Reach for the stars

Having figured out how to make the roof work, the walls needed to be constructed out of tongue and groove and the roof covered.

I painted the roof in a rubbery paint, and Ian and Nigel started cladding while we waited for the roofing felt to arrive. I was amazed at how quickly it all came together.

Now to explain, the walls go together by slotting one board on top of the one below, which is simple. That's easy when you can reach it, measure it and just hold it up to slot it on, fixing it with a few nails, but… when you have a pointy roof, you need to cut the boards to fit with tricky angles, each one slightly different to the next. Trickier, but once you have the angles right, still nice and easy. But then you come to the back wall, where you can’t stand next to it to measure, nor can you easily reach from inside.  

This is the point that Nigel had to go home (he’s a canny one that Nigel :-) ) so I offered to help Ian. We did OK measuring the longer straight boards by feeding them along the fence, and marking them, then with one of us inside, and one outside, we could slot them on, hammering in the nails from the edge. 

Then came the pointy bit. Once we got here, it was too tall to reach from the inside and we struggled to reach from the outside, so ever the optimist I said, I think I can fit in the gap, so I could hold and nail them… Oh, how wrong I was. This is the gap…. 

I managed to wiggle myself in, bending to get under the counterweight of the roof. So there I was, sideways in, one raised arm and a leg in the gap, with half my body wedged in, but on the floor. How do you stand up when you can’t lean forward, can’t grip hold of anything and are firmly wedged? The answer is you can’t, but nor could I wiggle out! Ian tried reaching me from the inside, but it was my dodgy arm that was raised, so pulling hard really wasn’t a good idea, and he could only just reach my fingertips! He tried pulling from the side, but nope, that wasn’t working. By now I was laughing so hard I had no strength at all, and Ian was getting worried. Can you imagine the response when you ring the fire brigade to ask if they can extract your wife from the gap between the fence and the observatory you are building?

I’m not sure how, but eventually we both stopped laughing, had a rest ( a slightly uncomfortable one for me as by this time my legs were numb), and Ian managed to free me, with one big pull!

Having decided I didn't fit in the gap, Ian found a way to complete the task. I have no idea how, as I was reeling from my squishing.

Once the roof felt arrived we nailed that on, clad the inside, oiled it all to preserve the wood, and fitted the telescope.

Fitting the telescope actually involved a lot of measuring, screwing, taking things apart, electrics and fiddliness, so in fact took hours, but it went in and fitted (phew).

The final job was to Polar Align the scope, which needed a clear night, so after a bit of a break due to dodgy weather, and it being far too cold for us to contemplate spending hours in the garden late at night, we did just that using the Pole star as our reference.

Here it is, watching the night sky, bringing a whole new word into view.