garden office - roof on! - Blazingocelots

garden office - roof on!

6/12/2020

Weather not quite up to the forecast - 3 degrees and misty - but nonetheless, that roof is going on today. We continued with the roof boards from yesterday and had arranged for Tomas to come over in the afternoon (tier 2 - outside is fine!) to give us a hand.

The remains of the pile - floorboards, fascia, roof edging and other random trim strips

Dave started by pruning the last few nails out of yesterday's boards while I brought the remaining roofboards over from the pile. We put aside 2 rejects, knowing there were 2 spares and decided that if we found something worse, we'd swap them out. We didn't. I handed boards up and rearranged the cabin contents to keep them out of the way of the ladder. Things progressed nice and smoothly thoughout the remainder of the morning, even though it was flipping cold. The warm air coming up out of my jacket as I bent down to pick up boards was steaming up my glasses. About half way along both sides, and Dave decided it was time to address the back corners, where the side wall heights didn't quite match the back wall. This was greater on the RHS (see earlier post) but there was a small difference on the LHS too. A bit of persuading with the mallet improved things, but the electric plane improved them more... Probably took off about 6 mm on the RHS. The LHS succumbed to the mallet. Carried on boarding for a bit then came in for lunch. We gave Tomas the heads up to come over, then went out to do the last few boards, which presented a slight topographical challenge in where to put the ladder. Dave didn't want to board himself in from the inside, so he took the ladder around the back and fought with the tree until he could get it vaguely in the right place and could almost reach everything. Tomas arrived just in time to help with trimming the final 2 back boards. Dave measured up and cut them along the length of the aluminium bench. Towards the end of the first one, Tomas said he thought the saw was about to catch the edge of the bench. Dave stopped and we repositioned, and Dave then realised he'd cut the first half of the board on top of the bench, so we had a long cut on the inside edge of bench as well. Explained why it was such tough going... Anyway, finished that board then carefully cut the second, then Dave wiggled around the back again to fit them. So, we were topped out!
The next part was the insulation boards, which if you remember weighed 28 kg each and we had to manhandle them 2.5 m in the air. That's why we needed Tomas. Dave went up on the roof to "catch" them as Tomas and I lifted them up and allowed them to pivot over, so Dave could pull them in to position. That went remarkably well for the first two. Then, according to the plan, the short board was supposed to fit along the remaining edge and we had to cut up the remaining large board to fit along the back. After a bit of measuring we decided that wasn't going to work, so trimmed down the short board to fit along the back, then cut up the remaining big board to fill the side pieces. We had a bit of a wonky moment for the last small piece, but we had so much left over, there was no issue with cutting another piece. Tomas was up on the roof for the smaller pieces so Dave could wield the circular saw without having to keep going up and down the ladder. We had a look at the instructions and at this point you're supposed to fit the roofboard edging strips, but there was no reason to hold up screwing down the insulation boards, so Dave went up with the bag of 50 mm screws and proceeded to fix the insulation to the roof. While Tomas was acting health and safety officer and keeping an eye on Dave, I put the floor insulation (which had been wrapped up with the wall insulation outside our bedroom window) inside the cabin, along with all the remaining parts that had been stored in the shed, on the grounds that then, nobody would need to risk breaking their neck/ankle/whatever on the deck, until we get a chance to clean it.
It was now getting dark and it was already cold, so we decided we'd stop for the evening - in any case, we need to work out the order of the roof trims and fiddly bits before fitting the membrane and roofing felt. So the tarpaulin went on - for hopefully the last time - and I ran Tomas home.