This evening, Bocoup is flying me to Santa Monica to kick off a project with a new client. While planning for this, I asked our office manager to book the flight as late as possible this Sunday—I wanted to take full advantage of the sunny weekend. The request was well worth it because we got a ton done yesterday and today. The big news from this afternoon is that the roof on the workshop is finally water-tight!

I should have tar papered it immediately after finishing the decking last summer, but I was too cheap to spend money on something that would ultimately be unnecessary. (At some unknown date in the future, we're going waterproof it with platon as an underlayment for a sod roof.)

Instead, we tried and continuously failed to tarp it properly. We had an unusually windy fall and winter, and spent way too much time fighting to keep the flimsy thing in place. Then, while we were out of town for a month, it blew off. The roof decking was exposed to the elements pretty much the whole winter. I swear, trying to keep things dry might be the hardest part of starting a homestead.

Thankfully, the roof decking made it until today relatively unscathed, and the tar papering process was easy. In fact, I know we spent at least twice the time it took to cover properly as we did messing around with tarps (and at least ten times worrying about the state of the roof and asking ourselves why we even bother trying to keep anything dry).

I still haven't figured out how I'm going to close the ridge (see this post), so I just put a layer of paper right over the gap at the peak. Fingers crossed it holds up!