If a bout of bad weather forces you to take a break midway through the process of renovating your house exterior, there are several steps you should take to ensure that you can easily get back on track when conditions improve.

Cover up any exposed roof trusses with heavy-duty tarpaulin

If as part of the renovation, you removed worn-out sections of your home's roof (with the intention of replacing them with new materials), some of your roof trusses which are located underneath the external roofing materials may be exposed. During a period of bad weather, this could be a problem. In this situation, you should use tarpaulin sheets to cover up the exposed trusses as quickly as possible.

The reason for this is that roof trusses make up part of a roof's internal structure, and as such, they are not designed for use in outdoor environments. Because of this, they can rapidly degrade if they are subjected to the moisture, wind and fluctuating temperatures that tend to occur when the weather takes a turn for the worst.

If you don't cover up your trusses as soon as you notice the weather has changed, they may, for example, swell up as a result of being saturated with rainwater and then begin to split and crack when they eventually dry out. This damage may then affect their load-bearing ability, which could, in turn, lead to your newly-renovated roof deteriorating.

Place scaffolding sheeting around the outside of the scaffolding

You don't necessarily have to dismantle the scaffolding you are using to access and renovate the exterior if bad weather occurs (and in fact, attempting to do this when it is very windy and raining heavily might actually be quite dangerous). However, you should buy some scaffolding sheeting and wrap this around the scaffolding structure. There are two reasons why you should do this.

Firstly, if you have just applied paint or render to the walls and it has not yet dried, then wrapping scaffolding sheets around the scaffolding that is attached to these walls should help to ensure that the rainwater doesn't land on them and negatively affect how they look when they eventually dry. Secondly, if you have lots of tubs of paint, brushes and other equipment on the scaffolding's platforms, putting sheets around the structure itself will ensure that these items aren't damaged by rainwater or pushed off the structure by the wind.

For more information, contact a company like Prefab Technology Pty Ltd.