Today, in the afternoon, we installed the Sun Shield tarpaulin up over the long corridor in our temporary living quarters . It seems to be very early this year, but we were suffering in the collected heat of the sun pouring into our corridor!

But the first job was to repair the Sun Shield tarpaulin because the stitching we did last year had torn apart. Well actually, the thread had frayed and came apart due to excess loading when we had high winds.

So this time, we decided to try to glue the two pieces of the tarpaulin (2.5 metres wide by 5 metres long) using contact glue. We first tested this method on an spare bit of the similar tarpaulin and it seemed to be just fine, in fact, very strong indeed! Of course, we don’t know whether the glue joint will survive in the sunshine but we will give it a try.

So we proceeded to glue the two sections together (with a 150mm – 6inch – overlap) on top of our garage, on its flat roof where we had plenty of room, plus also we didn’t have to disconnect the tarpaulin from the first anchorage point.

But we discovered that when we pulled out the new combined piece, it wouldn’t reach the far end! Of course not, we nicked 6inches didn’t we! But fortunately, we had wrapped some excess amount of the material around the fixing batten so we undid the first anchorage point after all, unwrapped it one half turn to give us the extra back again and redid everything back.

We now have a Sun Shield and aaah h.. it is nice and cool! Sigh!

To finish off being on the roof of our temporary living quarters, we inspected the surface and did some very minor repairs in the felt and also took notice that we will have to do a major roof job soon, perhaps later on in the Summer, and lay some new strips of roofing felt as the current layer is definitely shrinking and pulling itself away from the glue line. It is after all 8 years, or even 10 years since we put on the felt so it has done very well!!

By Shaun

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