12 Jul 11

Cants and crickets We've booked a friend to come and help us lay the bitumen roofing on Thursday so we only have today and tomorrow to finish preparing the roof - this concentrated our minds I must say. Dave started by screwing down the cants and crickets for the skylights while I added a strengthening tape to the plywood joints (it's the stuff used to do joints on plasterboard).

Rolling waves of plastic

The nicest part of the morning had been taking the black plastic off the roof for the final time. It's been great at keeping the roof dry (apart from the odd hole) but is a pain to keep in place and handle in the wind....

Now this should give you a clue (and quite frankly it should've been a warning to us too) about what was going to happen next. Just so you know what we're trying to achieve - we have to cover the edge of the roof by .5m and all the way down the berm to 4m all round the roof. This helps to stop water entering via the berm soil.

In our infinite wisdom (??) we'd decided to buy 12x13 metres of new plastic (that's 156m2) in one big sheet and cut a hole out of it. Why we thought this would be the easiest method I just don't know. It may have been ok I suppose if the wind hadn't picked up. But the wind did pick up, in fact it was probably gusting at about 25kph. We ignored all warning signs and unfurled the plastic...well, have you ever been to the theatre and seen how they portray water? Big sheets of fabric held at either side of the stage and being flapped and wiggled to represent waves? All I can say is that we did a pretty good rendition of a wild storm at sea, with black waves reaching 3 metres high or more!

I remember at the time thinking "will I laugh at this later? No I bloody won't", but I am laughing, I wish someone had been there taking a film of it as I'm sure it was funny to watch. Anyway, it wasn't funny at the time. It was a little bit scarey in fact because the wind was blowing the plastic so hard and high tyres were being flung in the air. Eventually I lay down in the middle and Dave slowly rolled it all up. We dumped it in the wheelbarrow and took it downstairs to worry about later when we'd both calmed down.

Gloopy tar - yukey dar!

Having given up on the plastic we started painting the first layer of tar sealer on our beautiful wood roof (sob). It's not quite as bad as I expected it to be, but it's heartbreaking to think of all that lovely cork and plywood being covered in this gloop. Still, we need to make the roof waterproof so needs must.

Below shows our lovely roof before, during and after.