Today has been a bit frustrating and nicely encapsulates how the year as a whole has gone so far.
I'm in the process of cladding the west gable of the house itself as board on board. This is the lower bit which will be in the porch/greenhouse.
The brown fence paint is just to preserve it for the time being, until I get to build the porch/greenhouse. Eventually it'll be white.
Today's job was to measure, cut and paint the ends of the 9 bottom boards to go to the south (right) of the front door as far as the purlin. I'd used my laser level on Saturday evening to bring a vertical down from the top to the batten across the bottom and had measured out the positions of the boards across the bottom so it was just a matter of measuring across the top to find the positions of the rightmost boards and finding their heights.
It was forecast to start raining about midday so I went out a little earlier than I normally do with the idea of getting the marking and measuring done outside then doing the cutting and painting inside the house.
I got the positions of all the boards established and the heights of the left edge of the leftmost board and the right of the rightmost board, etc, marked on a plank. There weren't immediate signs of rain clouds but I had a feeling they wouldn't be far off, I think from the the small gusts in the air, so I took the scaffold tower down and put away my more vulnerable tools (like the laser level).
I then sat down with a piece of paper to work out the heights of the intermediate edges of the planks. For the boards to the north of the front door I'd measured each plank individually but, as the top batten position with the firestop above was not too well defined the result was rather ragged. For the boards above the front door I measured the end ones and interpolated giving a much tidier result, apart from one second from left being nailed on a bit low.
I'd measured one intermediate edge to use as a check but found that things were not coming out right; there was something like a 14mm discrepancy somewhere. Big enough not to ignore but not big enough to make it obvious which number was wrong.
I contemplated putting the scaffold tower back up to re-measure but by that time there were showers starting on the coast about 20 km to the south west and out at sea to the north east. between Wick and the off-shore wind farm, so I put the scaffold tower bits, etc, away and went to Wick for a bit of shopping with the idea that the showers might have gone through by the time I was driving back.
Nope, they hadn't and looking out the window and at the radar from home things haven't improved all afternoon. So, all I've achieved today was marking out the horizontal positions of the tops and bottoms of these boards, something which took a quarter of an hour at most once the scaffold tower was up.