BrideShedRevisited

On Monday I have the utterly brilliant idea of putting the party lights up.  These will be the party lights we put up for Rob, took down, put up for the shed boys, and took down again.  This means that we can (a) find the shed in the dark and (b) work in it when it is dark (all the available non-working hours from Monday to Friday) and (c) finish the floorboards.

With the lights up we can now de-nail boards in the cabin and clean them too.  Except this is the coldest week this winter and it is FREEZING out there…  Warmer in the shed, but still COLD.  The sort of cold where you can’t feel your fingers.  Which isn’t great for chiselling…  

We shift the floorboards so that where my sitting room used to look like this:











It now looks like this:  


Festive, eh?

Anyway, back to the floorboards.  We’re not really, er, winning.  We knock out the nails, which is better now with the nail punch (the tool I was calling a ‘nail knocking out thingy’ last week) (ooh, look, I’ve gone all technical) and then need to clean out the tongues and grooves.  The grooves aren’t bad – mostly it’s soft earthy rubbish which knocks out easily enough with a tiny chisel.  But the ‘tongue’ bit is another matter, and it’s really hard work.  We buy ourself new chisels and it helps, but not much, and it’s going to wreck them pretty soon.  Guy has the brilliant idea (one night when he can’t sleep – see what I’ve done to him, he now lies awake thinking of floorboards) of using Nitromors (vicious paint stripper chemical stuff) to eat through the gunge. On Saturday, chemicals at the ready, we paint the edge of the floorboard and wait for 20 minutes.  Of course, being us, we don’t actually ‘wait’ – we go and mow grass/pick up leaves/try to get the wretched leaf blower working/borrow one from Colin/pick up sticks.  After 20 minutes we try the gunge – it just lifts off!  Hooray, Hooray and HOORAY!  Result!  We paint 5 more boards, trying to set up a little production line…  20 minutes (and more mowing/leaf blowing) later we go back to see the boards… some of it lifts off.  Some of it is stuck and needs another coat.   20 minutes (etc) later, some of it is STILL stuck and needs another coat…  The first one was obviously a fluke.  This is going to be a painful and slow process.  By the end of the afternoon we have cleaned 9 boards.  9.  Ok, so we mowed the grass, picked up debris from the recent storms and blew leaves off all the gravel, but even so.  9?  We reckon there are at least 200 more to do…  It’s going to take us YEARS.

So here’s the challenge – PLEASE can someone make a suggestion as to how we get the old varnish/polish/dirt off the tongues of the tongue and groove?  We’re going to phone the salvage yard and see if they have any ideas, and also email some reclaimed floorboard place from the back of a magazine and see if they have any tips they’re willing to give us, but otherwise we’re looking at spending all our waking hours for the next umpteen weeks cleaning floorboards.  Which will make for A Very Dull Diary:  week 24 – cleaned floorboards; week 25 – cleaned floorboards; week 26 – cleaned floorboards.  See?  Obviously we could spice it up a bit by finding a pin in the gunge occasionally, or trying to chisel through a finger, but otherwise it’s going to be DULL.   Sandblasting?  Chemical dipping?  It’s maple, if that helps… (I have no idea whether that’s relevant or not, but it might be…. The chemical dipping chaps might say ‘yes, love no problem ooh look it disintegrated you never said it was maple…’)

We give up on the floorboards and set about making the shed look suitably clean and tidy to be admired over the festive period…  we tidy up inside and move the two lovely planters and trees from my girlfriends into position.  Yes, I know the gravel isn’t finished.  Yes, I know we’ll have to move them again.  But they look GOOD!  Except by the time I took the photo it was a bit dark so they don’t really show up… better pics next week!

