Poor Tim, we whisked him home, gave him a quick breakfast and then I took him out to Wooroloo to work with me.

Tim did a great job of rubbing back, rust converting and priming a section of the house core peripheral beam.

I was surprised, at the end of the day to see how much he had done (we need to rig some scaffolding next week to work on a 'difficult to reach' section). He explained that he has very long arms.

I made very little progress.

I wanted to relocate the external GPO for the sump pump from the redundant column across to the final column.

This should have taken just 10 minutes to undo a few screws in one place and screw it back on on anther.

Of course nothing is ever that simple and this job ended up taking 1.5 hours.

Now that the priming on the diagonal beam was dry I was able to prepare the metal surfaces (grinding back to bare metal) ,check the alignment, and execute some tack welds.

While I was working on the final weld, a neighbour who I had never met before (Neil) offered me some welding advice and even gave me a brief training session.

This was very kind of him and he showed me some useful techniques that I did not know about.

Neil is a boiler maker so he really knows what he is talking about - many thanks !

By now it was almost dark so we tidied up, packed up and headed home.