Our planning permission dictates that the roofing material for the shed be the same as that for the house, or black steel sheeting. Since we are planning to put a slate roof on the house, and this would involve a certain amount of learning, we decided to replace the existing shed roof with slates by way of practising the art of slating.
When equipped with the right tools, cutting slate is not too difficult. In all I think we only lost about 3 slates due to breakage (out of around 850 which were laid). Laying slate correctly requires
- Good flat, uniformly thick slates.
- Correctly spaced roofing battens.
- Carefully and accurately marking out of the positions of all the slates before starting.
Applying only rule # 2 results in the roof on our shed. I have no doubt that a good roofer could have sorted our slates and laid them in manner that resulted in a flat and tidy roof. We laid them in a manner best described as “rustic” and did the best we could with a variation in thickness that exceeded 2mm. And as we finished, a light shower helped wash the dust from the roof and made it glisten nicely.