On Sunday we have lovely friends for brunch.  I mean, we feed them brunch, we don’t actually cook them.  That would be cannibalism…  We have crackers and wear paper hats and tell terrible jokes…  They all admire the shed in proper fashion but don’t really believe Guy is going to live in it.  Oh yes he is… (panto season would appear to be upon us…)  It would be truly impressive to say that after their visit we tackled more floorboards, but we didn’t – we fixed a leaky cistern.  I know, now we’re doing plumbing – we are SO pleased with ourselves – not only is there no longer a leak, but we also have the world’s fastest filling cistern.  Perhaps I got the pressure thingy wrong… No matter, a fast filling cistern will always be handy.  And then we repaired the attic hatch door which had dropped off.  Which is not so impressive as if I’d fixed it properly in the first place it wouldn’t have flung itself at the floor…

Achieved:       Er, not a lot really.  Tiny amount of floorboards cleaned, but we do have a tidy looking shed.  Full of unclean nail ridden planks.
Hours worked:  Shifting floorboards, rigging up lights, cleaning floorboards, cleaning floor in cabin: LOTS!  Sweeping/mowing leaves, fixing loo and mending attic hatch, also LOTS.  Not enough hours in the day sometimes..
Pressies:       Fabulous wooden wine carrier from Karen for Guy – he can keep a bottle of wine in it in his shed!
Purchases:     Plumbers tape, plumbers glue, new ballcock fitting.  Nothing to do with the shed, but Very Useful Anyway.
Lucky moment of the week:  We weren't standing under the attic hatch door when it fell off.  Neither were the cats.
Wildlife update:  the squirrels put on another brilliant floor show for Sunday brunch… Badger 2 is still visiting, but much later, about 10pm.  Perhaps he goes to the cinema earlier or something.
Plan:      Find a better way of cleaning floorboards.  Bottle of plonk to whoever comes up with a better way of doing it.  We have already ruled out chiselling, routing and Nitromors…
Drink:     Yes, thank you, very necessary.  
The ‘oh bugger’ moment of the week.  The slow realisation that it’s going to take us till April to clean the floorboards…
Shed:   Still gorgeous!  And tidy.  Did I mention tidy?  I swept up the dirt left over from when it was an open base, and then I hoovered it…  
Tip of the week:  Don’t put pierced earrings in when you’re in a hurry.  All this does is make a hole where there wasn’t one before And It Hurts.
Best brunch joke:  Guy’s cracker.  As he said before he showed us what his cracker gift was: ‘what would be the most inappropriate gift I could get?’

Here it is…





And here’s Guy:

Thursday dawns wet and windy – not a good day for shed-putting-up.  I wake at 5, listening vaguely to the pelting rain and a distant alarm which has obviously been set off by the windy weather.  The heating tries to start, despite the fact that it’s too early, and then the heating and the alarm both stop abruptly.  Power cut?  I try the radio… yep, the power’s out.  So how, exactly, am I going to produce bacon butties and hot tea for shed builders who’ve been on the road for 4 hours…  I lie in bed and Come Up With A Plan.  There’ll be enough residual heat in the Aga for the first round of tea and butties, then I can boil kettles and fill flasks, and cook the beef for sandwiches at mums, and we can drive the soup (made but not blended yet) up to Guy’s to work the blender.  Good grief!  At 6 the power comes back on, so my plans aren’t needed – I could have slept the last hour after all…  At 6.30 I ring Guy – he’s so full of cold that he’s stayed at his house – and he walks down in the dark.  The boys (Keith the Boss, Gary and James) sensibly turn up in the light just after 8 and manage to drive up the lane – hooray!  We show them where we’ve left a section of fence missing so that they can carry the panels down the slope, and then we fill them with bacon butties and cups of tea. 

They start bringing the panels down the slope – it is pouring with rain (and has been for two days) and the slope is mud and wet leaves – very skiddy.  The boys good-naturedly rib each other about who’s going to fall over first, and whether we can video it and post it on You Tube… (for the record, it was James.  Three times.) 



The shed is all beautifully made in panels, so very soon we have the largest flat pack we’ve ever seen.






Everything is labelled and the boys start with the back corners, then the sides, then the front.  In no time at all we have a roofless shed! 


 


Then the internal stud wall goes up – we can’t really call it a stud wall as it’s clad in wood and has a gorgeous door in it.  James and Keith are now in the storage room bit, and the lock’s jammed itself in transit, so they’re locked in, much to their amusement.  Gary calls out to make sure they’ve got enough air… there’s no roof on it yet! 

Then very quickly the roof sections go on.




It’s STILL raining, and the boys are getting soaked and covered in mud – we phone mum who whizzes off to Asda to buy tracksuit bottoms in case a change of clothes is needed – and now they’ve got to the tricky bit. 

