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Today may be something of an event. I actually achieved what I set out to achieve on the observatory today 🙂

To be fair, it wasn’t an awful lot. Just before the Sun set I remembered that I needed to test the end flap for fit so I rushed out to do that. One small adjustment and I was able to finish off the construction in the workshop and cover the outside with membrane. That’s basically it.

Tomorrow I shall try to fit it in place temporarily so the south-west end of the observatory is rain-proof, and then measure up for the north-east gable, hopefully getting that cut as well.

Despite a whole day working on the observatory I don’t feel as though I’ve achieved much today. The days are getting so much shorter however. I came in for lunch today and realised that by the time we’d finished eating there were really only two and a half hours of daylight left 🙁

Anyhow, the gables are now my priority because once those are closed off the structure should be rainproof as long as I stand something in front of the door. I started today by cutting OSB to fit the fixed section of the south-west cable (part of the rolling roof) and fitting that into place, covering it with breathable membrane.

That done, I started the construction of the folding section of the wall at the same end. I reached the point of needing one final test for fit, but the Sun was well gone and there just wasn’t enough light left to work by. I’m hoping that I can check the fit tomorrow during the day and then finish the frame off during the evenings this week as fortunately it’s just small enough to fit in the workshop. If I can do that and get it temporarily fixed in place (has to be temporary because I don’t want to fit the hinges until the cladding is all in place), then that should be the south west gable done for now.

The north east gable will need me to get up on the warm room roof to fit. That’s not a big deal, but does require daylight and preferably dry weather too. Hopefully I can get the boarding cut during the week so it’s all ready to go at the weekend assuming the weather plays ball. If I can get that done, or maybe even if I can’t, I should be able to make progress with the trunking for the cabling under the floor, at which point it’s time to give serious thought to getting the floor down.

With the roof keeping the rain off the top, I need to stop it getting in the sides as well before I can think about putting down the floor (and there are a couple of other things besides that need sorting before I can do that, too).

Fortunately most of the wall area was easy to deal with, just wrapping it in breathable membrane. I started this quite late in the afternoon and ended up working until daylight failed, as seems to be the case quite regularly now. It was so dark that my camera couldn’t find anything to autofocus on for this picture 🙂

I’ve boarded the sides of the roof with 9mm ply and then covered those with membrane as well. If you look at the area of the photo showing the inside of the roof in this photo you’ll see what the weather was like at the time 🙁

Feather-edge boarding has also arrived for cladding the walls. I chose feather-edge because it suits the rural setting and matches the beer shack immediately next to it. I’m not sure when I’ll get this started. Closing off the gables is really the next priority.

Finally, a couple of photos showing the inside now it’s starting to look a bit more like a building…

It’s been a slow four weeks since my last post, mostly because of the virus that my daughter kindly shared with me. It has left both of us feeling quite exhausted.

However, I have managed to make a little progress on the observatory.

Firstly, I finished painting the roof frame, dodging the rain as I went. This took considerably longer than I’d hoped because the weather wouldn’t play ball.

The next step was to get the OSB fixed down to form the sloping sides of the roof. For this I intended to use some Tek screws, which are designed to be self-drilling and self-tapping in steel. I thought I’d best try one out before getting up on the roof with an 8×4 sheet of OSB, so here it is. No drilling, no tapping, just hold the screw in place and let it do the work:

Getting the boards up on the roof was a bit time-consuming and took the better part of two weekends because I was having to dodge the weather again (and daylight hours are very short right now), but overall they went on easily enough. I did have a few screws that didn’t want to go through the steel, but in the main they did a pretty good job, though I reckon if I’d used two drill/drivers, one with a drill bit and one with the screwdriver bit, I could have used screws that were just self-tapping. I did discover that my new OSB boards were actually 2400mm x 1200mm whereas the left-over ones I had from the beer shack were 2440mm x 1220mm. A little unexpected, but fortunately it didn’t spoil anything. Here’s roof with the OSB all in place:

Having got that far, the last job of “roofing fortnight” was to get the EPDM in place. Temperatures are sufficiently low (and the weather sufficiently wet) that gluing it down isn’t really possible at the moment so I decided just to get it into place and wait for a convenient time to do the gluing. Lifting 30kg of EPDM up onto the roof was quite tricky in my fragile state, but I eventually managed it by folding the sheet so it would fall down each side of the roof from the ridge and then lifting it, followed by myself, up onto the roof of the warm room after which it was only a short lift to get it onto the ridge and pulled into place, temporarily clamped down at the edges.

Light was fading fast at this point, but I even managed to get in a bit of astrophotography as I cleared up 🙂

Oh, what dreams I had! I thought this weekend might be the weekend when I finally got the roof onto the observatory. Sadly the weather had other ideas 🙁

I went out on Saturday morning to paint the bare steel of the frame with Hammerite and managed to get about two thirds of the way through that before lunch. But whilst I was eating a fine drizzle started, leaving the frame wet. Over the next couple of hours the drizzle turned to rain and I was forced to give up for the day.

Things had not improved by Sunday, with near-continuous rain all day, so that was as far as I got. Most days this week are looking pretty wet, too, so it may well be next weekend before I can get started again.