shed – Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3)

Paddy O’Shed

Or, rather, shed patio. One of the two major summer garden projects got started the weekend after Debra flew home and continued until it didn’t anymore: a leisurely 6 weeks compared to similar construction jobs we’ve tackled so far.

We started by levelling the playing field / excavating the bed of the patio. THAT’s what was going on under the sheet…the first bit of grading required breaking up the turf before seeking the flat earth we suspected existed there, if only the high spots would move into the low ones.

Not worried about the permanence of the sub-slab, I used a bunch of the pavers already removed from other bits of the property to rough-out the now-nearly-level area and to act as filler so I needn’t, eventually, use so much concrete.

Quarry tiles removed from the house back when we started the dining room refurbs were spread out to facilitate cleaning. The nicest of these were used for the top of the deck while the next best ones were set aside to make the front garden look nice (smaller big project this summer). There was a bit of remaining substrate from 116 years ago that we spent a morning removing, leaving behind that debris and a checker board array of stressed grass.

With gravel levelled, we mixed and poured a self levelling cement over and through then reseated the pavers over this.

And, put down a screed over that:

This screed served as the tile adhesive for the quarry tiles.

Finally (about 2 months later due to rain and general malaise), we mounted a liner around the border. The entire area is in the shade by 2pm in the longest days of summer so we don’t need a brolly to enjoy the garden. Unfortunately, we have already started replacing our fence with an extension of the wall (hence the debris).

Week 36 Recap: Limbo? Chaos? Order? It’s ‘Bun in the Bardo’

The research groups that use The Facility were gone from Tuesday for the British Mass Spec Society conference. I had an engineer booked for two days and a master’s student who wanted to use an instrument on Thursday so I camped in the abandoned office all week. Quiet. I could get used to this.

We continued shifting things into the new shed on the Home Front and got some containers to help organise things. Likewise, with all the stuff from the erstwhile pantry under the stairs now safely stored in the shed we were able to start moving the durable-but-infrequently-used kitchen items into it. With this done, I’ll be attacking the kitchen in due course on the final big project before next year’s garden transformation.

Winter is coming and we are 6 weeks from the annoying clock change which will plunge us into post-work darkness for the next 6 months. With less carpentry, masonry, and plumbing to do than at any time in the last two years, we decided to join a gym with the first visit on Sunday.

Fines and fees: £52. Mileage: 12 (feel guilty about not taking advantage of the good weather and absence of colleagues to try and get back my stride, but…hey, ho).

Garden is still a wreck but we have a clear path from everything to everything, at last.

New Shed Part 6: Getting Dressed

Continuing on from the last missive…

The shingles went up one evening after work late last week but with the earlier sunsets (as Summer dies on the table before us) trimming and activation of the bitumen sticky-stuff had to wait a few days.

Jackie got started stripping the new front door which used to be the door to our stairwell in the main house.

We got the walls cladded and the back covered with a temporary door while we await delivery of the patio doors that will free up the sliding glass doors we intend to install at the back.

Progress is slow. We still await the polycarbonate window and there is lots of trim and more coats of paint to do to tart this up but it is functioning as a work shed.

New Shed Part 5: To the Heights

The past weekend plus Monday (for me) was supposed to be devoted to nearly finishing the shed. The shed framing was rushed to completion Friday night. We’ve left a five foot wide opening at the back so we can shift out current hideous patio doors when their replacements arrive. The lintel/frame above that is the weakest structural feature and it supported my weight plus that of a 28 ounce hammer and a can of Red Stripe.

A soaking rain set in Saturday morning and we had to put in two days worth of work on Sunday with Jackie painting the first batch of the plywood cladding while I fashioned and installed the roof trusses — single pitch, 1:4 slope, 30cm eaves in front with another 15cm overhang at the back.

Missed the delivery of a polycarbonate sheet — for the front window — Friday and rescheduled it for Monday when I was off on annual leave. But, you can’t hear the doorbell out at the shed so had to do what I could in 4-5 minute bursts then dash back to the front of the house to check for the appearance of the TNT/FedEx driver (the tracking app is absolute shit).

