Inaugural Posting

20A Senlac Green Roof

This blog is set up to document the installation of a living / green roof on 20A Senlac Rd in Toronto.  

As we wend our way through the "dream and design" stage in the winter and spring of 2014, it is quite clear that there are very few "tall tales and true" from people doing small (75 m2, 750 sq ft) residential installations (other than many English garages). The vendor support seems to be scaled at 500 m2 to  5000 m2 sized areas, like the top of a condo tower or a whole factory, where growing media gets delivered by the truck load and the crane is in-place to lift it for you. Not to mention staff / labour, contractors, consultants, etc....

Not for us.  86 square metres of roof, maybe 8 yards of medium. No crane.  One unit of labour plus one more on the weekends. Equipment rented from Home Depot or Stevenson's.

Having said all that,  there are a few evangelists out there who are really generous and gracious with their time and experience, to encourage us forward.  We are increasingly thankful for their guidance and enthusiasm.

Starting Point.

To save a couple of thousand words, here are a couple of pictures to show our starting point. 

The first shows the existing DUROLAST D50 membrane on the top of the kitchen extension.

The second picture shows one corner of the main roof, with a clutterati of PV solar panels.  We have our challenges ahead of us.

I'll fill in the background over the next few entries.

Big picture.... it is my intention to provide a virtual diary of our endeavours as we proceed through the next few months and years, getting our living roof installed and then maintained for years to come.  The trials and the tribulations. I don't have any particular axe to grind other than providing a documentary of our endeavours.  Some things will go well, and we will likely stub our toes on more than one occasion.  I'll try to include all aspects of our journey.

Very much "in the fullness of time..."

The only other gotcha is that this project had a number of parallel streams of work related to different aspects of the larger undertaking. So the blog might seem to jump around a bit as Task B appears to be proceeding,  while waiting for materials for Task A.  The publishing dates are in the correct sequence work-wise, but might not be that actual date the work was undertaken, nor closely related to the date when the photo was taken.