Jeff and I spent a chunk of the weekend working on constructing our shed. I haven’t blogged about our progress for a while. Since my last update, we’ve constructed the four walls:
Saturday
Yesterday we spent about 2 and a half painful hours in B&Q. Most of that time was spent in the insulation aisle trying to decide which insulation offered us the most efficient translation of money into thermal resistance. (Yes! Our shed will be insulated :-) This took ages because all the products provide different statistics on how good they are at insulating. The means to understand or convert between these values were not available to us. We asked a B&Q employee, but he was more interested in telling us that there was some insulation available for half-price.
We eventually resolved the issue after Jeff found the datasheet for one of the products with his iPhone, allowing us to compare it against another.
Saturday then dissolved into other non-shed related things.
Sunday
We’d also bought some other bits and pieces at B&Q, including some OSB and roofing felt. As soon as we started moving tools outside, it started raining. Of course by the time we’d finished repairing and putting up the awning, it had stopped raining.
We had to leave the protection offered by our awning to assemble the roof frame further down the garden. Five minutes after we’d started work on the patio, it was raining hard. A couple of minutes later, it was hailing. I think Joe took a video of us cursing about the rain from my window.
The hail stopped after a few more minutes and we spent the next couple of hours fitting the studwork into the frame. Then we began adding the OSB that will form the top of the roof:
It then got dark. We went through the familiar rigmarole of getting a light out and deploying the extension lead from the house. More rain. Wet sawdust is not nice! Our roof now has the outer layer of OSB on it. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this, as we were trying to get out of the rain.
Hopefully we’ll get the roof up in our next episode of construction. After that it’s the exterior cladding. It’ll be really good once that’s on, as it’ll feel like we’re really in a shed!
Jeff and I spent yesterday doing more work on our shed. We’ve done a fair amount of work since the last time I blogged about it. We’ve dug the holes for the four corner posts, which was a lot of work because of the tree root density. We’ve concreted down the seven slabs on which the floor’s crossbeams lie, which was an unforgiving slog. Then we got onto the fun part: the carpentry. We’ve cut all of the joints in the floor’s crossbeams and the corner posts.
So we now have a three-dimensional structure:
We can’t seem to get away from continuously visiting a DIY store to get bits and pieces. This weekend it was the tarpaulin in the above picture. Last weekend it was the tarpaulin for our shelter that we’ve constructed down the side of the house that allows us to perform carpentry in the rain:
The project’s moving along well. Hopefully we’ll have a shed after a couple more months.
Our house used to have a shed that looked like this:
Jeff and I decided that we needed to upgrade the shed. So we removed the old shed, which we think may have been an Anderson shelter — although it seems to differ a bit from the description on wikipedia. So we chopped it up:
Then we shoved it in Jeff’s car and took it to the dump:
Next came the clearing of the area for the new shed. There was a lot of bits of dead tree and stuff in this area, which we burnt. We wanted to burn these really quickly as we had a lot of stuff to get through — so we raised the fire, in the shopping trolley that we found under a tree in the garden, in order to give it more ventilation. Faye generously leant us her hairdryer, which was then attached to some tubing that we pointed into middle of the fire. This made the fire insanely hot:
(That’s a marshmallow on a stick). Jeff melted some aluminium in the middle of the fire, and then managed to get some steel red hot in it (see the flickr pics). It’s surprising what you can do with a hair dryer and some wood!
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