New tool store – day 5

And it was a nightmare. I’d been looking forward to putting the roof onto the new tool store but I didn’t have the slightest idea just how tough it would be. I knew it would be a bit tricky because as the building is too wide for you to reach across from the outside to its centre, you have to fit the ridge capping strip as you go from the inside as each sheet is added.

But I wasn’t expecting screw holes to be either missing completely or drilled in the wrong places which made the job even harder. And the other thing was that a lot of the screws securing the roof have to pass through three thicknesses of metal, none of which were perfectly aligned, making aligning the screws with the screw holes even more difficult than usual.

So progress today was very slow and extremely frustrating to say the least and things weren’t helped by it being very chilly this morning, making lining up screws with cold finger tips annoyingly difficult. I have to say, my language did turn a bit purple from time to time, but I just had to keep slogging on.

I had to work out how the sheets were fixed for the first side that I did and it took me quite a few minutes to work out that they’d got it wrong in the build manual. And later on when I’d started on the other side of the roof, I found that a complete set of holes on one half of it were drilled in the wrong places. But having done so, it didn’t take much to get a 2.5 mm drill bit and drill another set with my cordless drill.

The work also needed to be done out of sequence compared to the build manual eg if I’d fixed all the roofing sheets on as the manual recommended it would have been impossible, as I mentioned earlier to then attach the ridge capping strip because of the impossibility of reaching across the roof without some kind of scaffold to insert, line up and tighten its fixing screws. It had to be done as each sheet was mounted on the second half of the roof.

It started off quite cold this morning (cold enough for me to go into the caravan to put plastic washers on lots of screws ready for them to be used) but it had warmed up by about lunch time. Here’s where I’d got to at the beginning of the afternoon with almost half of one side done. I couldn’t fix the last sheet on because I didn’t have a high enough set of steps at that time that would have allowed me to reach the roof from outside..

Here’s a shot taken at the end of the day with the second half almost at the same stage. I say ‘almost’ because it was getting quite dark and cold again by that time and although not all of the screws were in place for the final sheet I thought that it was about time to take today’s photographs and call it a day.

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Now here are the four external shots taken from each corner.

It was approaching the next corner below when I was beginning to experience screw hole misalignment problems. Some were due to manufacturing faults where holes had been missed completely or were several centimetres out and in fact these were the easiest to rectify, merely by drilling new ones.

The most difficult ones were where the building is slightly distorted or misaligned in some way making the holes a millimetre or less out. These couldn’t be redrilled as then the screws would have stripped on tightening and the only solution was to heave, pull and push the sheets while standing precariously on the top of the steps until enough alignment had been attained to get the screws to enter the holes in question – more difficult and tricky than it sounds.

To finish off, a couple of shots of the interior.

So tomorrow I just have to finish off fixing the roof sheets, fit the trim pieces and ventilator panels and fabricate and fix the sliding doors. Then the new store will be finished. However, based on today’s experiences, I’ll not start blowing any trumpets until that point is reached as doing so beforehand would I’m sure, be bound to encourage yet more unforeseeable problems that will cause even more distress and delays than I experienced today. And it’s going to start off cold again tomorrow – but at least no rain is forecast until Wednesday, so I should be thankful for small mercies, I suppose 😐