Upon the resumption of the new week, we got on with the task of cladding the Front Porch wall, the “C” section that has the main house door and Entertainment Room’s window. It is over 7 metres long and disappears up to the apex of the porch roof, some 5 metres high.
By the end of Monday, we got all the lower section of the wall covered in our Larch cladding timber, with different randomised planks on each side of the door and the window.
Then over the next three days, using our existing high level platforms (we had to raise a shorter one by extending it’s legs by temporarily clamping on a set of the old tall legs), we slowly covered the rest of the wall. It was cramped at times, especially near the top, working around all the piles of timber, ladders and tools, it was a tricky and slow work.
C-Wall-Platforms-to-work-on-gable-wall
C-Wall-Day-2
C-Wall-Day-3
C-wall-Day-4
These cladding planks are the original finish (no burnt surfaces, apart from the gentle band of colour at the bottom and tops of the windows and doors), we had to go all over the surface, wiping the dust and finger prints off. Sometimes, a bit more effort and the use of some sand paper was require, to bring back the clean look again.
C-Wall-Finished
C-Wall-Finished-2
After that, we tidied away the three platforms and then continued on the next and last two wall sections, “D” and “E” to finish off all the walls that make up the “front” of the building that don’t need the fire-treated timber. We were looking at the finished C porch wall and decided that the darker band running underneath and over the windows should be toned down. We therefore proceeded to unscrew the high scorched planks off the “A” wall to scrub them more vigorously and put them back.
Dark-planks-Before-Scrubbing
Dark-planks-After-Scrubbing
Following this new thinking, we also decided to only use scorch level “2” and level “3” to form a narrower band on the “D” and “E” walls, to make the darker bands less of a statement.
D-Wall-Complete
Cladding on C,D & E
This concludes the work on the first half of putting up the Larch timber on our walls. The next job is to sort out our second set of timber, remove the rusty iron marks, scrub the darker scorched planks to tone those down and then dunk all of them into the oil bath. That would be next week’s list of jobs to do.