It's starting to thaw.....

Despite the cold wind this morning the snow is slowly starting to melt, but that brings with it new dangers. Roof avalanches!!!! There is a crack, followed by a whoosh and a hold load of snow falls off the roof.
Here is Holly looking at where the snow she is standing on had come from, the garage roof. We then had to clear this fallen snow away from the garage doors because if it freezes we will not be able to get in.
As the snow falls off the roofs, it is revealing just how badly damaged all the gutterings on the house and garage are. On the house the guttering has buckled and then cracked with the weight of the ice from the roof, on the garage it has just buckled at the end, which Tim has been able to twist back into place. But the most damage has been done to the barns. The main barn has a broken perlin and this morning we found a snapped upright. All that was holding up the corner of the barn roof was the guttering down pipe, which now has a lovely kink in it. When we went out to check on the ewes this evening we noticed that the little barn's (aka the lambing barn) roof was leaking. The reason for this was that one of the main roof perlins had a massive crack in it and the one next to it had a rather alarming bend in it. We've put a couple of supports under the cracked perlin. This will have to be the first perlin to be repaired once the snow has gone and the decision to do some more repair work to this barn have now become the number one priority once lambing has finished. Oh hum.......