The Shed I've Always Wanted Part 2

I've finished the shed - first read Part 1 (second post below) if you've not done so!

After doing the frame and the roof, I did the horizontal cladding.  It might not be the normal way, but I found it much easier to work downwards, starting by tucking the top piece of tongue and grooved cladding under the eaves.  Later on I fitted a small piece at the top between the rafters; the need for this piece is why you can't do the roof before the sides, although I did add the battens and membrane at this stage.  As the front has a higher wall plate than the other sides (to allow for the door), I did that side last, but I carefully checked continually that everything was level so that the cladding looks OK.  Doing the cladding is quite a noisy job as there are so many nails and also the structure naturally acts like a sound box; hence I took my time and tried to do it in short noisy periods spread over several days.

The roof was next.  I decided to use slate as (a) all other roofs in the vicinity are slate and (b) when I looked at the cost of modern "tiles" they were all quite expensive.  When you add in the extra cost of decent boards on the roof, the total is only a bit less than buying slates (which only need battens not boards).  There's also the other point that I like to experience doing things myself in the traditional way, and a shed is a good place to learn.

I made sure that I had everything ready before I started.  I had some membrane left from doing the extension (see this post and others at that time) so I needed slates and some ridge tiles, plus nails.  In anticipation of this task I had already acquired slating tools as my birthday present from 'Er Indoors, and the cutter was invaluable.  When I had a roof structure ready, I found that my ridge tiles were all the wrong angle and I was one short; I went back to the yard and got four swapped plus an extra, all for £10.  I also found when I had finished that I had too many tiles, like, 35 spare! This was a bit of over-supply but I'd rather do that than run out when I need two to finish.  I also had to buy some NHL5 for the mortar under the ridge tiles; fortunately the only place within 30 miles that sells this had precisely one bag when I called in on my way back with the ridge tiles.  The roof was also a noisy job, and I bet the neighbours were pleased when I finished! The last two day's work were done on Tuesdays when my immediate neighbour is out all day.

After the roof there were a lot of little jobs, plus the small question of the door, which used my last pieces of cladding - somehow I had EXACTLY the right number of 3m and 2.4m lengths without having a load of 1m bits left.  Well, there were some 60cm bits and these were used as one of the storage shelves.  Another shelf is comprised of old floorboards resting on two of the rafters from the old extension (all left lying around in the garden for three years!) .  Even better, the sturdy workbench has a horizontal frame which is the lower half of the old front door (also left in the garden), and the top is two spare pieces of our 4cm bamboo kitchen worktop (found under the stairs).  As I've said before, I like recycling things, and the garden is a lot neater now.

So, here's the finished shed, at last:

It's not practicable to take a photo that shows the shelves, but the storage ones are on the right inside, and the work bench is on the left under the window. There is a final job which is to provide mains electrical power to it...

The Shed I've Always Wanted Part 1

I've been building a shed! Not just an ordinary shed, but a shed that looks good, will be useful and should outlast me. 

I already have one shed which I bought in 2011; it arrived on the back of a small truck and I was able to assemble it myself.  It only measures 7' x 5', which is a bit small for anything other than storage.  In fact, it is so small and crowded that I can hardly get inside it.  Frankly, it's a bit cheap and cheerful, and the roof is already sagging, so when I have finished Shed #2, everything will be moved from #1 so that I can repair that one.  My intention is that it will remain a storage shed, whilst #2 will be the place where I can do things in a decent amount of space; it will also store a few things like our camping kit which is currently kept in a large metal cupboard in the garden. The cupboard needs to go, as it is kept partly dry by an ugly old green tarpaulin.

The new shed is, I admit, a bit over-engineered (I am a chartered engineer after all!). It is basically designed as though someone was going to live in it (which I am NOT going to do).  I designed my shed in my head; the only drawings were a couple of sketches when I was ordering materials, just to make sure that I didn't forget something.  I also used Excel to get the dimensions of the sloping roof etc - even I cannot do hyperbolic functions mentally! The structure is tanalized C16 4 x 2, with an insulated floor supported on 9 brick piers, plus a slate roof (because it looks right).