Following that regimen, it took from 8am till lunchtime to put a first coat of paint on the remaining wall plywood and to fix the two, full sheets of 3/4 inch ply to the roof (having already installed two full sheets of 1/2 inch stuff to the north wall and one of the two on the south wall Sunday night just before dark).

The right roof panel fixed in place, the left merely aligned while I commenced cooking lunch.

We’re almost finished with the roof and merely need a few hours to cover the tarpaper/underlay with the shingles. The delivery never arrived (Fuck FedEx and TNT for ‘phoning it in’ while the merger completes — although both were half-assed before). Had I been able to focus on the project, the walls would be completed by now.

It is cool on the roof, though.

New Shed Part 4: From Discworld to 3D

On the most recent shed report, the Earth was still flat. Friday, the first wall frame went up in the two hours between arriving home from work and sunset. The next day was rainy and we both felt ill and progress would have to be more incremental.

But, all the boards for the north wall were already cut so, when we returned to the tasks on Sunday we quickly raised the facing wall and moved on.

The west wall will incorporate the sliding door which is currently on our patio (once its replacement arrives). This required some load bearing structures:

We tidied up after a scant 3 hours effort. The fourth wall is the most complicated so, for now, the World is a stage:

New Shed Part 3: From Foundation to Floor

The slab, which needed at least 7, cured for 8 days before I was able to get back to it, post-vacation. With a couple hours of daylight remaining Friday after work, I set to installing the floor.

It is a 2×4 frame covered with 3/4 inch plywood (2 full sheets and another ripped in half lengthwise. The four joists over the concrete were bolted to the slab while the framework on the brick faces were pulled tight because the concrete is 1-2mm lower than the top of the bricks. I realise now that I should have put a layer of sealer on interface of these outer boards and the slab, but I’ll take care of that with a caulk of some sort in the final edit.

As the sun set, I tried out the loungy chair at the site for the first time since initial grading. A large bourbon, our robin (the male of the pair), and an episode of Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Series 1!) accompanied me. It is supposed to rain for much of the next two days so the new floor was covered in a tarp before going in for the night.

New Shed Part 2: The Slab

The 60cm square pavers that made up the foundation of the old shed were layed on paving sand but it doesn’t seem that any effort was put into levelling the ground. We pulled them all up and started putting that right, but between those two line items we took a break to barbecue some vegetables and souvlaki and to enjoy the shade on the once-and-future shed site.

Yeah, the entire garden is in disarray. Next to my feet you might be able to make out the orange grade line we used as a datum to get to mostly level. You can also see some of the shitty pointing done to the wall at the railway cut (and which I also addressed in my week off from the labs):

Excavated and much closer to planar by the following weekend, the site was covered with an impermeable plastic sheet and loosely refilled with the pavers leaving space between for the poured concrete to fill and make the entire pier a continuous pier. Scrap boards were held in place with tent pegs at the borders and these lined with bricks to make the boundaries look like a traditional foundation while having the advantages of the slab. The framing of the floor joists will be bolted to the concrete thus pulling the outer frame tight against a waterproofing layer between wood and brick.

The area is 8 feet by 10 feet (2.4 m x 3 m) and 4 inches (100 mm) deep but while we ordered in enough cement and aggregate fixings for the entire slab, I went cheap by lining the frames with old concrete pavers (thus saving half the materials for the patio and other projects). A last check that all was level and plumb before firing up the mixer (per fill, I put a whole bag of gravel, eyeballed about 70% of a bag of sand, and about 30% of a bag of cement for about a 3.5:2.5:1 gravel:sand:cement ratio).

The form took just under three hours of manic mix/pour/spread (with all three happening continuously) to fill and screed. Any larger footprint and I would have broken it into two or more pours (and put in expansion devices) but, even then, it would have helped to have an assistant.

Altogether, this is just shy of 2 tonnes of shed anchoring material. I feel every ounce of it in my back and shoulders. Crossfit can suck a bag of dicks.

