It was a bit of a dismal day with showers sweeping through every hour.

Fortunately I had set up a number of tarpaulins attached at the roof line and stretched sideway by tying to the trees.

This allowed us to keep working, except during very heavy downpours.

Last week we started to have trouble with access once we went over shoulder height - the work space is very narrow and cluttered with plumbing underfoot - we couldn't bring an ordinary scaffold in to stand on.

During the week, Tony M came up with a plan for a temporary scaffold.

I arrived at 7.00 am and ran around madly for 2 hours preparing for his idea - I positioned a scaffold at each of the extreme ends and dragged the appropriate length planks in to position.

Tony M then turned up and showed me how to build a safe, rugged scaffold out of timber cross pieces, uprights and bracing.

After about another 2 hours we had a convenient, safe platform to work off.

I called out measurements to Tony M, he cut the cladding to length, passed it up to me and it screwed it on to the stud frame.

The next two rows above the door frame went on quickly.

It then started getting tricky - when I installed the wall purlin I had to bolt it to cleats which were level with the wall line - this effectively gave me a 5mm cavity that needed to be packed out with spacers. In the end, Tony M ripped some scrap pieces of the WeatherTex and used a planer to reduce them down to 2mm, 3mm, 4mm and 5mm thickness.

After several hours of fiddly work, I managed to install all the spacers we needed.

The next problem, on this line of planks, was that fastening through the recommended attachment point on the WeatherTex planks would have damaged the copper plumbing just inside the purlin.

In the end, I had to use visible fixings, positioned lower down on the face of the weatherboards.

We also needed to contend with various bolt heads projecting out of the cleats - a few notches sorted that problem.

Eventually we had this row fixed down.

All that was left was a temporary row attaching to the 4 x 2 jarrah pieces of the temporary roof above.

I ended up just nailing these through to the wood - they will be broken off when we come to install the stud frames at the next level.