They have to clamber around on the roof to put the felt on.  In the rain.  With incredible patience and the same endless good humour and banter, they crack on with the felt.






I remark to Gary that they’re incredibly good natured, and he says it’s due to a lack of intelligence… we think not!

Once the felt is on the boys come indoors out of the rain for lunch (hot beef rolls and homemade soup) and then they’re back out again – the rain has eased to a mild drizzle, but it’s cold.  They screw the shed to the floor, make some minor adjustments to the doors, and we’re done!  WOO HOO!  We have a SHED!  I text a photo to Jo back in my office, who says it’s so gorgeous I could move Guy in before Christmas…  The boys leave at about 4 – that’s a helluva long day!  They left Essex at 4, and won’t get home before 8, and they had to slither and slide around all day in the mud, rain and gloom, yet they were endlessly good natured, funny and polite.  Wish we had space for another shed to have them back…

Once they’re gone, Guy and I don’t really know what to do.  Eventually we decide to go and properly admire the shed.  So we take a bottle of champagne and two plastic glasses, and a torch, and off we go.  We have a really good look round and agree it is utterly beautiful.  We start talking about where the lighting should go, and the electric sockets, and whether we need ceiling lights (we think we don’t) and the log burning stove in the corner… We’ll plaster three walls, but because the stud wall is finished so beautifully just woodstain it in a lovely colour.  Then there’ll be the wood floor…. It’s going to be just gorgeous!  I think we’ll be fighting over who gets to go and sit in it…



Yes, I know, splodgy photo.  Did I mention it was raining?









On Saturday Wyn the Wire and Mrs Wyn visit for lunch so we can chat electrics.  We agree on lighting (that’s ‘agree’ as in we say what we want and Wyn the Wire tells us whether it’s possible or not.  It’s possible, which is good).  We chat about some sort of background heating, and an outside light, and Wyn tells us that we can do the ‘first fix’ ourselves.  WOO HOO!  That’s ‘first fix’ as in what they talk about on Grand Designs.  This is, like, your actual building stuff!  We are ridiculously excited, and Wyn is going to send us a shopping list so that I can go to the nice leccy wholesalers near work and negotiate a discount…  He also draws us a very good plan of what goes where.  We believe we can do it.

On Sunday I (probably unreasonably) say that I would like to put my Christmas tree up some time this side of Christmas, and where it needs to go is currently Full of Flooring.  


We have a plan… we’ll move it to the pool cabin, de-nail it and stack it neatly.  It is currently in a large heap, and it will definitely stack better once it is de-nailed.  We start.  

As the Burberry factory was set up in 1939 (making clothing, although Burberry only moved there later), the nails are nearly 70 years old, mostly rusty and incredibly long.  My first nail takes me 10 minutes…  so I get the nail point thingy that you hammer (can’t remember the name of it) and use that – much better, except now I spend all my time getting the nail point thingy that you hammer out of the board having hammered it in too far.  Guy is much quicker.  Then someone (probably me) says wouldn’t it be A Good Idea to clean the tongues and grooves of accumulated crap while we’re de-nailing the boards.  There is seven decades of varnish, grime and wax on them.  So we get the chisels out.  Dumb idea or what?  


This slows us down hugely, and after 3 hours we have precisely this much to show for it.  And the pile in the sitting room looks just the same size as it was before we started…  


I have hammered all my knuckles and my knees, and Guy is just stiff all over from staying in the same position for too long…  Whose idea was it to buy reclaimed floorboards??  At some point we think that maybe sharper chisels would be a good idea, and we have a break to get new chisels, ink for the printer, brandy to cure mum’s cold and to visit Karen.  When we get back it’s dark and the lights in the pool shed, though pretty, are rubbish for seeing anything.  We think chiselling in the dark might be dangerous, so we just wallop more nails out instead. We pull out a total of 472 nails!  Actually, we have no idea how many we pulled out – the question is ‘shall we count how many nails we’ve done, or shall we go indoors for a gin and tonic?’  So we didn’t count nails…
Achieved:       We have a SHED.  And very beautiful it is too.
Hours worked:  Can’t count the hours the boys did on Thursday, and Guy and I did about 4 each on the floorboards on Sunday. 

