With this number being installed each week I should achieve a decent progress towards installing all the floor.

To achieve my goal I had to work in to the dark each night after I finished my work for my clients.

I also created the packing plates needed to bring the bolting points for the structural steel up to floorboard level.

What I am talking about here is the piece of steel work that will allow me to eliminate the supporting wall in the centre of the front of the loft - ie to create a large studio area.

The reason that I am going through the effort to pack 20 mm rather than just make the steel work 20 mm higher is that I have this crazy idea of preassembling the loft in the back yard, including the steel work and this simplifies the job.

Also during the week I dropped in to Vinsans and discussed with them a solution for filling in the back wall of the street level.

I had been hoping to install two 4 metre tracked lengths of stackable doors but I have been quoted $14K to have this installed and even if I did it myself it would still come to $10K.

Instead I purchased 4 x 1.65 frames with colonial doors. Two are fixed, two still have working doors with all the hardware.

I took Linda along for her approval and she bargained the price down to $1500.

So not as nice as a stackable door system but practical.

Saturday

I have reached the limit of clamping from the east side of the loft and need to relocate the anchorage point to the middle of the hallway.

To avoid damaging the floorboards I am using the fixing points for the steelwork as well as a few intermediate 10 mm holes that will be indistinguishable from all the other fixing holes.

I had a lot of materials to unload first - 5.4 m length of pine for the anchor, two sheets of multiply and 20 floorboard runs.

I then needed to mark up the holes for the steel work mounting pads using templates I had already created.

This involved drilling 8 x 12 mm holes through 6 mm steel which is always a slow process.

Then I needed to drill through the pine beam, the floorboards and the steel purlins below and run up and down the steps to install nuts on to threaded rod.

Also, at the same time, I was steel brushing off a coating of rust on the purlins left from drilling holes for the bridging and failing to blow it off before it rained.

At this point it became very hot under the tarpaulin and the job slowed to a snail's pace.

After removing any traces of the rust flakes I painted the surfaces with cold galvanising.

Finally, after 5.30 pm, it was cool enough to get back on the loft and install a set of 4 floor board runs and pack away all the tools.

A bit of a disappointing day in this respect but I probably had unrealistic goals.

On the positive side, Ian worked on removing the horrible crusher dust.

He would have been at it for at least 8 hours.

All my "good" soil supplies are now in one huge heap, the crusher dust is in another and there is a huge hole in the back yard.

Thursday (Australia Day)