garden office - roof pt 1

Finally, a warm, dry day at the weekend, time to get the roof membrane up. I went out bright and early to get the membrane to warm up in the sun, to find it wasn't quite that warm yet. Anyway, I unpacked the box, realised it probably wouldn't be a good idea to roll out the membrane on the grass (everything would stick to it) and found it was actually pretty flexible already...

Dave went out a little later  and the sun was heroically starting to burn the cloud away, so we decided it was going to be warm enough anyway. He got the ladder up the side of the cabin and I carried the rubber up and plonked it on the cabin roof. He then manhandled the membrane so it was covering what it needed to cover, dangling where it needed to dangle and left it to cuddle the contours in the warmth.
We returned to a nice warm roof, and the plan was to do the run along the back before lunch, then continue with the rest later in the afternoon. Dave went to change his trousers and battle commenced. He did a strip a couple of feet wide along the back edge and then proceeded to stick the back strip down. The glue was a bit like the varnish in that it kind of glowed in UV light, so you could see where it had missed. I was on standby purely for H&S/moral support/decorative purposes, which is most frustrating. Dave then proceeded to the front of the cabin and started rolling the rest of the membrane back (not easy when it's 3m wide) to sit on the rear strip then glue the roof and roll it forwards again. I helped as I could. The plan to come back and finish it later went out the window when Dave realised it would be better to be working from a wet edge of the glue. Suffice to say, there was much wriggling scooting, grunting and rollery noises as he glued the rest of the roof and rolled the rubber back where it needed to be again. A couple of leaves fell foul of the roller and when they came down, they were an amazing blue colour, presumably from the UV on the glue, and there was one point where a gob of glue came flying off the roof and as I rushed to wipe it up, I watched it land majestically plum center on a dead leaf on the grass, so no contamination ensued. A couple of times I picked up gluey leaves and pulled some stuff off Dave's fingers and found out how super tacky the glue was.
He managed to get the whole thing done, somehow, in super quick time and only using one tub of glue. When I re-woman-handled the ladder back to the side of the cabin and got him down safely.
Probably too much information, but when we got Dave's jeans off we found he'd burnt his knees on the hot black rubber roof - there were blisters and everything.
After lunch, I put on the external vent covers then went over any sections that looked a bit light on the staining front, including the left hand front cross pieces that didn't get done when the services were going in. After that I set to, staining all the bits of wood that started to show as the structure dried out, so the door and window panels and various joints (the joint in the back wall behind where the radiator is hung had definitely opened out, so that got an extra coat). The new triangular "crevice brush" did a fine job of getting in to some of the nooks and crannies not accessible to your bog standard paint brush.