Day 1599: Back to base-ics

Now with the garden clear of the old shed, it was time to do some of the hard work. While I'm not shy from doing a little manual labour, this was a bit too much for me to take on at the moment so I decided to call in reinforcements .. in this case our neighbour and friend Scott from Scott Greenscapes. 

The task was to break up all the old concrete base and who knows what else, put in a new fence and pour the concrete base for the new cabin. This took several nights of rigorous planning at the Royal Oak to make sure we got everything correct. I've found going over plans to be much more enjoyable with a pint in my hand. 

So here is the starting place .. doesn't look great does it?

Maybe this time around, we'll finally find dinosaur bones or some viking hoard like the luck folks below ...

But, alas .. no. We found the remains of an old green house (with all the broken glass to go along with it, yeah), a spoon, a plastic army figure and a bit of riveted metal from a boat or plane (of course).

   

Scott also found some not so little beetle grubs under the rotting old fence. These things were both big (size of my pinky) and really gross. And like any good dad, I had to show them off to the kids.

More than enough stuff to fill up an 8 yard skip. The thing I find with projects  is that you always seem to need more time and more skip than you'd ever imagined. 

Beanbag was also there to "help out"

With everything cleared, it was now time for the fence. Most of the trees back there were dead and cleared out. There was one tree in the middle that straddled the property line. This had to be pruned slightly and the fence also trimmed around it. As 90% of the fence will be hidden from view, it probably didn't matter. But Scott did a nice, clean job regardless.

A nice finished fence. Looks great. Now to hide it with a cabin :)

It was great to watch Scott do the cement base as I've had little experience with cement myself and good to see how it's done. We originally planned to put in place paving slabs and bridge these with a timber frame but elected to go with a strip concrete base instead as it would be cleaner and stronger. 

For the cabin, all the weight would be on the edges with little down the middle so it was important to make sure this was solid. We also decided to put a strip down the middle to provide additional support to the flooring joists. 

First the frame to pour the cement was made. Gravel board was dug into the ground and made square.

After that .. cement time. Bridges were run across the channels to allow the cement to be poured from the wheel barrow. 

And the finished product looked great .. much better than what was there before.This was a lot of hard, back breaking work of which I did little more than taking pictures. Credit to Scott for the great work he did. Now we are just waiting on the cabin to arrive .... counting the days! 

Day 1596: Shedding some unwanted items

Timing is everything .. 

So the grand plan was to do our loft conversion this summer. However, of course this is not straightforward. Back before the Beast from the East, I decided to board over the loft to create some much needed storage - see here. This was a very good thing to do to make good use of the loft space. The only problem was that now that we want to build into the loft, all this extra stuff needs to be put somewhere else. And I don't want to put this in the dilapidated shed at the bottom of the garden (with all the spiders and snails and who knows what else living there).

The easiest solution would be to rent out some storage as and when required. But there isn't much of a DIY element or good blog story to that. So the option we chose was to knock down ol' ugly at the back of the garden and put up a nice new log cabin. I'm sure I can get a few good blog posts out of this....

So first things first .. bye bye old shed. This thing has had a good life but was well past its expiry date. 

Caitlin and Bean Bag helped clear out the old wood - where on earth were we going to put it all?!

My main concern was whether or not this thing was made out of asbestos .. a common building material back in the day. Without testing I wouldn't have any idea. I got a bunch of quotes but went with Clear Away Asbestos as they were local and seemed easiest to work with. And the best part, it turned out there wasn't any asbestos so the work ended up being cheaper than planned. 

Graham and team from Clear Away came in and took everything out in just a couple of hours (I happened to in Germany so thanks to Carolyn for the photo). I can't say it was any prettier than before but at least the shed was now out of the way. 

Now comes the fun part of putting a new fence in place and preparing the base for the cabin. Probably the most labour intensive part of the whole process - and one that I decided to outsource. 

As to the timing part.... Unbeknownst to me at the time, we were about to embark on a global pandemic of a scale not seen in 100 years where we'd be all told to isolate in our homes for several weeks and not go into work. What a great scenario for DIY'ing and I just happened to have a new project to keep me busy. Timing is everything.  

Stay tuned as I show in future posts how the cabin went up .. even trying my hand at a video.