BrideShedRevisited

The beginning of the week starts with sewing.  I’m making the covers for the foam cushions to go on the window seats… I get Guy sewing too.  Seems only fair – it is his shed!


We also decide to put up the shelves on the eventually-acquired brackets.  We have marked the floor where the uprights of the shed are, so we can screw straight into the wood.  Easy peasy.  We’ve bought (and cut and routed and stained) wide shelves so we can use the brackets the wide side out.  Easy peasy.  We fit all the brackets, making sure they are all vertical and horizontal with the spirit level.  Then we put a shelf on.  The bracket sticks out beyond the shelf.  BUGGER.  Obviously not as wide as we thought… we have to take all the brackets off and turn them round.  And the holes don’t fit.  BUGGER.  Perhaps we shouldn’t do jobs requiring brains after we’ve been at work all day?  Eventually we get sorted and the shelves look really nice.  And don’t fall off the wall.  We celebrate by putting two daleks on them.

Then we have the Really Good Idea of moving the little copper wall light and filling that space with a CD tower and bookshelves to Put Things On.  We like making work for ourselves.  So we buy wood and cut it to make two sides that will follow the slope of the roof, lots of little CD shelves, and 7 bookshelves.  Then, having just got the shed looking nice, we cover the floor in plastic sheeting and start glueing, screwing and woodstaining everything.    

We take a break on Friday and get ourselves clean to go to Erica’s wedding (our dormouse and bat friend).  Lovely wedding, lovely venue in Somerset, and we’ve booked to stay overnight, but eventually don’t as the chap who’s buying Guy’s house is coming back to see it with his wife, who hasn’t seen it yet.  Yes, we are still VERY excited!  Luckily when we open the door she’s standing there with a huge grin saying ‘I love it already’ and we like her immediately.  They also put a fake bed in their house to sell it… sounded even more wobbly than ours.

Then we get back down to the nitty gritty of DIY.  We start by buying serious quantities of uprights, brackets and contiboard in order to put shelves in the back room. 









And then they look so good we put shelves on the other side too…  We have a lot of shelves.  We also buy curtains (dark brown chocolate suede effect from B&Q – fab!) 



Easter Sunday is not spent being clean and going out for lunch – it’s dawn to dusk DIY again.  However, we do swap pressies.  Guy gives me badger food, olives, a CD and a DVD about badgers, and I give him a Dr Who Tardis Easter egg (great sound effects) and two lovely Burberry cushions.  Very chav, but had to be done, given the history of the floor.  He is polite enough to say he likes them.  I think I did better out of the pressie-swapping.  Later on we watch two badgers tucking into the food we’ve put out, but after they’ve gone we discover they’ve eaten the dried fruit, peanuts and apple and COMPLETELY ignored the ‘badger food’.  How ungrateful is that?  It gets eaten later… perhaps the fox enjoyed it!



On Monday we erect the CD tower and shelves, finish off the shelving in the back room, do skirting boards, put up the curtain rail, move the copper light, saw legs off a table to make a coffee table (and it even ends up with legs the same length!), put up the curtains, put the internal door back on (having cut off the bottom to allow for the floor we’ve put in) and tidy up.

We think we’ve finished!  Except the stove boys are coming back tomorrow to finish off the inside, paint the outside and repaint the flue.

We’re DONE!  We can hardly believe it.  It won’t really look furnished till Guy moves in – rug, chest of drawers, books, CDs etc.  But in the meantime we are DONE on the DIY front.  At least, we’re finished in the shed….  
Now we start on the house!

Achieved:  A fully furnished totally completed shed.  We did it!
Hours worked:  Sort of 8 all the days we weren’t working… and then curtain sewing after that.
Purchases:    Curtains, shelves (that’s a serious quantity of shelving – we have actually cleared out TWO B&Q stores), wood for carpentry.
Pressies:  I got olives, badger food, DVD and CD.  Guy got chav cushions and a noisy egg.
New skill of the week:  I can at last keep a pencil behind my ear and not know it’s there.  I’ve been trying to do this for YEARS.  Am Very Excited.
Good news of the week:      We’ve FINISHED the shed!!
Wildlife update: Badgers don’t like badger food.  Labradors say they do…
Plan for the week:    Start on the house…