6 more days curing and we can build on top of this. Hooray.

New Shed Part 1: The Takedown

The old shed — small, rotting away — was more porous even than when we first moved in. We had other things on our plate but the time to rebuild is nigh. Above, the state of devastation in the garden as the old shed was methodically dismantle over the coarse of about 30 minutes.

A year ago last Sunday, this was the state of our doors

The plan is to follow the old wall at the railroad cut. The current box is 6 feet by 5 feet and crammed full, a good thing since the packed contents are probably the only thing holding it up.

Last summer, we started cleaning up some of the doors from the house refurb to use on the shed. Covered in lead paint, we had to strip these outside and with shitloads of PPE involved. I burned out an old heat gun working on one of these.

Shed roof is now the lean-to roof and everything in the shed had to be relocated

We also took down a brick shed at the back of the house, now temporarily replaced by a makeshift lean-to for temporary storage of the current shed’s contents. This is next to “The Pile,” our longstanding, building-rubbish collection awaiting the next skip (link is to LAST year’s one). Now that the old shed is down, we have enough shit around to justify ordering another skip and to clean up the garden a bit more.

Week 28 Recap: When Did Simple Desire Become A Sin?

There is an overwhelming longing to finish the house refurb as we start our 21st month in The Compound. We feel like this is normal but we have never set — nor abided by — the standards of others. The arbiters of taste and morality be damned.

We continue to work on indoor details because the pile, seen behind the rising cladding (made from 115 year old skirting boards formerly resident in the pile), precludes our enjoyment of the garden. In the coming four weeks our summer project will be to shift the old shed’s contents to this temporary structure (made entirely from scrap, mind you), tear down the old shed, add it to Skip #3 at the end of the month, and pour a slab onto which we will build the new, larger shed and a wee patio.

This is less ostentatious than mildly ambitious. The garden is small but the aerial Google map of this buurt was recently updated with our stuff in the garden blurrily visible. The brick shed on the back of the house (torn down June 2020) is still attached to the house in this shot and our blue patio table is visible with the shadow of the folded parasol on it. A larger shadow on the lawn is cast by the folded down clothesline and tells me that the date is late spring and the time is mid-to-late morning (someone was home as the upstairs bathroom window is open):

We may have missed our window of Summer opportunity, though. The first days exceeding 25 degrees C (77 F) were this week and that may be what passes for the heat wave this year. We are natives of the sultry, humid lands of the subtropical southeastern US; moderation in all things is an unfair demand in this hellishly temperate climate.

The foot injury seems to have eased and I’ve managed to run enough to sweat a few times. Fines and fees: £72.67

Shed 1 Removal

At the top of this post, the photo from 4 months before we moved in shows the door to the right which is part of a storage alcove added at some point to the house. Sturdy but too small to be of any real use, it wasn’t small enough not to eat up valuable garden area nor was the wooden shed (which will be replaced by next spring) rickety enough to justify keeping this brick one. We’ve been meaning to tackle this and, with the pile of other refurb debris almost high enough to justify ordering a skip, the time seemed right.

The rains started as I finished removing the roof. There was still some carpeting to go to the next skip in there so I covered it with the old door.

The Pile is a combination of old plaster wall, porcelain tiles with the levelling scree that was on the original quarry tiles, plumbing (some of which needs to get reclaimed/sold on), doors, and scrap lumber. The wall was brick covered in cement render and soon started coming down from the top.

We’re both knackered. The drill hammer weighs 11.5 kg and a lot of the work was at head level and above. For her part, Jackie spent the hours retrieving, sorting, and stacking bricks so there would be room to reach ground level as the rubble rose around me.

In for a penny, I knew I would be aching the next morning and decided to use up the last of my strength and energy removing the cement render from the original partition wall between us and the neighbours. Worst case — that the original was hopelessly damaged by this scree — was not realised and now we feel confident we can recover the original outer brick work wrapping around the back part of the house … on another day, mind you.