3rd January 2010

I've been away to my sister in Sussex for Christmas and then my brother inlaw in Yorkshire for New Year, arriving back on yesterday evening. I'd intended to have the temporary scaffolding handrail installed before Christmas but the scaffolders felt it was unsafe to work when the beams were covered in snow and ice. At this stage there were no decking boards laid except a few laid out from the back door of the clubhouse. The rest of the boards were in 2 stacks laid across the rafters, waitning to be put down.

The weather was glorious today, very sunny but very cold, so I decided that, with Margaret's help, I would lay all the decking loosely across the rafters as each board would span the entire distance from the club to the river edge beam to form a complete floor. I had agreed with the safety coordinator that we could avoid the need for a temporary subfloor if we had all the boards laid out to form a working surface, just taking up a decking board, cutting it to length and then fixing it down. With only 1 or 2 boards up at a time there was never a gap large enought to fall through into the mud or water.

So I tried to get my first board off the stack, unfortunately the stack was frozen and I thought I'd have to give up; the boards were looser where the sune had shone on the stack so I had to start at the south side of the stack. As the job progressed I had more and more space to stand on and the job got less and less risky. One of the stacks had to be moved so boards could be laid where the stack was sitting which was a bit of a blow. All together there was more than one 7.5 tonne lorroes worth of timber so I think I moved about 10-12 tonnes of oak.

I did have a climbing harness that was intended to be worn for this operation, this was insisted upon by the safety coordinator. However it was more of a hindrance and I think increased the risk of a fall as I was walking up to 10metres carrying deck boards and a rope might have snagged and thrown me off balance. I would also have had a big swing, possibly against a pile or beam, so I just gradually increased the width of my platform, by laying boards out from the stack and felt pretty comfortable once I'd got about 10 boards laid down as that gave me a platform over a metre wide.