Pressies:       Three pairs of spare trackie bottoms from mum, dalek key ring for Guy (from me) to put his shed key on.

Purchases:      A shed.  And excellent value it is too!
Wildlife update:  Performing squirrels much admired by all our visitors this week.  They are really fluffy now.  The squirrels, not the visitors…
Drink:          Yes thank you, lots.  We did do quite a bit of celebrating…
Shed:  Did we mention it’s GORGEOUS?!
Tip of the week:  If you’ve been knocking crap off floorboards and want to get the grime off your face before going to the shops, simply lick your palms and rub your cheeks.  Quicker than cleanser, and can be done on the move.  Beauty products are overrated anyway…

We have a SHED!!!  This is soooooo exciting!  News and photos on Sunday... It ended up being Thursday, not Wednesday, and now Guy and I are too busy admiring it to spend time on the computer!

It’s a completely unsheddy week, so we’re both looking forward to Guy’s gig on Thursday night and a day off work on Friday – nothing much planned, except a lazy morning, bit of shopping, catch up on some telly, take it easy.

As I’m leaving work on Thursday I get a phone call from Keith the Shed to say our shed is ready and how about Wednesday?  What, NEXT Wednesday?  Yes, yes, yes and YES!   I decide not to phone Guy to tell him as I want to see his reaction… when he picks me up for the gig I say casually ‘Keith phoned, he’s coming down with the shed next Wednesday…’ and then there’s a lot of ‘what, NEXT Wednesday?’ and ‘WOO HOO’ for a while.  To say we are excited is a bit of an understatement. WOO HOO!  And then we start planning madly… the forecast is horrendous (again) for the weekend, so we think we ought to finish the drainage on Friday.  Our nice lazy ‘recovering after the gig’ Friday…  We spend the entire journey into Cardiff discussing drains and gravel and clearing up and paths and walls….

The gig is fantastic – the band are brilliant (as usual) and everyone has a great time – definitely plans to do another one some time….  It’s a late night and by the time we get to bed it’s about 1.30.

At 8 I’m awake thinking drains and sheds…  The forecast is for ‘showers’ and the wind is so brisk we can see the showers coming… It’s sunny so we get up to make an early start, thinking we’ll put our feet up in the afternoon… by the time we’re downstairs it’s pouring again, so we have breakfast and then it’s sunny. 

We start digging.  Or, rather, Guy starts digging and I stand around taking photographs.  I think this is A Good Arrangement.  The drain has to follow the wall around, cross the path and then cross the lawn to a piece of rougher grass where we don’t mind puddles. 

As Guy digs, I unturf a section across the lawn.

Guy gets as far as the path edge and hits gravel.  That’ll be the gravel of the land drain that runs at right angles to where we’re going and down into the wood.  So our drain can, er, drain into that drain?  Yep!  Hooray!  Less digging!  No need to take the turf up!  So I put it all back in again.

We’ve got this far surprisingly quickly.  Now all we need to do is get the soil pipe, pop it in the ditch, fill it with gravel, put the membranes back over and add more gravel.  Easy peasy.  We go to the local builders’ yard for soil pipe.  They don’t have any – it’s on order and due in today, but not yet.  We try the local plumbing supplies depot, two DIY stores and another builders’ merchants.  Zippo.  We ring the first one back to see if their delivery has turned up.  It hasn’t.  They suggest another yard in Cardiff (practically next to my office) and it has two reels.  That’s two 25m reels of pipe.  We only want 7m!  Nobody is prepared to cut it, so we have to get 25m. 

We go home and fiddle with the damp proof course – the plastic is supposed to be ‘glued into’ the concrete, but it isn’t, and where it’s loose it’s filling with water, leaves, stones, mud and general crap.  We sponge out all the wet bits and then attempt to glue the plastic to the concrete with guttering sealant.  Which says on the tube, helpfully, ‘make sure all surfaces are dry, clean and free from grease’.  Yeah, right.  We do it anyway.  We weight it all the way round with yet more bricks – just to hold it in place till the shed is on top of it.

