I decided to zip out to site at around 5.00 pm Friday, remove the required part of the roof in the evening, stay overnight and get home early to stay home and guard against fire.

When I arrived, I was pleased to see that Ross had dragged the majority of the steel beams down to behind the house.

He heard me arrive and came around to talk.

It turned out that he couldn't move anymore until the wasps calmed down.

He had also attempted to clean up a bit near the creek but was discouraged by a wild bee hive.

My main purpose on site this weekend was to give Ross access to the "sockets" on the creek wall of the house.

These were concealed under the temporary roofing, and in some cases covered over by the temporary roofing frames.

I needed to remove the roof edge capping and the entire gable covering to give access to this area.

I also removed two of the roof frames from under the sheeting.

My life was made much more difficult by the presence of 4 wasp nests on the sheeting I was removing.

I was working with a power drill in one hand and "outdoor fogger" in the other, desperately avoiding wasp stings.

During the evening I worked on shortening the frames I removed.

I turned in at about 10.00 pm and set the alarm to be up at 5.00 am.

The next morning, I was outside as early as possible and quietly reinserted the shortened frames.

I needed to wait until 7.00 am before I could make any noise - ie screw them back down.

Next I went up on to the roof, taking with me two large tarpaulins, some lengths of jarrah 4 x 2's and some rope.

From previous trial and error I had worked out the best way to fasten tarpaulins in a windy situation.

Each timber length had a hole at each end. I tied these off to ropes and then ran the ropes towards the street side of the house where I fastened them.

I then wrapped the edge of the tarpaulins once around the timbers and attached them by nailing through 100 x 50 mm scrap timbers.

The tarpaulins were placed so that about 1.5 metres was over the roof with the remaining 4 m hanging down the wall of the house. Plus some laying across the ground. I secured the tarpaulin on the ground by placing heavy planks and bricks.

The winds were gusting up to 60 kms an hour while I was there with no sign of the tarpaulins being ripped away.

So for Ross to work on inserting steel columns in to the sockets he just needs to get up on the roof, haul the tarpaulins up temporarily, hold it down with some bricks and then he can get on with his work.