The gas company is becoming picky about a perceived safety issue and at this rate I will soon run out of hot water.

This took me about an hour and at this point the air con technician arrived.

I have a small Daikin air conditioner in the garage area.

If it was working it would be wonderful to give me a little bit of warmth on the nights that I stay over on site.

However, it is a bit long in the tooth and probably 20 years old.

The verdict was that the whole system would need replacing.

We will get a quote and see if we can afford to proceed. While we are at it we would move the outlet unit to a much more suitable place.

My next job was to move the television antenna to another place.

Currently it is clamped to one of the back wall columns and is preventing me from applying the building wrap.

I had to climb up on top of the second temporary roof, disconnect the feed and remove the unit from its supporting pole.

This was enough to allow me to unclamp the pole and move it to a different anchorage.

At this point Jim and Sandy visited and I drafted them in to helping hoist the mounting pole up to its new position.

Finally in the afternoon I could make a start on the building wrap.

The remnants poking out from the cladding on the East side of the building were a bit tattered and torn.

I very carefully folded them over the top of the new back wall warp.

Then applied a completely new corner strip starting from the veranda up.

This took quite a lot of careful work and by now it was too dark to do anything else.

Sunday

I stayed overnight and was up at 6.00 am and outside by 7.00 am.

I worked on wrapping the four steel / timber columns and also the small stud frames at each end.

With the very publicised storm coming in, I worked as late as I could up to 1.00 pm.

There were very strong winds and the start of light drizzle.

I thought I should drive home while the roads were still accessible so I packed up and left around 2.00 pm.

At this stage I don't know how well the tarpaulins survived and if there was any flooding or water damage.

I might make a visit out to site today (Monday) just to check.

Monday

Late afternoon I nipped out to site to see if there was any major water problems.

Everything was fine. Even the tarpaulins were fully intact.

Wednesday

In the morning I moved the first of the door frames to a working position in to prepare it for installation.

The first step was to route a small groove 25 mm in from the front face of the frame, on to each external surface of the jambs to accept flashing.

After this I applied the first coat of primer.

In the afternoon I headed out to site to dismantle the set of steps that served me so well when installing the loft floorboards.

These steps are very heavy and almost impossible to move. At the moment I cannot move anything past them and I really need an easy access way to bring in the door frames for installation.

I made good progress and the steps came apart easily.

I have one last small structure to dismantle but the rain started to come in and it was 5.30 pm - so I headed home.

Thursday / Friday

I have been really wanting to apply a second coat of primer to the first door frame but we have had constant rain and storms - so this has not been possible.

All three of our verandas, at our residence in Mundaring, are chock-a-block with building rubbish. The space where I am working on the frame is very close to the edge of the veranda and cops any bad weather.

I keep having to throw a tarpaulin over the frame to protect it from the rain.

This brings me to a side project I am working on.

I really wonder if I am crazy creating this extra work for myself.

The back wall at Wooroloo is very vulnerable to bad weather. I have protected it with black builder's plastic held down with timbers and bricks, and also hanging tarpaulins.

So far I have been lucky and not had any water ingress.

However, once I have the door frames installed, there is still a lot of work to prepare the double doors and install them.

Also - I have not done this type of work before and I am a bit nervous to start on it.

I do have someone in mind to come and help me install them - maybe next summer and if Covid19 is under control, and if they are still available.

However, in the meantime, I just want to install simple infills (like I did for the front bay windows) and make the street level water tight as quickly as possible.

To this purpose I have purchased 7 sheets of very thin ply (3 mm thick) 2400 x 1200.

I intend to paint these with some cheap paint to make them weather proof and mount them on to light frames that will slip in to each door frame.

This week I started on the frame for the first door.

I do not want to purchase any expensive framing timbers and I have been casting around for anything already at hand.

I have quite a few narrow pieces of chipboard that are 2400 long.

Each piece can be ripped down in half and combined to make a 36 mm thick beam.

Also, simple corner joints can be formed by cutting out an 18 mm piece from one layer of the beam.

To create the beams I have used liquid nails and copious brad nailing using a gun.

No particular strength is required and these frames will be temporarily fixed inside the door frames.

I spent Thursday and Friday preparing 2 uprights, a top and bottom piece and two intermediate cross pieces.