Day 70 - plastic wrapped again

We finished putting in the floor joists into the main section of the house, leaving only the area around the octagon and a lot of the blocking to be done later.


We then put up two temporary frames along the length of the houses and stretched a large sheet of polytunnel plastic over the top of the houses.

This is a fair amount of work and a considerable expense, but it will help to keep the structure dry and more importantly the insulated ground floor slab. The plastic will stay for the few weeks that it will take to build the remainder of the wall frames, and then we will take it off during a spell of dry(ish) weather, put up the next set of frames and if necessary put it up again.

Once the houses were covered, we pulled up the plastic that had been covering the ground floor slab for the past week to find that over 80% of the surface had got wet. We don't think that much or any of the water soaked into the insulation below, though it would have if we hadn't done anything.
The black builders plastic that we pulled from the floor was reused to cover the walls that the clear plastic sheet didn't reach.

It doesn't look great, but the wooden structure and floor will dry out and remain dry for the next few weeks allowing us to continue to work on the blocking and framing out of the wind and rain.
Neither of us like using so much plastic, but at least with the polytunnel plastic, it will be reused for many years in the gardens and allotments!