Breton Blog Renovation: New Barn Roof

In 2006 after completion of sale, the first job that needed doing was to re-roof one side of the barn roof because it had a big hole in it! The roof is on the same level as the lane which leads down to the nearby Brest Nant canal therefore lots of walkers walk past every day. This meant that replacing this roof was a priority, if only to stop people falling into the barn!

Gouarec sits in a seam of slate therefore a lot of the old houses have the original big thick slates on their roofs and our property is no exception. We only needed to re-roof one side of the barn as the rest of the property still has the original slate roof and is in fairly good condition. The property has been re-roofed at some point because the timbers inside the house is fairly new but the original slates have been re-used. We wanted to use as much of the original slate as possible and there was a pile of them sitting in the barn.

The work was carried out by Yvon who's a local roofer. The bottom 7 rows of slate are from the original roof while the rest of the roof was covered using a cheaper Spanish slate. We also installed 4 large velux windows into the roof to more light into the barn as previously it was a fairly dark room. The roof was fitted with zinc guttering which is fairly standard in French properties.