By this time it’s 12 o’clock and threatening to rain, so we stop for an early lunch.  Blunkett has been with mum since Thursday teatime before the gig, and we’ve said we’ll pick her up ‘lunchtime on Friday’.  So after our early lunch we phone mum who says we can go and get her, and off we trot.  Now, I don’t know which bit of ‘we’ll pick her up about lunchtime’ translated as ‘we’ll come for lunch’ but mum has lunch for me.  She’s roasted a chicken and promptly puts some on a plate in front of me.  No problem – I can always eat two lunches.  Guy is busy laughing.  Until a baked potato gets put in front of him and he has two lunches too.  Excellent idea!  We leave, somewhat stuffed, with Blunkett and agree what we actually want to do is fall asleep… instead of which Guy walks back to his house to get… I can’t remember, but doubtless something we needed… and I go off to the builders’ yard near my office to get the pipe.  I toy with the idea of popping in to show people how relaxed and stylish I can be on my day off, but as I have mud pretty much everywhere and I haven’t washed my hair, I give it a miss.

Do you know how much 25m of soil pipe is?  It’s a lot.  It’s a car full… luckily I thought it might be pushing my luck in my little car, so I’ve got Guy’s, but it still won’t fit.  The chap at the shop suggests unfurling the coil, so we saw off the bindings, and then try to push the pipe in bit by bit….I remember a bit from one of the James Herriott vet books where some cow’s intestines have escaped and he tries to put them back in – as you shove one bit, another bit pops out.  It’s exactly like that!  Eventually it all goes in and we get the boot shut, but I certainly can’t see a thing out of the back of the car and the sky is looking ominously black…

By the time I get home the rain is monsoon-like.  I decide the only thing to do is… carry on.  I drag one end of the pipe out of the car and it snakes and coils around behind me as I make my way to the drain.  I put it in the far end of the drain and uncoil it along the ditch.  It coils up again.  I try again.  It coils up again.  This time I drag it down to the lawn and, by doing some mad dance, manage to uncoil the whole damned thing.  Hah!  I drag the end back into the ditch and saw off the other end.  Now it’s shorter it can coil back up again… AAAARRRGGGHHHH.  I stand on one end and shovel gravel at it until it gives up the fight, then repeat with the other end.  That shows it!  At this point Guy returns from his house, also drowned.  My coat zip has broken, the rain is still torrential, and we are both soaked.  Guy starts bringing more gravel down the slippery walkway, and we shovel… we fill the ditch, then put new membrane down, and keep shovelling.  The rain turns to hail and we temporarily hide in the utility room.  When we venture outside again we have to empty the wheelbarrows of hailstones.  Eventually we’re done.  And done in…

And that’s about it.  We can’t do anything more to the path until the weather is better (Vincent’s brilliant wall is going to be extended round to the post you can see), and we can’t shovel any more gravel until the wall is finished. 

Achieved:  We have a slab ready, and it won’t flood.  We think.
Hours worked: Zippo till Thursday night, then LOTS!
Purchases:   Two pansies to make the pool cabin look pretty so that it looks its best for Keith’s return visit.  Grand sum of £1.10.
Pressies: The soil pipe for the land drain was a Christmas present from my mum.  We meant to put a bit of tinsel on it before burying it, but given the torrential rain, we forgot.  So we sang Jingle Bells as we dumped gravel on it instead.  And we got wine for the tent cake, wine for the wedding cake, and champagne from Sam and Gavin for letting them use Guy’s house.  Excellent!
Wildlife update:  Those squirrels are NOT fat.  They simply have thick coats.
Plan: Get a shed on Wednesday!  WOO HOO! 
The ‘oh bugger’ moment of the week:  Tough call this week… was it when I found I hadn’t needed to take the turf up?  Or when my zip went in the monsoon?     

At the beginning of the week Guy is off work ill (so he really was ill last weekend and not just trying to get out of gravel shovelling!) so he stays clammily in his bed and I do cake stuff when I’m not working.  We have excellent intentions of digging a drainage ditch on Saturday afternoon, but on Friday evening somebody from the Caerphilly Woodlands Trust phones to say they know we’ve agreed to ‘man the stand’ at the garden centre on Saturday morning for 2 hours, but in the afternoon for 3 hours is almost the same and is that ok with us?.  What can you say?  I say yes.  Guy says he’d have said ‘no’ but I bet he’d have crumbled too.  As it is, we have a castle themed wedding cake to finish, so on Saturday morning I make a bride and drop the turret.  On the stone floor.  Oops.  Luckily it only breaks a bit, and we repair it fairly quickly…  It’s got to travel all the way to Scotland, so it’s comforting to know that it’s relatively indestructible.

