This was a quick day job I recently finished in a small village just outside of York. The porch was leaking, some tiles were blown off by the wind and just been refitted with silicone. So the task was to remove all tiles, save what we can, re-tile the small porch and make good the mortar on the small verges, the bottom and at the top. Now, normally on the top you would use a strip of lead but that would have make the job a lot more expensive. This time the customer opted for sand/cement as the previous mortar bed on the top lasted for over a decade as well.
To start with, I carefully stripped the small roof area. I took of all the old mortar pieces, the tiles (even the glued ones) and eventually the timber battens as well (they were rotted away mostly). I only left on the old plyboard base it was still in good condition. I measured, cut and fitted the new battens and after that I started to set out the tiles. I had to replace a few, but luckily the neighbour had a few perfect matches in his big roof tile stack at the back of the garden. We were planning to buy a dozen of second hand tiles for the porch but with the spares, we had enough and the customer could save a few pounds on the material costs.
The tiles are old pantiles and as such, they are all hand-made. This means they don’t line up as perfectly as modern tiles and for the same reason, some roofers point blank refuse a re-roof job if pantiles are involved. And even though this was a tiny “roof” area, it took me a few attempts while I figured out how I can achieve the best look out of these tiles. I also cut off the left edge of the tiles on the left verge to make the finished look tidier.
Once I had the right “tile combination” on this small two coursed porch, I started to fix the tiles. I also fitted an extra batten underneath the bottom of the lower course to make sure the tiles are lining up nicely from side-view. Once the tiles were fixed, I started to mix some mortar and make good of the verges, bottom and top.
I finished with the work just after lunch-time. I could have rushed it more, but I wanted to make the most of it from what we had on this project. At the end, the customer was happy with work and I was off to the next job.
Screw it! 