The house shed measures only 10' x 6', but I feel that this is as large as the available space allows.  The only space large enough is on the raised ground beside the house, just inside the back gate, so it looks larger than it actually is.  I felt that 8' x 6' was a bit small but didn't want a huge shed, so 10' x 6' was a good compromise.  This gives 60 sq ft and I worked out that two sheets of 8' x 4' plywood were 64 sq ft, so a careful bit of cutting gave me four pieces for the floor and a 2' x 2' bit left over.  The long side is the side visible from our kitchen so I wanted the ridge of the roof to go across the short length, so that a gable end is seen. The visible long side has a window (see later) and the door.

Firstly I had to make the nine brick piers to support three beams.  The holes were dug and 4" of concrete inserted, then recycled bricks were set and built up - levelling was fun but a 5ft spirit level helped.

Then I had to make sure that my joists were going to support the edges of the bits of floor plywood, so the floor has ten joists (including two edges, plus the other two edges at right angles) which are separated by a slightly irregular gap of about 10 inches.  I used one inch structural grade plywood for the floor which is probably over-designed but I did not want to risk a sagging or bouncing floor. The floor also has 75mm Kingspan (= Celotex) insulation between the joists as I didn't want it to get cold (although I haven't yet decided whether to insulate the walls; they can wait).  Then there is a bit of thin OSB ("oriented strand board") on the other side to seal it in - I made the frame first and put the OSB on top (so it was now rigid) and then turned it over, did the insulation and then fitted the plywood floor.  As well as getting the edges supported by joists, I also fitted some half inch plank where the cuts in the floor were at right angles to the joists, so that those edges are nice and rigid as well.  Oh yes, I should mention that everything was screwed not nailed - I did try to hire a nail gun but no-one seemed to have one available.  Some photos:

Having done the floor, I used it as the platform to assemble the frames for the walls: two identical rectangles for the short ends, and one larger rectangle for the long back wall.  The two ends were erected and held in place by temporary supports, then I put up the back frame and screwed it all together, with a temporary joist at head height across the front to hold the sides in place.  The roof was next - I cut both ends of ten 5x2 rafters plus a bird's mouth, and a board to fit as the ridge, with five rafters each side.  The question was  - how to erect this on my own? My solution was to screw rafters #2 and #4 to one side of the board, and rafter #3 to the other side, then lift it all up, placing the bird's mouth cuts on the top of the two end frames, and then screwing them down (having previously marked the positions). I could then screw on the other halves of rafters #2, #3 and #4, and fit a horizontal member to each pair of rafters to complete each truss.  Finally, I could fit the 5th truss at the back, then remove the temporary joist at the front to fit the front truss.

The front wall had not been built as the height of the door was higher than the temporary joist that I had fitted, due to my desire to keep the overall height down.  This could now be done and I incorporated a space for the window.  The I finished off the top of the back wall, where I put in another window.  More photos:

The two windows were recycled from an old bathroom window (from the old extension - see here) which had large lower window and an opening narrow top window; I fitted a temporary plank across the top window, cut the frame at the bottom of the top window and made a new frame for the bottom of it, thus giving me two useable windows - the larger for the front and the other for the back. Sometime I will replace the glass, but it's not a high priority!

To be continued...

Little Bits of Progress

It's really cold outside right now, so you won't be surprised at my lack of activity out there, even before it snowed.  All I can manage is an occasional quick foray to feed the birds or to bring in some more wood for the lounge fire - it seems to us that this fire is producing more heat into the room than last winter, but perhaps that's just us being older? We're still burning the trees from the front garden and the (untreated) old battens off the roof - I think that will see us into next winter fairly comfortably.  There is a nice feeling of burning fuel that actually cost us nothing as the battens would have gone to landfill if I had left them for the roofers to get rid of; the only cost of the trees was that the tree-fellers had to do a few more strokes with their chainsaw to give me the fire-friendly lengths to split.

