Today we took down an interesting chimney. The interesting bit was that it came through the roof and the attic, and then ran through the middle of the next room down, but didn't emerge through the ceiling of the room below that - just an odd sheet of plasterboard to show where there once had been a chimney from a kitchen stove. Oh, and some scorched beams.
As I didn't fancy walking on the roof (it's a very long drop to the ground), we took out a few of the roofing tiles. These are "mechanical tiles" (by contrast to the handmade curved roman tiles?) and they interlock on all four sides. Regrettably, many manufacturers made sure that their tiles couldn't be used with ones made by the competition, so we were scratching around to find ones to fit.
After that it was the difficult bit of chipping away the slapped on cement - some of it was surprisingly hard. These pictures were taken by Mike through a skylight in the roof just across from the chimney.
The view from inside the roof isn't quite as pretty as a picture:
though you can see the chimney stack going on down to the room below.
Eventually we had quite a big gap in the roof where the chimney had been -
and it was time to re-instate the batten that had been cut when the chimney went in, and try to replace the tiles. The edge of the roof where it meets the house next door - and up against the chimney - needed a bit of new cement
and we were able to put all the tiles back in from the inside of the roof.
The grey tile that looks as if it shouldn't be there had a load of cement stuck to it. I removed this as best I could with my angle grinder, but it doesn't match the lichen-covered roof yet. But at least it was the right profile, and with luck the roof is watertight.
Of course it came on to rain just as we finished, so I am hoping the new cement doesn't wash away.
