I still find installing an architrave accurately to be a difficult job so this took me about 2 hours.

At the end of the process I went to wipe down the installed timber with a turps soaked rag and found that much of the primer came away.

This did not surprise me as I had only applied the primer the day before - it was a close run endeavour as to whether I would have the architrave timber ready in time for the installation as it was.

I made a note to myself to repaint it at the end of the day.

Next I had to reinstall the bridging bracket bolts that I had previously removed to allow the rooves to sit flush with the front of the building.

This involved drilling a pilot hole through the 12 mm holes from the inside, into the upright flashing of the bay window rooves, followed by drilling out the 12 mm hole from the front of the house.

There was much running up and down ladders and drilling holes from awkward positions with no head room.

The whole process was difficult and took me up to 3.30 pm.

Just as I was stopping to take a break Jim and Sandy visited and we had a coffee for an hour.

When I re-emerged at 4.30 pm the day was rapidly drawing to a close but I had enough time to prime the architrave, glue in the flashing above, and temporarily nail in a plank above the door.

Sunday

I had intended to spend the first part of the day painting all the soakers (aluminium corners) with etch primer in preparation for the first coat of paint on all the cladding.

However, when I read the instruction on the can it suggested that the top coat was intended to be enamel.

I need to use a flat water based top coat to try to merge the corners in to the WeatherTex planking as much as possible.

I was disappointed to discover that Solver Paints was closed on Sunday as I really trust their advice.

Instead of visiting the building site I decided to stay at home and clean up the architrave timbers I had made out of floorboard.

This required me to sand off the existing varnish and the excess of any epoxy patching I had done.

I had a rather worn down P40 belt in my sander and decided to refresh it.

Unfortunately my local hardware did not carry any stock so I had to head down to Bunnings Midland.

While I was there I also picked up some etch primer from their paint department - they assured me that it would happily accept a top coat of water based paint.

The rest of the day went on the sanding process and I must say that I think that the resulting timbers look pretty professional.

Most of them will need some minor extra patching.

I will try to get out to site in one of my lunch hours to etch prime the aluminium so that I can carry on with the top coating next Saturday.

Wednesday, Thursday

Over the two days I made two visits to site and painted the aluminium soakers and flashing with etch primer.