which seems to be the very first color according to the first postcard) and white (that was the color on which the windows were painted probably few years later already). I suppose the inner part of the windows was having colors depending on the way the room looked like.
I have also contact some of the previous owners (Freeberg - Edler) and they confirmed the windows to be white on the outside.
They also confirmed that the roof was green or at least the metal of the roof (a postcard from 1975 shows the roof to be a normal "red" roof).
Now, we have just to find which is the "right" green for the roof and hopefully, by taking a sample on the tower, we will know that.

In the meanwhile, while everytime it rains we get somewhat water in the attic (which we didn't do before), we have got few more rotten spots that have required our attention.

Looking not so good.

A big hole is there in the wood.

It looks tragic and partially it is. The tandad fris under the piece of wood that they removed is gone!

We will have more summer (and allyearround) projects to deal with. Like some white boards to paint

Over the entrance we had a couple of rotten boards

Today they started to work over the tower and also there the situation was as in any other part of the roof which suffered of "water" stress. Rotten boards.

The view over the tower

From the attic we can see the amount of boards that they have changed and were about to change

New wood and isolation

Today it has been a quite intense day - as always recently.
This morning, I have realized that they might start to put isolation material between the two layers of wood and we had not discussed which material to use.

Ideally, I would have want something called "ekofiber" to be used. In the specific, cellulose or flax could be great materials. It seems it is really hard to get an hang of these materials (and they are possibly very expensive), but I lost 10 years of my life when I saw them coming with rockwool.
I had heard the worse stories ever about using unorganic material in an old house and that was confirmed also when reading on the web.
However, it seems that there is a good amount of free terrorism on the subject and possibly, it is not as bad as it sounds. So, after probably making a fool of myself and suggesting a version of the same material that needs to be pumped due to its consistency, we agreed that what they planned to use was ok.

The first layer of wood boards have been removed and noone more will be touched

 We had already some worse case scenario in mind. They would remove the first layer of wood and found that the damage requires to break walls and bricks. We started to sweat when thinking about our "new" bathroom.
Luckily, it seems the damage was contained and we sigh of relief. It is sad though that Isabella's room has earned a little bump probably due to the movements brought to the structure when hammering and drilling.

On the right, the new pillar and on the center the paperboard that is wet

 When looking under the wooden boards, one could see some wet paperboard. In order to avoid to keep such material, they did cut the bad piece of and put some special board material (vindpapp).

Some friends have moved near Oscar's room

 It is very interesting that inside all these constructions, we could find fairly huge wasp nests.

First window frame

In the meanwhile, I have to get a crush course in how to restorate an old window. Thanks to the help of some neighbours that have similar projects to do, I had the opportunity to learn on how to do it. Now the problem is doing it.
I have a very short timeframe every day for working on it and I have to work from the scaffolding in order to reach the window frame. Of course, I can work on the window per se inside, in the evenings/nights.
Before doing that, though, I have to wait that they will open up the metal around the frame and that we create a temporary protection to be used when the window is not there.

There is something rotten in Villa Bellevue

When on Friday the contractors left the site, we were quite satisfied that we didn't rush into changing the roofing felt on the north side of our house. Afterall, we need to understand and evaluate!
It was also good to see that they had covered the south side, on which they had started to work because of our decision, in case of rain.

Sunday night, I had a nightmare. I was up in the attic and it was raining in. Unfortunately, I do not remember the details of the dream any longer but the general sensation I had was not good at all. When I woke up later on, I could hear that there was heavy rain and I felt uneasy.
I woke up fully few hours later and the first thing I did was to go up. I did panic when I saw several stains of water everywhere on the floor of the attic and I started to put buckets wherever possible.
The rain was starting to get stronger and stronger and I finally went down and I checked on our entrance door. I could hear that there was a lot of water there. I called Mattias and showed him that just outside the door the roof was not holding anything and it was almost just raining through the protection and what was left of the roof. When we looked up in the room, we noticed that water was coming down on the wall and... there was half a liter of water in the lamp!
At that point, if before we were a bit hesitant, we were sure we had to call the contractors and three hours later, they finally arrived to try to patch as best as they could all the sides.
We were very unlucky that such a stormy rain came when we had taken away the tiles. But we are always having such kind of luck :-)
We did see this though from a positive perspective: it seems that the roofing felt we were having doubts to change was not in such a good shape, afterall.

Changing the roofing felt

On monday, we finally started to remove the old roofing felt and put the new one. The conditions of the roof on that side looked promising, however the work has been difficult since there were several layers of roofing felt.
We finally made some sense of why that looked good. We think that most likely there has been a storm few years back, during which few tiles flew away. In order to secure them, they most likely changed the lath and that is why it looked new.
However, this is just a guess.

Pipe for the oil boiler expansion tank: we don't use it anymore and it is anyway totally rusty

 It is very interesting to look at the old metal sheet. The oldest one seems to be from the 40s. Back then the labour was cheap, but the metal was not so they were taking small pieces of metal and put them together: it was cheaper.When I look carefully at it, I can see that there are three layers of color (if we exclude the rust): a brown-red layer, a dark green and the current light green.
I really can't believe that noone has had the guts to change it in 70 years but they have just painted over and over again (even though, with the proper maintainance, I suppose, one should have a durable component). Clearly, the proper maintainance has not been done in a while... It is enough to look at how bad it is in certain points!

If this is not bad maintained...

Crap that is being thrown away, a mixture of lath and metal sheets

A piece of metal that is painted red

A piece of metal that shows three color. Red, dark green and light green

Rotten wood under the partition plate

Of course, we had to expect few surprises and in this case under the partition plate, structured in a quite sloppy manner, there was pieces of rotten wood.

Side of one of the bedroom windows

Under the "new" metal there is plenty of rotten wood. Why!?

More crap

The main problem here is that under this light green metal there is the old one!!! Thanks to this amazing invention, the water has just gone through and the pillars and beams of the supportive construction are actually quite rotten. The pillars are rotten for about 10-15 cm each.

Now, I don't know who to blame, but I have a suspect and anyway, it looks like they tried to patch some bad looking metal by adding on top something that was supposed to look fresh and nice, so that they could sell the house without big troubles. 

Rotten wood on the edge

 This is of course generating a lot of worryness and troubles for us. Now we don't know the entity of the damage, but it is serious enough in my opinion.

Over our entrance

 Over the entrance, they have also found a 40 cm wide hole in the wood. In fact, they could tell me what they saw in the small room we have beneath our bedroom!
Some good news there is though. Today, they could put new roofing felt in an area that I thought would be heavily damaged. Luckily, the beam there was instead in a good state and they could proceed without problems to the next step.

For us, it is quite heavy to go through all of this.
Meanwhile, in another part of the garden, I take out my frustration on the plants that anyway need to get cut down. The first big victim has been an incredible gigantic jasmine, that was covering the garage, the neighbours and suffocating an apple tree with its top.
I got the chance of borrow a chainsaw (which I have now purchased) for enjoying the painful operation.

The decapitated jasmine bush

The jasmine ;-)

It will take a while before Mattias will manage to make all the rests disappear!