The beginning part of the week is weirdly filled with woodstain… shelves, floorboards for windowseat fronts, pew ends, window seat frames… To get the right amount of stain and varnish on things, I seem to be permanently staining something either before breakfast or after work.  And my fingers end up a funny colour.  On Monday I show three people in kagoules round Guy’s house and they irritate me.  They ask millions of questions like when was it rewired and what are the floors made of and have the walls been replastered and was this once wallpapered.  I begin to get facetious.  ‘Is this wall hanging hiding damp?’  I lift it to show the perfectly blank wall and say ‘Nope’.  ‘Is this fire ever used?  It looks suspiciously new’.  I fling open the doors, point inside and say ‘Ash’.  Eventually they go.  The youngest kagoule wearer phones the next day to say the house is ’15 miles too far east’.  I refrain from pointing out ‘it’s in the same bloody place it was when you viewed it, love’.

On Friday I wake up unwell, get ready for work (as you do), drive to the office, my boss looks as me and says ‘yeugh, you look horrible, go home’, I’m feeling so unwell I’m not even offended, and I go back to bed.  I sleep most of the day, wake up to see Guy and have my supper cooked for me, then go back to sleep again.  As days go, it’s a bit of a write-off.

On Saturday we have viewings of Guy’s house booked for 11am and 1pm and Guy says he’s left the house tidy.  I’m feeling better but a bit wiped out, so we get papers and go up there to wait.  The first chap is just lovely – he’s driven 4 hours from Brighton after a friend saw the house in the paper and said it was what he wanted, and he’s super chatty… loves the house, thinks it’s perfect, takes photos and gets back in his car to drive the 4 hours back home.  The second couple are not so much fun.  They are, in a word, DULL.  They stand in the middle of each room saying nothing.  Nothing.  Not ‘ooh, it’s nice’ or even ‘yuk I can’t stand it’.  Just nothing.  I give up, leaving poor Guy to try to jolly them along.  Eventually (seems like they’re with us forever) they go.  Hope they don’t come back.  Then another lot come at 3, but they’re the complete opposite – superfast viewing, in and around in 20 minutes with a very bright kid (if you like that sort of thing) who tries to climb on the fake bed.  I can see the horror in Guy’s face… luckily it doesn’t collapse.  (The fake bed, not Guy’s face).

After all that non-shedding we’re in the mood for a bit of DIY, so we put in the frame for one of the window seats…






Add the front bits











And a seat with super cheap foam rubber and spare fabric..
Hey presto – one window seat!  
Funny pictures – the walls are brown, not blue…  Although the blue is nice.  Maybe we should repaint?



On Sunday Guy’s mum Joy comes for lunch – I drive to Monmouth to pick her up, leaving Guy behind to get lunch ready.  Damned Fine Plan.  When we get back, my mum arrives to say hi, I go out to the shed to light the fire and then Guy comes in, all of a tizz.  The first (chatty) viewer from yesterday has made an offer - £10k under the asking price.  Close, but not close enough.  We think about it, all have coffee sitting in the shed and then I phone him back to say ‘not close enough’.  We leave it with him and start lunch… he phones again and agrees to come up to what we wanted.  OHMIGOD!  We’ve sold Guy’s house!  On the market for precisely 9 days.  CRIKEY!  And he’s already sold, wants to move in at the end of April.  OHMIGOD!  That gives us about 7 weeks max to (a) finish the shed (b) clear Guy’s house (c) clear my house (d) do the renovations we wanted and (e) move Guy in.  We celebrate with a bottle of wine (as you do) and then can’t think straight… OHMIGOD!

Guy drives Joy home (via his house to admire it in its clean and tidy state) and I take the cats and Blunkett for a walk in the woods.  It’s a bit like ‘The Incredible Journey’ except that was two dogs and one cat and no humans.  And probably one of the cats wasn’t muttering ‘does that bloody dog have to be here’ all the way.  (BB).  He loves her really…

Then we’re still twitchy, so we finish the other window seat…  OHMIGOD!

