www.tanstaafl.co.uk

It certainly wasn’t warm out there today, but armed with some newly-purchased stainless steel screws I decided to get on with the cladding on the sides of the roof. To do that it was necessary to open the roof which I’ve not done in what seems like ages, so whilst it was open I took a rare daytime photo.

As usual it took rather more time than expected to get the cladding into place, mostly because I was trying to be very careful to avoid fouling any of the structure as the roof opens and closes whilst keeping the gap between the sides of the roof and the wall as small as practical. Another minor little issue that I should have identified sooner also tripped me up: stainless steel screws are not magnetic, so they don’t stick on the end of the magnetic driver bit that I have for my drill/driver. This left me needing to use all three hands to hold the wood, the screw and the drill. And that’s when I noticed the problem 🙂

By the time it was too dark to work I’d got most of one side done. It really was quite dark, too. The chickens had all taken themselves to bed before I’d even finished tidying up. There’s no rain forecast for tomorrow so hopefully I can get out there again and it will be quicker having sorted most of the difficult bits today, which should allow me to finish most of it off and perhaps even start on the flap in the southern gable.

Dry weather on the last day of the Christmas break gave me the opportunity to get back to the observatory and clad the last, eastern, wall. This wall is very sheltered, being barely a metre from a stone wall and also shaded from the east by the Beer Shack, so it was where I intended to use up as many off-cuts as practical from cladding the rest of the building. As a result work went a little more slowly, but by the time it was done I had less than a couple of metres of scrap timber to discard.

Although the sun was setting I decided there was just time to finish off the northern end (I left the top two pieces last time because they needed cutting around other timbers and it was too dark). By the time they were done it was once again too dark to work any further.

I did manage to get out the next day and take a photo of progress so far however:

If the weather remains dry then the next steps are probably to clad the sides of the roof and the gables and end flap. Otherwise I’ll be back inside to get the ducting all done so I can lay the floor.

Construction has slowed somewhat thanks to the weather, but taking advantage of a day when it threatened to rain but turned out to be bluffing, the eastern and northern walls are now covered in cladding, all but for the top two rows on the northern wall which need to be cut around the roof rail supports and rafters. By the time I’d got that far it was too dark to finish those bits off, hence the lack of photos.

A bit of a break in the weather (by which I mean “it stopped raining for a while) this afternoon left me an opportunity to get out and do some of the cladding on the observatory.

My plan is to try to clad as much of the sides facing south and west in full lengths of boarding, then do the northern end with as few joints as possible, leaving the side facing east with the majority of the joins as it is longer than a full board length anyhow, and is largely sheltered by the “beer shack” and a stone wall.

Today I cut and fitted all of the full boards to the southern end. I need a cut-down board for the top, but that can wait until I’ve done more of the rest. The lowest board I trimmed down by about 15mm above the concrete pads supporting the outside joists so that it can sit 5mm off the concrete and 10mm below the bottoms of the joists to shade them from any rain running down the face of the board.

Just to check for size I also fitted on full-length board to the eastern side. I’ll leave that until last now.

No photos today though. By the time I’d finished hammering in the last of my lovely stainless ringshank nails the heavily overcast skies had ensured that darkness was not far off.