Putting the lid on

Wednesday, 31 August to Friday, 9 September 2011

During the next week and a half, Dave and I worked on the Writing Hut roof.  It turns out that a hipped roof is insanely complicated, and if you check YouTube for information all you get is people in America trying to sell you special tools for calculating the angles.  So we bodged it. 

Part of the problem was that we didn't quite trust the initial framework to take the weight of either of us, so we made the triangular sections in two pieces (which were easier to get home from the woodyard as well).  This meant we could stand the ladder on the nice stable floor to fix the first sections at the apex.  We put triangles of ply and then triangles of roofing felt, with overlapping flaps to flip down when we got to the next section.  This also involved long strips to run down the ridges covering the joins.  It was all quite sticky and messy, and took a much longer time than I expected.  (Dave had said so all along, of course!)

Somewhere in the middle of all this was the annual Paleokatuna vegetable festival and village fete.  If you remember from last year, we all did giant pumpkins.  This year it was open to any enormous vegetable.  None of ours had flourished: we'd replanted the pumpkin seeds but only one miserable mis-shapen specimen had been produced (I expect they doctor the seeds so that you can't use your own, but have to buy more each year).  Anyway, Sue from NewsStand had done a brilliant job with sunflowers - unfortunately, they hadn't lasted quite till September, but the dried heads were still impressive.  Some of the seeds were missing - she said she'd been growing them outside the shop, and passing Italians would just reach up and munch on the seeds.

Finally, the Hut was finished (ish).  By 9 September we were pretty sure that rain must come soon, so as well as the insect screen and the bamboo matting, I clad the walls in polythene.  The picture shows the West wall, which is fully clad, but I also wanted to keep the free flow of air, as the weather was still in the high 30s, so the other sides are only covered half or three-quarters high.  I'll just have to hope the weather doesn't come from the East.

An inside view of the roof: it looks quite smart if you don't get close up and see that most of those joints rely heavily on long screws rather than clever woodwork.