Achieved:     We have two window seats and we’ve sold Guy’s house.  Aaaaarrrrggggghhhh!
Hours worked:    More than we care to think about staining stuff, quite a few showing prospective buyers round Guy’s house, just a couple making window seats.
Purchases:   Nope, can’t think of anything.  A cheap week…
Sales:    A HOUSE!
Wildlife update:  The fox visited again this week – he is so beautiful.  Izzy thought she would chase him, so she sat out on the patio whilst he was eating, wiggling her backside and looking ready to pounce.  I don’t know why I was watching really… if she had pounced she might have come to a very sticky end.
Plan:    Help!  What to do first?  Finish shed?  Start on house?  Both?  Eek!!!

I have a day off on Tuesday to meet the energy assessor at Guy’s house to get the energy efficiency certificate bit of the HIP we need to sell the house.  He turns up late, stays half the time he says he will, doesn’t look in the lofts and shoves off again.  He says we’ll get a rubbish rating as its an old house but that it doesn’t matter as nobody ever reads the reports.  I say that must be a shame for you and he launches into a lengthy lecture on just how successful he is and how busy he is.  Odd chap.  I go to B&Q to buy pots for planters and then head for IKEA to get the shelf supports that they didn’t have the last time we went.  We had checked their ‘on-line stockcheck’ thing and it had said ‘in stock’.  Which, as they did have one bracket, was technically correct, if useless.  This time I am wiser.  I phone IKEA and speak to A Real Person who says that yes, they are in stock and that there are 57 of them.  Hooray!  I drive down in great anticipation.  Big mistake.  When I arrive at IKEA there are blue polo-shirted Co-Workers (never call them ‘staff’) on the roundabout outside the car park waving people past.  Er, why?  Everyone, naturally, slows down to talk to them, and the co-workers look a little weary of speaking through car windows.  I slow down to ask them what’s happening, and am told that there has been a fire and that the store is closed.  Indefinitely.  For the day.  (Which, incidentally, are two different things… indefinitely being considerably longer than ‘for the day’, but never mind).  The damned place is SHUT.  BUGGER.  There is nothing else to do, so I drive home via the cake decorating shop (blocks of black icing for tyres) and B&Q for a doormat which I didn’t get in B&Q earlier because I could get one in IKEA.  Which I could have if it had been open…  Back to Guy’s for planting the last few tubs and arranging the doormat, then back to mine to finish what I can on the electrics.  And woodstain something or other…

Wednesday and Thursday are entirely taken up with cake making – it’s a limousine cake for an 8 year old’s birthday party, and it works fine.  






On Friday we have both taken another day off for the stove boys to come back and finish the inside, paint the pipe outside, disguise the orange rubber bath mat and sort out the paint mess.  The boss turns up, the lads don’t – he says they are ‘busy elsewhere’.  He also says that if we’d wanted a black pipe we should have asked for a powder coated precoloured machine manufactured pipe in any one of 16 agreed European colours.  If we’d bloody known we could have had a powder coated precoloured machine manufactured pipe in any one of 16 agreed European colours I expect we would have asked for it, but as it wasn’t mentioned, we didn’t.  He doesn’t seem to have heard of the old adage ‘the customer is always right’ and basically blames us for making his boys paint it black when that’s not really their job.  As we have watched them paint stove flues black in both our houses before now, we think this is A Bit Rich.  He will bring his painting expert (that’s a stove fitter who used to be a decorator) back with him to sort it all out.  In three weeks time.  Hey ho.

After his visit we head to IKEA again.  This time we’ve phoned them to find out whether (a) the shelf brackets are in stock, (b) in stock by how many and (c) whether the store is on fire or not.  They now have 55 brackets (2 sold since Tuesday, there should be some left by the time we get there) and no, it’s not on fire.  We head off hopefully.  It’s open!!  We have a celebratory cheap lunch in the canteen and then go and find our shelf brackets.  We also buy curtain hooks and rings.  It is a very dull big yellow shopping bag…  Then we go to several fabric supermarkets to look at fabrics for the window seats and the curtains.  We’re thinking ‘brown and funky’ and don’t find anything even remotely suitable.  We do, however, buy an enormous sheet of bargain foam rubber to make the window seat pads.  It’s too big and too thin, but it was a BARGAIN.  If we cut it and stick it in layers it’ll be fine.  Probably.

