To avoid the logs twisting at their “free” ends at all the window and door openings, a “slot” is cut with a chain saw (yes a chain saw!) and a piece of steel channel set in.

Not very exciting but as we thought our log house would probably have a few wood offcuts left over we are fitting a wood burning stove so had to fit a chimney. This was best done before the sedum was put down to avoid walking on it.

Hope we have got it in the right place to make sure the heat is spread nicely around the lounge. The wood burner will have a pizza shelf too!

Two days to cover the log house roof with the first layer of felt and we are have a watertight roof. A good job, because the weather is going downhill this weekend with 100mph storms forecast. Another layer is yet to be fitted before the sedum rolls can be added to finish it off. These will need to be cut and delivered within 24 hours or the sedum like any plant will die.

In the mean time we will get to work on sorting out some more Western Red Cedar for the window and door linings so that we can get the house watertight.

Just three days later the second ground loop is buried and just awaits the scaffold to be removed so that we can take the pipes the last few metres into the house and hook them up to the heat pump.

Most sedum roofs have generally been applied to flat roofs. So safety considerations for maintenance and attention to the roof in later years are reasonably easy to accommodate with off the shelf roof safety solutions. Our roof has a slope of 22 degrees and so we had to work with some helpful consultants on a workable solution that would meet the safe working at height regulations. We have secured this plate at the ridge and it will be covered with the felt and sedum and another rail will then bolt on top to contain safety lines used by personel on the roof.

At last the roofers have arrived and start to put the first layer of felt on the 1″ plywood roof. This is the first layer of our sedum roof construction and once this is on we can breath a sigh of relief because the roof will at least be waterproof. You can also see our zinc guttering we bought in Germany in late 2006 which has been waiting in the shed for a while!

How to stick 300 metres of ground source ground loop in the ground! Dig a trench 1 metre wide, 1 metre deep and 150 metres long. Put pipe in trench, order in 30 tons of soft sand, bed the pipe in this and then back fill the dig and top soil you took out.

To comply with building regulations we need to vent the space under the ply. At the eaves we have a vent strip supplied with the log house “kit”. Close to the ridge we have made these vents to permit air circulation in the insulated roof space. We have put one on each side of the ridge and carefully calculated the area they need to provide to match the eaves vent strip.

Finally we can start to put the plywood sheeting on the roof. It may be a bit of overkill but we decided to put 1″ ply on for strength and peace of mind. It’s only a couple of hundred pounds more than using 3/4″ or 18mm as we must now call it but it is a small amount now rather than having a big problem later.

The first 4 foot ladder truss is lowered in place. Begins to look like a roof now.