4 May 2015

Cedar Cladding- fully dressed now!

The slates were on, the scaffolding gone, we were on to the timber cladding.  







I'd got a great price from Hillbarn Sawmills, based in Snowshill further north in the Cotswolds.







Andrew and Paul got on with putting on the Tyvek UV façade.  It’s a vapour permeable water proof membrane.  The cladding design is a rain screen and has spaces between the planks, so the membrane will be visible which is why it has to be UV stable.  






The house looks super-cool with a black skirt, we all had a moment of wondering whether black would be the way to go...






Andrew insisted on less easily available red treated battens which he swears will last forever, the standard green battens are a lesser grade of timber.  Yours truly stained them black -now that I was living on site Andrew put me to use where ever possible!










Charlie's original concept was that we could have the planks cut from cross sections of trees, and we could minimise any cutting waste by having all different sizes of planks.  Lovely idea, and I really liked the fact that the planks would all be different widths.  Reality was different though, saw-mills told me that that is just not how it works, they rarely process a whole tree like that and given than the timber needs to be dried it wasn't going to be realistic option.  They just wanted to know what dimensions I wanted and the quantities of each.



Looking at the random width layout



 Andrew begins the fixing using the more pricey stainless steel screws and cups, necessary as cedar sap corrodes anything else.






It was Paul that did the layout and fixing and he'd found his calling, he'd got a really good eye for it.








 Beautiful!  Over the next couple of years the cedar will silver.  The planks are 50mm thick, really solid and I'm told will outlive me.

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