Today I took advantage of the bathroom multi ply sheeting I laid last week to install a pair of 800 x 600 frames.

I mounted these on top of some pieces of 80 x 80 mm jarrah to bring them up to the correct height and then bolted on a piece of 4 x 2 karri to reach from the previous piece of roofing to these frames.

Next I needed various lengths of 4 x 2 to bolt on to the floor boards halfway along their length.

Rather than cut up some good lengths of 4 x 2 I worked my way through my timber supplies selecting appropriate lengths for the rafters I will install - 4 x 3500 and 4 x 2300 and then looked at the offcuts that I generated.

I only needed to cut up one additional piece of timber to end up with 2 x 800, 1 x 2000 and 2 x 1600.

As I processed the various pieces of timber I carried the cleaned up lengths up to the loft floor to keep my cutting work area tidy.

This took me quite a lot of time and effort and it was not until 4.00 pm that I started bolting down on the floorboards.

As before, I am placing the holes in the middle of existing fastening holes for the floorboards and by keeping the size to 10 mm I can eventually plug them up along with all the fixing holes so they will be barely seen.

I ended up with 3 base pieces bolted down - this is a lot of work as I need to drill through the timber, floorboards and purlin and then run up and down the steps to install nuts from below.

It was around about 6.30 pm that I started working on installing risers and the top timber to create major support beams to accept the rafters.

By now I was too exhausted to clear away the partly completed work or to reinstall the black plastic.

I will need to visit for half an hour on Sunday to do this - rain is expected in the next few days.

Wednesday

I didn't want to take a day off work today but I had to.

The effects of a cyclone in the Pilbara are touching Perth with heavy rain forecast through to the end of the week.

I have the 3.5 metres of floorboards covered with black plastic only.

I have noticed that all it takes is a pin prick sized hole in the plastic and rain will soak through over a large area.

The solution is to complete the installation of the corrugated iron sheeting but there are still several days of rafter / batten construction to complete before I am ready for this.

Instead I realised that if I sorted out the sheeting I intend to use then I could lay this over the floor, with a small amount of slope and cover it with the black plastic giving two barriers.

The first job, out on site, was to visit my store of corrugated iron sheeting and pull out sufficient to cover this area of flooring and the last area still to do at the front of the house.

I discovered that I had some quite nice, uniform sheets, that would almost reach the full length but I also had to find a few more sheets that I could cut at 1 metre to make the total distance.

The sheets had accumulated a lot of mud and tannin and I had to spend several hours cleaning them..

As I cleaned each piece I carried it up to the loft floor level and stacked it ready for use.

I was looking for an excuse to use my power steel snips that I received for a previous birthday - so I was quite happy to cut off some 1 metre sections.

Around about 3.00 pm I had all the sheets cleaned and up at the loft level.

I then placed them so that the existing installed rafter spines gave them a small slope in each direction and replaced the black plastic.

I also laid many various weights (lengths of timber) over the black plastic to keep it under control.

It did in fact rain quite heavily Thursday through to Friday but I now felt much more relaxed about it.