snow blind

No, I have not been to the snow but I did spend a good chunk of yesterday and a little bit of today painting the gable end of the house. It has had the Hardiplank weatherboard (fiber cement, but it looks like weatherboard) cladding put up. The weather has been glorious all week and that means Stuart and Jason were able to get back to work on turning our veranda into a sunroom and covering the gable. The scaffold is only here for another week, so that meant this Saturday was set aside for painting.

In not such good news we now know beyond reasonable doubt that our roof tiles, despite having just survived an apocalyptic fortnight of rain, are w-a-y past their best. They are old concrete tiles which lost their glaze long ago. Give one a scratch and the concrete easily breaks down; in fact most of the crap in our gutters (of which there isn't much, and the gutters are reasonably new) is dissolved roof tile.

So it looks like we'll be biting the bullet and replacing the roof as part of this renovation. We could try a roof restoration, but the chance are the pressure-clean would smash some of these old tiles. There is a cost to re-bedding and capping the roof anyway. We had a tiler quote $16k for tiles but we are almost certainly going to go for a Colourbond steel-sheet roof, probably in a bluish colour. It should look really nice, and we'll just put our fingers in our ears and sing 'la-la-la' when discussing the budget. Spending the best part of $250k on a renovation while skimping on waterproofing from above and below (remember the slab downstairs?) is daft. Ho-hum, the new windows will definitely have to wait.

Anyway, painting white boards in the noon sun, even with a low-sheen paint, is a bastard and I needed to borrow some of Sal's sunglasses. My eyes were stinging today. It was a very nice day, and I think I made a reasonable job of it. If I didn't I'm sure Stuart will let me know and I can have another go next weekend, weather permitting (so it will almost certainly rain.)

And that is pretty well it for progress this week, other than to say removing bagging from bricks is my new least-favourite task. Bagging is basically the practice of filing the gaps between bricks with a mixture of sand a camel spit. Digging it out again, with a screwdriver is not difficult, but it is as sould destroying as painting a roof of exposed rafters, my previous least favourite. Someone decided to bag half of the bricks around the veranda, so to even things up we're removing it all.