Today started out a bit cloudy, but generally sunny and warm. Pretty much t-shirt weather, in fact, had the wind been a little less gusty. Obviously therefore it was time to get some outside jobs done. Unfortunately heavy rain has now stopped play (I’m still drying off).
First I decided to open up the observatory roof a bit and have a bit of a tidy up in daylight as doing the warm room insulation has made a bit of a mess.
I discovered that my temporary bodge to prevent rain running back along the roof rails has not held up and there was a small patch of damp on the floor. There was still water sitting under the rail, so clearly sorting that properly must be a priority as soon as everything gets dried out. It is at least the first time it has happened since I attempted to plug the gap temporarily.
Being able to roll the roof off and having a floor meant I could get to the southern gable comfortably with a step ladder, so getting the cladding on seemed like a good plan. That all went rather neatly and just as I was fixing the last piece in place, the first few raindrops started to fall from what actually looked to be a largely cloud-free sky. Discretion being the better part of valour I decided to close up the roof and finish off the cladding on the top of the southern wall where the flap folds down. The bottom length of cladding on the flap has a layer of EPDM trapped under that covers the join between the flap and wall. I trimmed that to size and then trapped the bottom section behind the top piece of cladding as I nailed it in place. As I was nailing the last piece on the rain started pouring down, so I finished off and paused only long enough to take another photo on my way back to the house.
I’m not quite done with that end yet, but I decided to leave the “skirt” of membrane in place until I can fix some sort of drip bar in place to protect the gap between the gable and flap.
So, my next jobs to do are sort out that drip bar, fix the leak and make a door. I was getting very near the end of my box of stainless nails, which I’ll need for cladding the door, but another very kind observatory-builder has offered to send me his left-overs. That should cover everything I need, I think.