We get home to find the ‘FOR SALE’ sign for Guy’s house has arrived.  It’s huge, and we get to colour in our phone number ourselves… Very clever design.  One teensy snag, though.  It says ‘PRIVATE LET’ not ‘PRIVATE SALE’.  Oops.  We phone them up and they say they’ll send a new one pronto, but it might take a week.  We gloss over ‘LET’ – literally, using white gloss paint.  Now it just says ‘PRIVATE’, but who cares?  At least it shows people the house is for sale.  Or for ‘Private’, whatever that might mean.

On Saturday a couple come to view Guy’s house – so we whiz round with the hoover and tidy stuff away into drawers – Guy will be finding stuff in odd places for WEEKS!  They love the house, but have only just put theirs on the market, so are in no position to buy.  Frustrating.  We go home to start on the window seats, but the first job is wood cutting, and it is pouring with rain, so we wait.  And we wait.  And we wait.

It never really stops, so we stick bits of wood into the pew ends instead…  We call it marquetry.  A carpenter would probably call it ‘amateurish filling’.  The weird soggy looking bit (which will be inside the window seat) is a test of woodstain to see if it looks right.  We think it will be fine…





Sunday is better and after a visit to the farmer’s market and a coffee in a trendy café with Karen, we crack on with woodworking stuff.  

We cut lots of bits of wood to size and glue them together to make the window seat frames, cut some maple tongue and groove to size for the seat fronts, cut MDF for the seat, er, seats, and sand down our ‘marquetry’ on the pew ends.  



We also cut and rout the shelves which will go on the brackets we eventually bought.







Achieved:  We’ve done lots of woody things and we made a nice limousine cake.
Hours worked:  Not that many up until Saturday, then we felt like we were slacking, so we did lots on Sunday.
Purchases:    Shelf brackets!  6 of them.  We checked, re-checked and checked again that we had 6.
Companies not to employ:  The cleaners we had to do Guy’s house.  We’re still finding all the bits they didn’t do.  Can’t name names, obviously, as that would be libellous, but think famous film by Stanley Kubrick involving a large citrus fruit going tick-tock…
Plan for the week:    Window seat frames need screwing together, then putting in place, stain maple for seat fronts, stain pew ends for seat ends, stain shelves for, well, shelves.  Do battle with large sheet of foam rubber to make seats.
Wildlife update:  The squirrels are very bouncy - obviously Spring is in the air! And our favourite badger is called PaintPot because he has a white tip to his tail... and he truly LOVES apples.
Hope for the week:  That the beech tree doesn't come down in the promised storms and turn the shed into matchsticks.
Guy’s house sale progress:  We’ve had an encouraging amount of enquiries, and one viewing already, with another one booked for Monday.  Keep your fingers crossed! 

The week starts well with the builders merchants delivering lots of bits of wood for the architrave and skirting while we’re at work.  We get home and start measuring.  We measure how long the architrave needs to be, add on the width of the architrave, measure, cut and put in place.  How easy is that?  Except when we put it in place it is two feet too long.  TWO FEET!!!  Obviously something has gone wrong in the measuring/adding up bit.  We decide we’ll just plonk the wood in place and mark it with a pencil, and then try and figure out the angles.  Luckily we do have a mitre saw otherwise it would be never-ending.  Finally we get the hang of it, and soon we’ve got the door pieces cut to fit.  Then we start on the windows, and I cut the mitres totally the wrong way, so in the end we don’t have enough wood.  Bugger.  Never mind, most of it’s done!  We label all the bits on the back (LL for Left window, Left side, RB for Right window, Bottom, etc) and we label one bit of skirting BF (Back Fridge).  We know what we mean.  Because we were so crap at measuring and cutting, we don’t get it all finished, and do the last few bits on Tuesday.

Then we lay everything on the floor and paint or stain it – the back room is going to have woodwash, and the front room woodstain.  

On Wednesday we do more woodstaining, and decide that it would be sensible not to try and fit them in place till Friday, when we have a day off.

And it’s easy!  We glue and pin everything, and soon our windows look like proper windows.  Hooray!