So, I've been doing little things inside - the sort of job that normally I don't find time for as there is usually something far more important to do.  Last winter there were lots of tasks left on the rebuilt extension, but now there's no excuse.  The first thing to do was to sort the wardrobe: I built this in 2011 as a stud wall, a foot in front of the fireplace in our bedroom, the whole way across the room.  This was done so that when we moved in we had somewhere to put our clothes which was a little less dusty!  Sadly, the recycled doors sat forlornly (getting in the way) awaiting repair, repainting and fitting from then until I managed to do the repairs and repainting last autumn (only a whole year...).  However, the fitting had to wait and was eventually done in a hurry on the Saturday before Christmas 2012 (that was 17 months...) as I had some time and realized that it would make Jane smile.  They are all done now and look really good - they even make the room seem bigger as there is nothing falling out of the wardrobe!

Also before Christmas I made a new coat rack for the hall, recycling some old coat hooks which I had kept from two years previously.  The previous coat rack is still in place but hardly used as (a) it is above the radiator and seems to absorb the heat and (b) it is so high that Jane cannot hang coats onto it!  Having moved the coats, the hall now seems larger as well.

Now I've moved on to finishing the tiling in the bathroom - there was an annoying bit which was where the tiles met the window frame; this needed some decent cutting and of course I had bought a good tile cutter ages ago but still never got round to this little job...  It's done now and is awaiting grouting - that reminds me, there's also a bit left for grouting in the extension utility.

Perhaps next I will see if it is possible to fit the bath panel properly - this has also been left since we moved in, resting almost in place, due to the impossibility (it seems) of getting it to go under the lip of the bath.  Then there's the repainting of the doors on the landing; these were also done just before we moved in, and it is amazing to see how much shrinkage there has been since then - on the door panels there is a whole centimetre of dark wood showing where I had painted white.  The dampness in the house must have been much worse than I had realized.

One other external and long awaited job that was done before it snowed was that the roofers came back to fix a slipped slate which had been outstanding since about last April.  This had not been done because it was directly under the chimney and thus a roofers ladder couldn't be used, but it was too far up the roof to allow it to be done with a ladder resting at gutter level.  Hence a cherry picker was required and, to save money, this had to wait until one was hired for another job.  Hence after such a long wait I was quite surprised when they turned up in early January.  As you might expect, it took longer to position the cherry picker than to actually do the job, which was a single lead tingle to hold the slate in place.  Since the cherry picker was resting on the lawn, they needed some spreaders to stop the feet digging in, so I found some rafter ends (7" x 2") from the construction of the extension and left them to it.  When I came back, they had finished and gone, taking my bits of rafter with them!  Oh well, I suppose they weren't valuable, but they have been useful for a good number of tasks in the last year.

Reflections on the Last Two Years

Now that I have a bit more time for activities other than building work, I've been thinking about what has been acheived in the last two years and two months.  Specifically, I've been thinking about two aspects of the work, namely the things I've done which have really pleased me, and the things that I would rather had been done differently.

Under the latter heading come a few things which still bug me:

• The attitude of the Conservation Officer - this relationship seemed to have gone wrong near the start, but I still don't really know why, other than because (just possibly) the CO really IS an unhelpful person.
• The fact that Highways at the County Council told me that I could not widen the existing gateway to make a single driveway entrance for both houses as it was too close to a junction, but then (after I had made an entrance in the old wall) they allowed my new neighbour to make a new entrance even closer to the junction!
• A newly laid slate has slipped from the roof to the gutter, but the roofer has yet to come and fix it.
• The new kitchen sash window is four over four, not two over two as the rest of the windows.
• There is still no vent to the kitchen...
• Thames Water fitted an external meter in the pavement and this has been found to be a joint supply. Now we have to get an internal meter fitted, but that would have been so much easier if done before the new kitchen was fitted, as I intended.
• My new loft hatch is not quite square, because the joists were not parallel!
• The new extension is not exactly as intended - the roof is higher, the chimney lower and the plasterer gave me incorrect answers to two clear questions, with the result that the internal work I did is not perfect; one window cill has thicker render than he said, so it's almost level with the top of the lower window frame, and a plastered stud wall is thinner than the rendered blocks that it rests on.

