Saturday, March 2, 2013

Battens, battens everywhere

Today's job was to finish the battens on the dwelling roof, and install them all on the garage too so that on Sunday I can fiddle around with the little bits of Hebel I need to finish off.

I knocked the dwelling roof over pretty quickly, as I already had a third of the battens done to hold the plastic sheet down and so got stuck into the garage right around the time the sun showed itself above the trees, bathing me in its full glory.

It gets hot up here in full sun! :)

Progress on the garage roof however slowed considerably as I'm going through batteries for my saw and drill like there's no tomorrow. The OBHW battens are hard, and driving the batten screws through them is giving my cordless drill a really hard time. I've got three big batteries, and today I've had one on the charger at all times and that's still not keeping up with me. Making things worse is that I'm charging from the deep-cycle battery and solar panel in the caravan, and that is going flat too!

So rather than press on in the full sun I decided I should take a break for a while and visit my fire-affected neighbours to see how they fared after we left last week.




It's actually not terribly obvious in the photos that there was a big fire here. Most of the upper tree canopy is unaffected, although there are places where the leaves are changing colour indicating they got a bit of heat. Thankfully we had very little wind to contend with - had it picked up, the sight today would have been very different.

As it is, the containment line we put in along the creek held the fire back perfectly, and it never really looked like threatening the property.

So after several hours chatting I decided I really ought to get back to the building site and finish off my roof. It was 4pm before I got back...

With my batteries recharged (both figuratively and literally) I managed to finish off the large fall of the garage roof before the light failed me.



So tomorrow I really have to finish these battens if I stand any chance of getting the tin installed next week.

No comments:

Post a Comment