Barn Raising

Monday 22 November 2010

We turned into our little track on Monday morning to find a new wide concrete road on the Corner of Doom.  A relief, despite feeling conflicted about the concrete.  There's still a vertical plunge off the edge, but the road is wide enough even for me to navigate safely round it. 

 Once on site we removed the tarpaulin over the frames, and found a lodger - he was very miffed to be disturbed.

We'd just happened to mention to the crew during the weekend that we might need a bit of a hand on Monday.  

Lovely guys that they are, they all agreed to come along and help with our barn raising.  Dave and I put up the first two frames bright and early.

Mike and Margaret turned up just as we finished our lunch break, and Mike (2) and Bill arrived soon after.  Bill is a proper woodworker, and within minutes decided he needed his own tools for the job.  Unfortunately he'd walked down from Paleokatuna village, not realising quite how far down the hill we are, so Mike (1) had to give him a lift back for his van, drill, clamps, and the 'special tool' (quizzically raised eyebrow).

The lads started in enthusiastically, very quickly relegating Margaret, me and even Dave to junior status.  I think they were grateful to be out from under the lash of the skipper.  The other two walls went up smartly,

then the rafters went on - against a darkening sky.

 (Dave holding up the pot of screws for the proper workers!)  This was where we found out about the 'special tool' - a neat gadget braced onto the side of the rafters to guide a drill to make a diagonal screw hole to fix down the ends of the rafters. 

This is the photo I've sworn not to put on the blog - Bill says if Sylvia sees it he'll be in real trouble!  (Oops, sorry Syl)  But it is the only one which shows me doing anything at all.  This is the point where the framework was complete and we just had to get the polythene cover on.  The wind was getting up and rain was close.

It looks easy, but we should've had stop-motion photography for this, if not for the whole afternoon.  Despite our combined race-winning knowledge of what fabrics do in the wind we took two attempts to get the cover over and nailed down

What a team! 
Bill, Dave, Margaret, Mike (1) and Mike (2)