Sikaflexing The Storms Away

In a turn of events that can only be described as a very happy accident, Dan finally got to doing an overdue Big House-waterproofing job that has been top of the to-do list the day before this storm hit:

Yup, the storm was every bit as powerful as it looked here.

As you may know or notice, Big House's exterior is unfortunately clad in aluminium not timber (why, people of the 70s, why...)

Aluminium deteriorates quickly, it's completely inflexible and - when you replace windows as we're doing - you pretty much have to replace the whole exterior of your home's cladding too. 

Take THAT, landfill. 

We aren't replacing the cladding just yet, so for now the exterior of our house continues to take on a patchy, ramshackle, hillbilly-compound look that increasingly bemuses our curious neighbours. They're a forgiving lot, luckily.

This is the kitchen end of Big House at the moment.

Classy, no? I think the wonky hills hoist really completes the look. 

Until we can pull all the cladding off and replace it with weatherboards, we just patch and repair as best we can. 

We'd had some water coming in the sides of the new timber windows, Dan's dodgy temporary cladding patches above clearly weren't holding up. So, on Sunday, he got up there on the trestles and filled in the gaps down the side of the windows with Sikaflex-PRO.

He snapped these photos while he was up there. They show what a mess the exterior is at the moment. 

Here, you can see the crappy aluminium cladding and the VJ lining of the pantry on the other side. 

This product was actually donated to us about six months ago by Sika to block the gaps in the Little House floors. 

The colour (Redwood) was picked to match those floors, but the job kept getting put off because all our renovating time really goes into the Big House (and has to, if we ever want to move in there again).

After the big storm came through on Monday, I went and did a pretty thorough check of every last nook and cranny for water entry points.

The entire house, verandahs and all was BONE DRY. No water in the kitchen, pantry or study.

So for now, at least, we can continue forging ahead on the inside, happy in the knowledge our externally-ugly duckling is finally watertight.

The Sikaflex-PRO featured here was donated by the good people at Sika Australia.