Water, water everywhere

As we wrote the blog post a couple of days ago, we had been aware that there had been a little bit of rain overnight. OK, that’s maybe an understatement – there had been torrential downpours and we had been mere inches away from it striking the roof of Bertha as we slept over the cab. We had noted that the carpet in the middle of Bertha was a little damp in the morning, but it wasn’t until later that we noted the drips coming from the edge of one of the skylights. Great. Oh, and the damp in the top rear corner was even damper, and when we took off the rear window blind we found yet more rotten timber and some useless bathroom sealant that had probably worn away years ago. Time to set our master craftsman brother-in-law to work with a tarpaulin to try to keep the rear corner dry!

The rain was incessant, so we focussed on finishing the floor; cutting the polystyrene sheets to size and fitting the top layer of plywood. I’ll admit that I (Steve) had a little bit of a meltdown (to rival those of our nearly 3 year old neice!) with regards to the finish of the floor. I wanted it to be perfect, but trying to marry up old and new wood has left the new floor slightly bowed and I should have put an extra batten across, but it’s a vast improvement on what was there previously!

We also took time to check out our Paloma boiler which had been leaking water when we turned on the fresh water pump, so we unscrewed it, took it off the wall and found that our predictions were correct. There was a classic freeze split in the copper pipe. At least that should be fixable some other time with some solder and plumber’s putty.

By this time the rain had stopped and the tarpaulin which was rigged over the rear corner had kept the outside dry enough to seal. We let our brother-in-law have first dibs at using the nasty Sikaflex; he re-did some a couple of the seams that had been too high for us to reach last time, then I hopped onto the roof to remove the bathroom sealant around the skylight and replace it with the proper stuff. Whilst I was up there I also did a bit of a patch job on one of the connection points of the roof cage that was looking a little exposed.

All too soon it was time to head back to our London lives and say farewell to Bertha for another couple of months, but not until we’d had a photo taken with our Lego alter egos!