On Saturday Wyn the Wire and Mrs Wyn arrive to do more electrics… Wyn shows me how to wire a socket, and I wire sockets.  Guy is doing the outside catenary wire – a wire stretching from the apex of the new cabin to the apex of the pool cabin from which we will hang the cable, taking power from the pool cabin to the new cabin.  Wyn does the fixing at each end, and I wire a light switch.  There is far more to do than we had envisaged, but we do get the sockets working by the end of the day.  We have POWER!  And light!  (If we plug a light in to a socket).  HOORAY!  The lights and heaters will be connected another day…

On Sunday we have a total day non-shedding.  Which means we are at Guy’s house tarting it up – it goes on the market this week and we are, naturally, expecting a flood of viewings next weekend.  We paint the newly plastered wall, pressure clean the slabs outside, make wigwams for the veggie garden, paint the wall again, throw unwanted bits and pieces into a bin liner, shove wanted bits into my car and rebuild the fake bed in the spare bedroom.  Phew.

On Monday we have another day off work (this could be habit forming) and the stove is installed in the shed!  It’s almost snowing, and it is VERY cold, so the stove is arriving just in time to keep us nice and toasty while we’re working in there… The flue was originally going to go up a bit, then right a bit, then up through the ceiling, but the boys decide it would be better if it just went straight up.  One of them keeps looking worried – he’s in charge, and he doesn’t seem very confident.




The scary bit is when they cut a large hole in the roof.

 The even scarier bit is when we see how they’ve finished off the outside – it is HIDEOUS.  It’s been a long few days and maybe we’re a bit emotional, but we’re not particularly happy.  Aside from the fact that it’s rubber and orange, they’ve left the bloody labels on the flue.  Mmm, nice. 

And the mess inside is horrendous.  After they’ve gone I decide I can’t face it, then decide I have to face it, and it takes a good half an hour to clean up properly.  At which point we notice that in spraying the flue black, they’ve managed to spray the wooden wall and the paintwork.  A lot.  We are even less happy. 

In order to take a nice picture for Guy’s mum (who has kindly bought us the stove) we put a log basket next to it and light the fire.  Then we sit in front of it with cushions and the dog and drink rather a lot of wine…  We have a table lamp (on the Workmate) and the radio on – it’s almost like a real room.  Although if we look behind us there are still electrical bits and dust sheets everywhere…   

The boys will have to come back – the inside of the roof isn’t finished yet either.  Hey ho.


Achieved:  We’ve got working sockets!  And a STOVE!  WOO HOO!!  
Work created:  We’ll have to sand the wooden wall to get the black spray paint off and try to woodwash it again to match the rest of it.  And repaint bits of the side wall too.  Bummer.
Hours worked:  All of them over the weekend.  And Friday and Monday, which have been our days off.  Other people get up late and go for a day’s shopping…
Purchases:    Wood, wood and more wood.  That’s a lot of wood.
Pressies:  Guy’s mum hugely generously bought us the stove.  THANK YOU!
Health update:  For some reason I have given up sleeping.  I sleep from about 11 – 1.30 then I’m awake through the night.  I am SHATTERED!  Guy is also knackered, but simply from doing so much DIY…
Plan for the week:    Do less!  And sell Guy’s house.  And make a limousine cake.

On Monday we varnish the floor again.  And we have our first badger squabble – by the time we’ve hurtled out of the comfy sofa where we’re sitting after varnishing, they’ve been spooked (probably by us hurtling to the window) and gone…  but definitely two badgers squabbling.  Later in the evening one returns, looking a bit dishevelled… and he doesn’t like apples.  Fussy bugger.

On Tuesday we varnish again – that’s 3 coats, and they’re still just soaking in.  I say I’ll do one more Wednesday morning before work, then we can paint the walls in the evening.  It’s still soaking in, so we buy more varnish, and do another coat instead of painting.  And then I do another coat before work on Thursday.  We think it’s 7 coats in all, and it looks lovely.  Eventually.  Then we cover it all up again to do the painting…


The colour is called ‘Cookie Dough’ and it is exactly like the same colour as our chocolate cake mixture.  The paint is fab – great colour.  In fact, Guy likes it so much he already has a sweatshirt to match…


I also go to the electrical supplies place to get the bits Wyn will need for connecting the power up – it will be BLISS when we don’t have to go to the pool cabin first to connect the power and lights.  And it will also mean we can shut the window that the cables are currently passed through.