It’s too early to eat lunch before we head off to do our stint on the stand, so we take sandwiches and chicken drumsticks.  We arrive at the local garden centre and Vernon, who has been on the stand all morning, says it’s Been A Bit Quiet.  He has handed out two leaflets and got one signature of interest.  In three hours.  Blimey.  Turns out he had the busy part of the day…. In the afternoon there are NO visitors (well, not to the outside bit where we are busy freezing, anyway) and we don’t even give out two leaflets.  I do have a couple of children looking at the giant fir cones, but I have to confess my heart sinks a little when they guess they are acorns.  Education nowadays, eh?  I explain that they really are fir cones and also point out how you can tell which kind of mouse has nibbled a hazelnut but as I don’t have my glasses on I may be misleading them.  I figure as they can’t tell a fir cone from an acorn it probably doesn’t matter… We entertain ourselves by watching the wood turner turn wood and make a bowl, and also by wandering off in turn to find the best Christmas decorations available.  Guy wins with ‘Hippity Hoppity Santa’ (or was it Hip Hop Santa?) who is dressed in shorts, baseball hat and iPod and sings a rap version of Jingle Bells as though he’s an Elvis impersonator.  Must get one.

By 3.30 we are frozen so we call it a day.  Apart from the two ‘it’s an acorn’ kids, we’ve spoken to nobody.  Still, at least we did our bit. We go home to yet more cakeing and then our visitors arrive.  As they want a proper holiday, we’re putting them in Guy’s house on their own so after a cuppa we drive up to his and show them round and then we do very little else apart from sit in a heap in my house and watch telly…  For a few days Guy is officially Living With Me.  We like it!  Which is probably just as well given that we’re building him a shed and selling his house…

This one is a baby with red markings.  We call him 'Little Red'  Yep, we're still crap at names!

On Sunday the plan is that they will walk down and find us, but they get lost, so Guy carries on preparing lunch while I walk out to meet them.  Guy has practice in the afternoon, so Blunkett and I walk them back up to his house to show them the way, and then walk home again to do yet more to the wedding cake.  Can’t show you a pic because the groom can’t see what the bride is wearing!

All in all it’s been a busy if totally unsheddy week.  Bummer!  No idea when the shed will be arriving – we can’t wait now!

Achieved:  Nothing sheddy AT ALL, but two cakes iced and delivered.
Hours worked: Shedwise?  Naff all.  Cakewise?  WAY too many…
Meditation progress:  What you need is peace, quiet and the certain knowledge that you are not going to be disturbed.  The Woodlands Trust stand was just perfect…
Purchases:   Nothing.  Zippo.
Pressies: Two chocolate advent calendars (one each so there’ll be no squabbling) from our visitors.  Excellent pressies!
Wildlife update:  Badger Number One is back!  So he’s not dead, which is brilliant news.  Still haven’t seen them both together but, yes, I can tell them apart.  Honest.
Plan: Again, we’re stuck without daylight, so we’ll have to wait for the weekend.  Then we’re going to do a bit of remedial drainage work (one of the advantages of the torrential rain at the end of last week was that we can see where the puddles are…) 
The ‘oh bugger’ moment of the week:  Guy was off work ill the beginning part of the week and returned on Thursday, happy in the knowledge that the wedding cake was due for Sunday, and the engagement (tent) cake for the middle of this coming week.  Jenny (her wot wants the engagement cake) greeted Guy on Thursday with ‘ooh, I’m so excited, where’s my cake?’ which came as somewhat of a surprise.  We think she got her dates muddled… Oh bugger.  So Thursday evening we finished the engagement cake.  Very quickly.  They are a stunning couple (although maybe not by the time we’d immortalised them in icing).  She’s a doctor, he’s an RAF weatherman, they like camping.  So we gave them a tent.

Gig of the week:  Guy’s band are playing a Christmas Ceilidh at O’Neills in St Mary Street, Cardiff, on Thursday night – it’s going to be fantastic, so if you’re in the area, come along!  If you’re in California, sorry, it’s a bit far, isn’t it?