John, I do have a Safari roof but it had to come off to get it into the garage. I bought a "marquee" on ebay intending to do the work outdoors last summer. But I found the thing was so flimsy it blew about in a gentle breeze. So I had to have a rethink and instead lined the inside of my garage with the sides of the marquee to protect the bicycles and other stuff around the edge of the garage from overspray.
I will do a more systematic series of posts on the way everything worked out, with pictures, but in summary it took me about six months after buying the SIII as a non-runner to get it back on the road and MOT'd. Then I enjoyed running it in it's rat-look for a couple of years before finally getting down to the bodywork on Boxing day, working reasonably full days for the next two weeks. I am lucky to have a good base - a galvanised chassis and a pretty good bulkhead. Otherwise the preparation time could have been much longer. The first week consisted of tearing out the rusty / mossy window channels and fixing the rust holes in the door frames and bulkhead. The second week consisted of sanding off all of the top layer of paint to get back down to the original primer (and some bare metal) and then applying two coats of primer. In all about 84 hours. For most of this time I was helped by a friend, so in all 168 man hours. Then I had to return to my day job until I managed to get back into the garage this Saturday.
I am sure winter is not a sensible time to start a project like this but I just thought I should go for it as I found it very difficult to find a time when I could get off work and find someone to give me a hand during the summer months. But on the whole I've been lucky the temperature hasn't gone tooo low. It was 12 C. on Saturday when doing the first top-coat.