Hello All, My first post so before my question I guess it would be polite to start with some info that hopefully might be of use to someone. My wife and I have a village house in Languedoc and following recent crazy hail storms ("comme les balles de tennis") had several canal tiles that needed replacing. My neigbour mentioned that his "macon" was coming round to fix his tiles and that he would probably have time to do ours as well if we had some replacement tiles ready. So, quick trip to Chausson... canal tiles 86cents each. Macon arives and spends over an hour on our roof in temps approaching the 30s and replaces 20 or so broken tiles which I helped him bring down via skylight. This also gave me a chance to see how he walked on the tiles which is something I have always been too scared to do (and have seen unanswered questions on this forum about the best way to do it). Well, his technique is to walk sideways relative to the slope of the roof with the front of each foot on one row of tiles and the heel on the next row, thereby speading his weight between the two... v logical once you have seen it done. When finished, the macon only wanted 20Euros (cash) which seemed a complete bargain given the normal artisan rates. I guess this says a lot about using neighbour recommendations but also I got the impression he was not so much a specialist macon as more of a general builder, painter & decorator. For example, he mentioned he was currently painting a house nearby and also that he had installed a shower for the previous owners of our place. I'm guessing that he therefore tends to charge less generally (especially for cash!). Anyway, all in all a great bloke to know for a DIY amateur like myself. One other thing he mentioned was that a lot of tiles had also slipped and that he could "crocheter" the whole roof (which I presume means putting those little hooks on each tile) plus fix & cement the tiles at the apex of the roof (apologies for the wording here but I am translating from french and have no idea of the correct terminology even in English!). Total price he reckons would be 200-300 Euros which again seemed very good value. The area of house beneath the roof is 100m2 so I guess the actual roof area is even more. Apologies if none of the lengthy above is of any interest, but now to my floor question! Our third floor is currently just an empty 100m2 space open to the roof. Ultimate plan is to put bedrooms in up there, but for the moment we are just getting a new floor put in over the existing one (ie raising the floor about 20cm) which is a complete mix of old & new boards and lots of holes. The idea is that the new floor makes it a safe usable space (eg for table tennis table, football pitch etc!) and enables us to keep the heat in the two floors below. The charpentiere has quoted me as follows, including labour and materials: Laying of the wooden skeleton/framework ("platelage - bois du nord traite") = 2,700E HT Laying of Rockwool insulation = 770E HT Laying of tongue and groove boarding (OSB 3+) = 1,450E HT As previously mentioned, I know very little about this sort of thing but it just seems expensive somehow. For example, he has specified the insulation he will be using and I can find it online for approx 300E... so the remaining 470E (ie approx 2 man days of work judging by previous posts I have seen) seems a lot just for fitting it, doesn't it? Any opinions much appreciated and apologies again for length of post. Cheers.