Looking at the good side, there are lots of things which make me smile:

• The stone wall where I filled in the bottom of the old doorway
• The wall which I lime-plastered myself (the stone wall which is the join between the old house and new-build extension)
• The new 6' stone wall beside the front door, and the attached gates
• The new sash window which cost just £95 from a reclamation yard
• The front room floor where I replaced bits of joists and re-laid most of the boards plus some reclaimed ones
• The stud wardrobe frontage which I built for the master bedroom
• The wood-burning stove in the kitchen, in the alcove which I "found" by removing the old tiled fireplace
• The recently fitted secondary glazing (we are cosy, and it is quieter now)
• The limecrete/black limestone floor in the kitchen (laid by Chris, Shane and me)
• The black limestone floor in the new extension which I laid entirely by myself (on concrete...)
• The extension roof on which I laid over half the slates in just over a day on my own, much to Chris's surprise
• The casement window in the new extension which I salvaged from the old extension and did a major repair job
• The 1800+ Imperial bricks from the old extension which Jane and I salvaged and were re-used in the new extension (I only had to buy about 200 more)
• All the other little bits and pieces from the old building which I laboriously removed, kept and re-used
• Buying my own mixer, instead of hiring one
• Deciding that I would manage the entire process myself, instead of paying a builder to project manage it

Actually, the whole place makes me smile - it just feels so safe, solid and secure, just as a home should feel.

A 100th Celebration

No, I'm not that old although I do sometimes feel it.

The celebration is because the Blogger editor tells me that this my 100th post since I started this blog twenty seven months ago. Having a back-up on Word, the word count tells me that it now comprises almost 62,000 words, which is probably a whole book, I suppose.  The blog has been quite useful for myself when I have forgotten how, when or why I did some particular thing, and it has also encouraged me to take a couple of thousand pictures of the work as it progressed.  Mind you, there are still some things of which I have managed to fail to take pictures; this surprises me as I seem to have the camera close to hand most days.

Some unexpected good weather this week has allowed me to lay some more concrete near the back gate and to start finishing the low wall in the front which leads up to the new wall.  I'm still putting off the inside jobs until the weather is too bad to work outdoors at all.

Finishing the concrete at the back gate was a relief; I had already purchased a monkey tail bolt (right) - the sort with a long handle to operate it, as these are often used at the top and bottom of large doors and gates.  Since I wanted the half-inch square bolt to locate in the concrete, I had to leave that bit of concreting until after I had fitted the gate and the bolt, so that I could set the bolt in its receptacle in the ground and concrete around the receptacle (a bit of square tube, just visible in the photo); even so, the bolt needed modifying as I wanted a greater travel than any bolt I found, since I wasn't sure about how close to the ground I would get the bottom of my gate.  This modification was easy once I had found some rivets to allow me to drill out the existing and move the retaining bracket up a bit.  In the event, the gate is satisfyingly low (ref cats, comment below) and I could have moved the bracket a bit less.

I treated myself in a shop recently and bought a blacksmith-made Suffolk latch (photo left) for these gates.  You know, the sort of one where you operate a lever on one side with your thumb above the handle, and it lifts the latch inside.  I have to say, at £35 it was quite expensive compared to mass-produced stuff from W and HB, but they cannot even get close to the quality and feel of something properly made like this.  (Yes, I need to restore the paint finish...)

