Up until about 21:00 this evening ...

... the weather was magnificent. In fact it was far too magnificent to work.

This morning we put up a small scaffolding at the southern end of the barn and while Terry was drilling and screwing into the wall for the mounting brackets I was sawing and cutting scaffolding pipe to make a framework to mount the solar panels that are on the roof of the Luton Transit and also the wind turbine that we took down from the north end of the barn.

But we were defeated by that most unusual phenomenon - overheating batteries. When they went flat in the Hitachi SDS drill (and what a good purchase that was!) they were too hot to take a charge. Mind you, it was only 37°C today - the hottest of the year.

Not to be outdone however we started on the guttering of the barn as you can see. I told Terry that there are four classes of people in France -
1) the peasants - the ones with the leaky roofs
2) the lower class - the ones with roofs that don't leak
3) the middle class - the ones with guttering on their barn ...
"What's the fourth class?" asked Terry
"The ones with drains to take away the water!"
But having seen how dry the house walls have become since I put guttering up, then my barn will have it too. I'm sick and tired of being up to my neck in mud. But I'll have to wait a bit for the drains though.

The chevrons are much too short for the roofing (I went for a long overhang) and so a fascia panel is out of the question but they did have at Brico Depot yesterday some galvanised straps with the facility for a sliding attachment. If you bend the straps so that the sliders are at about 60° there's still a good 9 inches or so on the straps and they fit nicely onto the chevrons and you can bolt the gutter mounts to them and they are then perfectly vertical.

We did what we could bearing in mind that we had no joints (moving the scaffolding out to give us clearance was fun) but by 15:00 it was no longer possible to work up there. The combination of a searing hot metal roof, blinding sunlight and tools too hot to touch made us call it a day.

I did a little some while later and then history was made by my not only having a solar shower  (and this LIDL garden shower thing needs some attention) but a solar shave as well. And no surprise - the water temperature was a phenomenal 46°C

We had a barbecue round at Clare's tonight. Esther hosted it and very kindly invited me, and of course Strawberry Moose met some of his admirers. James and Juliana drew some good pictures of him too.

But by 21:00 we were having thunder and lightning and we even had some rain. But nothing like as much as we need. And right now the sky is a clear cloudless starry night promising much more sun for tomorrow. I have to go to Commentry to look for joints and downpipe and thenit's a toss-up as to whether I come back to do the guttering or go for a swim.

We shall see.