Rendering and wood cladding

As we are now only 4 weeks away from the arrival of our first guests and the weather has turned particularly Spring like we felt it about time we made the exterior of the house presentable and waterproof.

We decided to wood clad the top triangular part of the gable ends to add a little more character and to try and blend the house in a little more with it's surroundings. We researched the different wood available and suitable. Although red cedar is beautiful we are not great fans of the "grey" aged look of the wood but we were very aware of the need for a hard wood and one not particularly attractive to wood boring insects (we have had a 15 metre fence eaten this year by long horned beetles!!!) Consistently Douglas Fir rated very highly as being naturally resistant to fungal and insect attacks and also retaining it's red colouring with an annual protection coat. So that decided and ordered the frame was built with an under lay of breathable membrane.










The rendering was a little more back breaking!!! The scratch coat was applied with a "multibat" mix (a mixture of lime and cement) with sand and the final coat with a hydraulic lime and sand mix. We added a fantastic waterproofer to the scratch coat which also contained a plasticiser (normally impossible to find in France), unfortunately, the builders merchants had no further stock and with the typical French shrug of shoulders by way of response as to when the next stocks would arrive we had to resort to another brand which sadly did not contain a placticiser. However, our good friend and ever patient goat expert bought us a great replacement known as washing up liquid and that happily did the job!!!


So now the house is waterproof we can start on building the internal walls and adding insulation. We are currently researching the best options for insulation. Regulations are very stringent and demand that we have a minimum of 260 mm of rockwool in the roof. Trouble is, we really want to expose the rafters (and having painstakingly sanded them are not very keen to give up on it!) but to squeeze 260 mm of rockwool into 100mm gap which would be left between each rafter maybe pushing it a bit...we don't want the slates popping off under the pressure!


"Building Control!"