The gates need to be secure so there are two other horizontal bolts plus a support strut which goes to the new gate pillar; of course, when secured the Suffolk latch will not open the gates from outside, but other than some ugly padlock I could not see how I could secure and open the gates from both sides.  In fact, what I really wanted to secure the gates with was one of those bits of 4 by 2 which fits into brackets on either side - like an old fortress gate.  I would have wanted to use oak (which is obtainable) but I couldn't find any nice sturdy brackets anywhere; brackets made out of wood would be a bit too chunky for the size of these gates.  Anyway, the gates are now pretty secure and, to my delight, they keep the local cats out; one of these is a huge, insolent black moggy and another is pure white.  They seem to have used the garden as their own pathway from front to back for years, stopping for a bird meal somewhere if they got lucky.

I also want to put a strip of wood down the front edge of the right hand gate as a stop for the left hand one; I found a long strip of half inch seasoned old pine removed from somewhere, but I can't recall exactly where.  As I've said before, keeping something which "looks useful" for a year or eighteen months on the off-chance, and then finding a use for it is very satisfying as well as economic (I once used a car light bulb which I had bought 17 years previously for an earlier car!)  Strip, sand, cut to length, fill, sand, prime, undercoat, top coat and then I can fit it.  Then there's just a drip strip along the top of both gates and a quick touch up of the paint, and they will be done.

There's then just the small job of painting the left hand gate black.  This is not so easy as the paint is some incredibly hard modern stuff on which all known sandpaper seems to have no discernible effect.  I did the road side a long time ago using my sander plus a good number of sheets of aluminium oxide paper, so I guess it will be the same again, but largely by hand this time thanks to the ledges and braces.  You can see why I am leaving that task for later!

Walls and Weather

Well, I could go on about the recent weather, but you know what it's been like.  What I find really annoying is when the forecast is for weather which is a lot worse than the actual.  This can really mess up one's plans for the day, when you want to work outside, using cement or lime.  You find the day is unexpectedly sunny when frequent heavy showers are promised; yet when you check the current forecast on the BBC for your own specific local area, you find that it's still showing heavy showers.  So what will happen in the next couple of hours? Do you dare risk it?  I think that they are covering themselves with that symbol of a black cloud with raindrops and sunshine; basically they haven't a clue!

I have managed to out-guess the forecasters a couple of times.  I have started the garden wall foundation (parallel to the western wall of the house, about six feet away, holding back the higher ground) and have done the foundation and the first real bit of wall on the wall beside the front door.  There's also a new bit of concrete where the wheelie-bins will be stored.  Sadly, this is now the height of summer and I have barely started the major outside jobs that I had been "looking forward" to doing; apart from the walls and concrete leading to the patio area, there are a large number of sash windows which need refurbishment while it's warm (if/when?).

I've also done the promised run to the scrap merchant; the brass was £2/kilo (not bad...) but the ferrous stuff was down to 11 pence/kilo which was a bit disappointing considering I took 246 kilos in my car!  When he weighed it, the scale said 445 kg which almost excited me, but that weight was because it had all been put in a large (and heavy) metal stillage.  At least there is now a bit more room in the garden as I've also done a run to the council tip this week.

I mentioned (here) about the limecrete floor being laid in the church opposite; here's a photo of the finished floor.  This is just the choir vestry, where there was extensive damp, rotten floor joists and horrible smell!  The stone is Creeton Silver edged with Creeton Blue limestone (from Ancaster, I think).  Before you ask, no, I don't know why honey coloured stone is called "silver".  There's now a French drain and new soakaway being done outside in the churchyard, as well as re-pointing and leadwork.

It's all expensive but it's the necessary long-term solution to ensure the structural integrity of a Grade I listed building which will still be here long after I've gone. Once again, I'm reminded of the proverb "a stitch in time saves nine".  This is so true of old buildings - if you don't look after them properly then one day you (or your successors) will have to repair the unnecessary damage and pay out many times what you saved in skimpy maintenance.

Reclamation and Recycling

Whilst contractors were working here, I always tried to keep the place tidy.  Now, with some contractors this was impossible (see this entry, for instance, or this one), but in general I managed it. At times it almost got too much for me, especially with the way that most contractors just throw the rubbish down without thinking about it.  I used to pick up nails and screws on the scaffolding and I was delighted to supply a hundred copper nails once to keep work going when the roofer ran out!

