With the lengthening summer days this usually allows me two hours each time.

During the week I effectively saved one Saturday work day by tying up a whole lot of loose ends :

finishing painting the stair case / applying decking oil to the treads, finishing off the brush cutting on Ian's side, finishing of the joist levelling, treating a section of stud frame top plate for mould and repainting.

Saturday

I have not had the protective tarpaulin up for many months - mainly because it has too many holes to protect against rain, and partly because it takes me half an hour to set up. However, today was forecast to reach 37 degrees and I really needed some protection from the direct sunlight.

I finally moved the supporting frame to its intended position - right in the middle of the house and then hooked up and raised the tarpaulin.

This gave me very good shade for most of the day and I planned my work around the moving shade footprint.

The "beachhead" area (ie 9 mm ply sheeting over the wet area) worked exactly as I had planned. This gave me a very satisfactory facility to layout tools and to access all areas of the joists.

It also integrated well with the temporary staircase.

Today's job was to add some criss-cross bracing on top of the purlins to keep the whole deck from deforming.

By using 6 scaffolding planks, and moving them around as necessary, I was able to access all areas of the deck.

I am using 30 mm x 1 mm strapping and stainless steel 4.8 mm rivets.

I find that even using a good quality "Cherry" pop rivet gun is too hard on my hands.

With this in mind, about 4 months ago, I purchased a drill add-on that installs a rivet just by pressing the trigger on the drill.

This worked really well. The only negative was that the action caused one hell of a bang as the mandrel pulled through the rivet and then broke off - I just had to wear protective ear phones.

It turned out that, in combination with half a roll I already had, I had sufficient rolls of strapping to just install all the bracing I needed.

The tarpaulin protected from the worst of the heat - it was certainly much better than working in direct sunlight.

Between 1.00 pm and 3.00 pm though it became quite hot under the canvas and I had to retreat to working half and hour on , half an hour off.

I ran out of the longer rivets needed for the 6 mm thick PFC beams and not all of the purlin rivets are completed yet - I think about another 2 hours are needed to finish the job completely.