Following on from my framing blog of two Saturdays ago, the store is now weatherboarded and sarked and the long drain is finished. But first a quick résumé of Friday’s pool session, where I chose to practise wet exits again counting lengthening times before releasing the spraydeck and getting out the boat as well as heel-hook assisted rescues. And must say I’m much more relaxed about the wet exits now I know what I’d already guessed, which is that there’s really no need to rush at them when you don’t need long to find the cockpit coaming and work round to the tab with a calm, clear head and will probably get out quicker anyway remembering ‘more haste less speed’!
So here we have the long wall weatherboarded. Is it perfect? No! Is it still a good job? I think so!
Look along the line of the boards and you’ll see they finished up marginally higher on one side of the central join despite me setting them all as tightly together as I could. But that join will be covered and I’m not planning to spend my life lying between fence and store staring at that wall anyway!
I didn’t cut the ‘bad’ joint wrong but simply trusted the factory ends to be square. They usually are but, after discovering the error on the first board I fitted, I cut all the remaining ends square before cutting the boards to length. And, as already stated, that join will be covered:
This all worked exactly as designed!
I cut the edges off the top boards on the table saw, which was still set to 30° from cutting the roof rails. The chunks of CLS are my ‘push sticks’ because I needed a bit of weight and rigidity there:
I wondered whether I should have cut the weatherboarding flush with the end rafter before doing the sarking, but (as you’ll see) chose to fix the sarking on top when the join between them was all going to be covered either way:
Already less of a gap under the back end where I dropped the side boards to match the back, but later to be effectively reduced to nothing through the addition of gravel boards to retain the chippings. I’m still planning to frame these lower weatherboards along their bottom edges:
A study in wedges where I recently discovered the shed found had sunk slightly at the back corner and I’m also temporarily propping up that side board, but the real reason for this photo was to show off that nice rounded corner on my frame!
(What the vertical pieces above hide is that it’s also rebated to fit round the shed trim.)
Not much to say about the sarking except that it’s, well, sarking:
Not exactly a day’s work next, but these gravel boards gave me something to play with on a pish day! There’s maybe a bit more to this than meets the eye because I had to dig out about a bucketful of soil with a trowel, find a piece of wood for a mini post, shape it to avoid chipping away the existing shed found (which I didn’t want to do), concrete it in, fit a spacer behind to take the boards, and shape and fit the gravel boards (one of which I did twice because my first attempt used a horrible bit of sarking that didn’t meet the weatherboarding nicely). But still really just playing compared to the previous few days…
Here I’m taking a break from building after an abandoned attempt to start the corrugated roofing on Saturday to work on the drain yesterday. There’s two bulk bags of gravel gone into that, which proved to be the Goldilocks amount as I tipped the last of the second into the top of the former hippo pit to finish working downhill then back up. So here’s where it starts on my neighbours’ side of the fence:
And where it finishes just above the remains of the old field drain I found:
Still quite a lot of gravel to go in here:
I worked downhill along the trench…
Then back uphill…
Till the gravel ran out perfectly up at the shed end…
Then raked a fair bit of the ground back, which was probably harder work than doing the gravel!
It’s not all gravel in the hippo pit because I put some of the rubble back in the LH side:
And finally (for now) some more ground restoration/realignment today before I get back to building things. Who knows when I’m going to get working on Fly, but I’m guessing April now. Which is OK because, much as I’m looking forward to a good sailing season, I’m currently busy with this and want to see it done! :-)