Simply separating rubbish and scrap made a huge difference to the general tidiness, and made it much easier when I went to the scrap merchant.  These visits have made me a bit over £350, most of it from lead, but there is also a good satisfaction at everything which does not go to landfill or free to the council tip. A lot of old wood was burnt outside, and then more was used on the woodburner in the winter; a pile of old (untreated) rafters and batten still awaits a similar fate next winter, together with the remains of the trees from the front garden.

One particular thing that got recycled were the 10 litre tubs for the lime mortar and plaster we used for the plastering.  I had to get all this in tubs - we couldn't even get the 950kg pallet of 45 tubs onto the pavement so it had to be left in the road; then they all had to be moved inside by hand without delay. (I once had a much cheaper 950kg bulk bag and almost broke my back putting that into tubs just to get it inside...)  Given that I probably had 13 or 14 deliveries from Mike Wye, you can see that I had well over 500 tubs plus lids; these tubs can be quite useful, but if you're not careful you end up with dozens of tubs filled with hardcore or rubbish to be taken to the tip.  I did manage to send a couple of pallet loads (see left) back to Mike Wye for a small rebate but that really was hard work for little reward.  Consequently, when we moved in, I got a recycling bin and started putting 15 tubs and lids in each fortnight!  Long job, but we're there now.

During this project I have found a great deal of satisfaction in re-using items, and the list is now quite long.  The first thing was a bit of 3"x2" oak ceiling joist which I cut out to make the loft hatchway; within 30 minutes this had been re-used as a replacement for a section of the adjacent wall plate which had rotted (due to the prolonged roof leak).

I did numerous repairs to the structure of the house, using (as appropriate) old bricks and stone found around the place.  In particular, some of the stone which I used to fill the old kitchen doorway (under the window, photo right) was found just inside under the old kitchen floor where it had been the foundation for an internal wall.

Although I replaced the old 2.5" cast iron downpipes with 3" (to match the wider 5" gutters which I considered necessary), I was able to re-use two sections of the 2.5" for places where it didn't join to the guttering, one for the bathroom outlet (where the old piece was cracked lengthwise) and the other on the extension.  Both were wire-brushed and painted copiously with Hammerite.

The LBC said that I had to re-use the old door furniture on the new front door, but apart from the (original?) doctor's knocker, that was not feasible - the knobs were from internal doors and the 4" letter plate was far too narrow for modern use. 

The new extension has several re-used items.  Most significantly Jane and I reclaimed 1800 bricks from the demolition rubble (and only had to buy about 200 more to match), whilst the chimney is topped with a yellow pot from the original back chimney (this chimney pot spent a year acting as the kitchen rubbish bin!). The old internal ledged and braced door to the utility has been refitted at the other end of a new wall in the same position, with the original Suffolk latch fitted, and the redundant external ledged and braced door is also repaired and repainted, ready to be fitted to a pair of pintles on limestone blocks which I bought at the local reclamation yard.  This will be one of the pair of back gates; the other matching door/gate was obtained as a swap for some old glass (thanks JohnB) and is already fitted.  Also, as I have mentioned before, the casement window in the extension was a major repair which I did myself, utilizing part of the frame of the replaced front sash window, plus some old wavy glass from two broken sash windows.

Of course, we had to buy a lot of reclaimed Welsh slates for the roofs, but we did re-use what we could, although that was a pitifully small percentage.  Another reclamation yard purchase was the almost new sash window in the extension (on the left of the photo, left) which we bought for £95 including delivery - absolute bargain!

So, I'm now working on the garden walls, again using (free) stone from around the site, including the weathered stone from the front wall where the driveway now goes.  Next week I'll do another run to the scrap merchant with the last load of brass and iron, including the old Crittal door and windows.  Then, when I have also built the stone wall (using the stone from the front wall where the driveway was made), the garden might look a bit tidier.