Back at home, I paused to apply the second coat of enamel to the timbers intended for architraves.

I was out to site pretty late (probably 10 am).

It took my the rest of the day to complete the cladding over the doorway and tweak the packers to produce a level run down the whole length of the wall.

On my next visit I will install the architrave over the door header and from that work out my next step.

Sunday

Ian, next door, had invited us to a New Years Eve get together.

I mentioned this to Linda and she was keen to go.

The only problem being that we would have to drive home late at night.

She suggested bringing an extra mattress and sleeping on the floor of the kitchen in the undercroft.

I suddenly realised how filthy this area was from all the traffic during last winter and doing a long overdue cleanup suddenly became a high priority.

It turned out, in the end, that we went home at 10.00 pm and abandoned the idea of staying over.

However, now that I was fired up about cleaning, I thought it was a good opportunity to do some housekeeping that had been nagging at me for months.

I was out on site at around midday and was still working away at 6.00 pm when Linda arrived.

A lot of time went in to improving the bathroom (the hand basin was originally black with grime) and also scrubbing back the light coloured grouting was a very slow process.

I am still less than halfway through cleaning the kitchen floor but I did manage to tidy away a lot of clutter.

I am thinking that if I put in half an hour's scrubbing, first thing, on every site visit then I will soon have the undercroft spick and span.

Tuesday

Today I carefully transported the painted architrave timber out to site, as well as my "Poor man's pan brake".

It took me a long time to install a single piece over the doorway.

First of all, I was unsure weather the bull nose side should face inwards or outwards.

Secondly, I was aware that the architrave should be positioned about 5mm in from the edge of the reveal.

Unfortunately, some of the head flashing intruded in to the full width of the edge of the reveal.

I ended up cutting some of this away and cleaning away the adhesive with turpentine.

I managed to cut the timber to exactly the right length but I was really struggling to position and clamp it in place on my own.

Then I realised that if I instead clamped two pieces of mitred scrap on to the side jambs then I could do this easily and control the header piece very easily.

The next issue was that the architrave did not sit exactly parallel with the reveal. After fixing it at the extreme left and right I had to clamp it upwards in the middle to achieve a parallel strip against the reveal.

In the process, this forced the door header down by a few millimetres so I also ended up having to insert a few fixing screws through the door header.

By now the day was really starting to warm up (37 degrees predicted and I was working in a heat trap).

I retreated inside and could not restart work until 17:00

I cut a piece of Weather Tex to fit over the header architrave and experimented with my "pan brake".

I will take Wednesday off as I am a bit burned out today (and frustrated at the slow progress).

When I am back on Thursday I will launch in to folding up a 1900 mm long z flashing for the next step.

Thursday

Refreshed from a day off on Wednesday , I threw myself in to work again.

The first job was to fold up a 1900 mm length of aluminium flashing to go over the door architrave.

I repositioned the "pan brake" so that I had adequate lighting and created the Z fold.

The aluminium is only 0.3mm so it tends to show ripples from coming off the roll.

I am hoping that once I have etch primed it and painted it with the same acrylic paint as the rest of the wall that it will fade out of notice.

I fixed this piece of flashing with a few dabs of sealant and copious temporary pieces of gaffer tape.

The top edge is secured by the next layer of Weather Tex.

During the day I installed another two layers of board.

The process was very slow due to tricky work fitting around the top of the door and the top of the window.

Also the heat slowed me down.

After midday it became a rhythm of half an hour on and half an hour off.

I am now at the point of installing the architrave over the window and then its z flashing.

Hopefully this will be much quicker due to the experience I acquired doing the door way.

After this, just two more layers to complete the wall.