... with this floor in the other lean-to. I've done about two thirds of it and the only reason that I stopped (it was 18:42 when I did) was that I had run out of the wood that I had bought. It's 25mm planking and I might even have some more in the barn - some of that cheap concrete shuttering that I bought from Brico Depot. I need to go and have a look.
But I won't be doing all of the floor - I'll be having a kind of ladder-type of stair so that I can get up here from inside rather than climbing up the fence and in through the old window.
One of the two heavy beams in the foreground is to replace the broken one in the middle of the picture and the other one is to attach to the wall on some hangers that are there. The third heavy beam is sort-of in position at the low edge of the roof.
Once the floor is done and the woodwork is in position I need to build up the far wall and the low wall (it was the low wall I was doing when I became ill - that was the one that collapsed and I repaired it up to floor level) and then I can start to think about a roof. I hope I have enough recycled plastic slates left over.
This morning Terry was round and we built up the scaffolding and took the tiles off the roof. After lunch we knocked part of the wall down to fit the horizontal beam extensions and then started on the chevrons. And I managed to drop a huge rock onto Terry's hand - right onto his scar tissue - and he wasn't impressed. But them I have told him a million times that he didn't ought to be working downhill from me. But his response was that he prefers it. If I do something he can simply grab my leg and yank me off the scaffolding. Ahh well.
But this roof is a mess - nothing is straight and nothing is sound. It's not possible to work in straight lines as the more you dig into it the more defects you find. Replacing a chevron, we discovered that it had been rotten for years and all of the surrounding wood had collapsed. A new chevron went in straight (as they do if you don't buy them from Brico Depot) and then we had to put a broadener onto it when the wood that fits under the tiles promptly collapsed under the strain of the new wood. Instead of a broadener we should have replaced the voltige back to the next chevron, but where do you stop? What would happen if we were to discover that that chevron was rotten too?
The only solution as I have said before is to replace the entire roof and make everything new. Patching it like this isn't really the solution as it won't be long before the bugs that are creating the ominously-huge cavities in the old wood move house into the new wood and that lot all comes crashing down.
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