I already told you about the rain storm that had left a trail of devastation in our greenhouses mainly because of the poor construction an the bad quality of the material that was used to build them. So we needed to fix the roofing before the rain season will begin, otherwise everything in the greenhouses will be lost to the water…
Claudia explained how to fix everything but I was pretty sceptical about it. The woodwork was poor, most of the timbers were twisted and crooked, some of the timbers were nailed together, everywhere there were nails jutting out of the timber, almost no timber or pole was level with any other, the tarpaulins one can buy here are just a piece of weak plastic crap material that will be wore down very soon because of the local weather conditions and also because the material simply breaks easily, one can even push a finger through it… So I was not happy with having to fix that crap using even more crap.
What to do… this is Africa… We had to fix the greenhouse before the rain would come back so I bought 5 tarpaulins in the next town, sized 4 X 6 m, that cost 45’000 Shillings each and started to fix them on the roof according to Claudia’s instructions… We started with the greenhouse in the middle which was damaged most. We used one tarpaulin lengthways to cover the roof on the sides and two crossways to cover the middle part. The side parts where easy, even though the tarpaulins were a bit too short but still long enough to cover the parts that had been ripped. At the ends we would nail a timber so the wind would not damage it but the rain could still rinse down the gutter and into the drums. The middle section was a bit tricky. We had to use two tarpaulins lengthways so one would reach from the gutter about 70 cm over the roof top. So we had to mount ropes in the loops of the tarpaulin and attach those on the timber. Then we put one on the other side and attached it in the same way. Before we could attach everything with a timber the rain came so we had to stop our work. We could then observe how the wind would inflate the tarpaulins like a yacht’s sails. So Claudia and I tried to pull the ropes a bit tighter and I even used some more ropes to distribute the forces that were working on the tarpaulins. In the end it looked a bit like a spider web and the effect was minimal as the wind was simply too strong… So we had to wait… After one hour the rain stopped but we still had to wait for the roof to dry before we could climb it to attach the timber… As it dried next morning, Charles and I put the timber up the roof. He had to climb on top of it again to nail that thing down. Unfortunately the roof construction was so bad that we had to use several pieces of timber to attach the tarpaulin, so it looks very ugly now… Anyway, we had to leave it like that. It may work for a year but it needs to be fixed again for sure…
Charles holding a timber to attach a tarpaulin
a few 4” nails will do…
Charles doing a monkey’s job, I would later also have the opportunity to doing this…
as the timbers used for the roof were completely not level we had to drive some nails
through several short pieces of wood to attach the ends of the tarpaulin…
so it looks pretty crappy now… the art of roofing…
No comments:
Post a Comment