At the weekend there isn’t much else we can do, so we decide we have to tackle the a small bit of plastering at Guy’s house… rain has been getting in down the chimney and although we’ve cured it getting in, it’s messed up a bit of the bedroom plaster… easiest thing to do is batten it, put up more plasterboard and replaster.

We have battens and all the tools we need.  At my house.  We pile everything into mum’s car (bigger than mine!) and go to the builders merchants for plasterboard.  That gets shoved into the car too, and we’re set.  

We measure up the battens and mark them up for drilling, then realise we haven’t got enough.  We’ll have to go and buy some more.  We have tools and stuff at Guy’s house, but no money between us… We’ll have to go back to my house to get money to go to B&Q to buy battens.  Which will take time.  BUGGER.  Then we remember Guy’s 20p piggy bank… so we raid that.  I nip off to B&Q and pay for the battens with 20p pieces and Guy stays behind to drill holes into the wall.  I get back to find him Very Cross and with a Very Blunt drill bit.  Now we need to go back to B&Q for new drill bits… but we decide there won’t be enough 20p pieces, so we really do have to go via my house to collect money, then to B&Q for drill bits, then back to Guys.  Then we decide that we have to drill into mortar (which we don’t know where to find) so we make random holes in the battens hoping to hit lucky.  Eventually we have enough fixings in the battens, and wood that looks like Gruyere cheese…
We whack up two bits of plasterboard and then decide we have to go and get clean to go to Bob and Veronica’s party.  However, we never do things that simply, so we’re going via IKEA to buy six black iron shelf supports for Guy’s shelves in the cabin.  Easy.  It shuts at 8, so we aim to get there for 7.30… we leave late, after having the world’s fastest baths, and hurtle into IKEA with a little time to go… we ignore everything in our bid to get to ‘storage’ and find the shelf displays.  They have precisely ONE shelf bracket.  Which is Not Much Good.  Not even if you only wanted to put up one shelf…  Even if we unscrew the display one on the wall, we’d still only have two.  BUGGER.  We are Not Happy.  We leave in disgust and head for the party.  

Good party!  We have two cakes with us – a Malteser cake for eating, and a fruit cake for Bob and Veronica to take home for themselves…  We think we’ve captured them in icing, and it gets much admired, which improves our mood no end.  Guy’s band plays for some of the party, and it’s a good night all round…

On Sunday we finish the plasterboarding and then plaster the wall.  Knowing how much mess we made in the cabin, we’re hugely careful not to splat plaster on the other walls and the carpet.  And even we stay remarkably clean!  We’re improving!  My plastering’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable, and we think we’ll put a picture on the wall to hide the worst lumps.  It’ll be a BIG picture…

After lunch we put a second coat of lovely chocolatey paint on the cabin walls, and that’s it.  We stop.  We are knackered.  Again…  We wonder what other people do on Sundays, and think it’s probably ‘lie in, breakfast, papers, coffee, walk, Sunday lunch, snooze, tea, telly, bath, telly’.  We’ll do it one day…

Achieved:  We have a painted shed!
Non-purchases: Those bloody IKEA shelf supports.
Pressies:   Two fake sheepskin rugs to go in Blunkett’s NEW wicker dog baskets.  The cats already think they’re lovely.
Wildlife update:  Badgers, robins, squirrels, damn mole, pigeons… some days it’s like a Disney cartoon.
Plan for the week:  Wood for architrave and skirting gets delivered Monday, then we cut it and paint it.  Then fit it.  We have Friday off work this week, so should make good inroads into the ‘finishing’ bits and pieces before the installation of The Stove on Monday 3rd March. Hooray!
Statue of the week:  Saturday saw the unveiling by Anthony Hopkins of the statue of Tommy Cooper in Caerphilly.  After the party on Saturday night we went to have a look at it on our way home.  It’s good!  Apart from the odd mouth, the strange unrecognisable stance and the rabbit with its tongue sticking out…