www.tanstaafl.co.uk

The weather this weekend was quite wet and windy, but I managed to get out early(-ish 🙂 on Sunday to start fixing the northern gable in place. Everything went quite nicely to plan in terms of rolling the roof over the warm room and fixing everything from a ladder with the exception of the rain that started to fall once I’d done about half the job. I decided to stick with it and finish off, finally getting the roof closed up again about five minutes before very heavy rain started (though I was already soaked at this point anyhow). I also found an old door to temporarily prop in place to keep most of the rain out of the doorway.

The photograph below was taken well before sunset, believe it or not. The sky was just so dark.

Next steps are to get the ducting for the wiring to the piers into place under the floor, get the lower sections of the piers themselves in place and put insulation between the joists in the warm room. Once that is all done I can start putting the floor down.

[Edit: some additional photos taken during the day to show progress]

A little more progress yesterday evening…

I’d measured up for the north-east gable once, but when I came to check the measurements over they clearly couldn’t be right. The pitch of the roof wasn’t anywhere near the same as the southern end and that worked out fine. So I measured everything once again, this time clamping bits of scrap timber into place to give me marks to work from. My second set of measurements came out to within a couple of millimetres of those for the south-west gable, which pleased me greatly given how such a large roof frame was welded together sitting on saw-horses on my drive.

Happy with the measurements I cut the final sections of OSB to close off the gable and they’re now sitting inside the observatory waiting to be fitted this weekend. They’d best be right, as all I have left of the 20sqm of OSB that I bought or had sitting around to use on the roof is in small pieces that probably wouldn’t even cover 1sqm.

I’ve decided to try to avoid climbing onto the warm room roof to do most of the fitting. I reckon if I open the roof about 1/3rd of the way then I can hold the OSB in position and fix most of it from a ladder propped against the end wall of the warm room. If I struggle to reach the ridge then I’ll push it closed and just do the last few screws from the warm room roof. Saturday isn’t looking too clever at the moment weather-wise (again) unless I can get up and out there at the crack of dawn, which really isn’t me. On the plus side, the rain all appears to be coming in on southerly winds, so if I can’t get the membrane on until Sunday the OSB should still stay dry.