the shed the shed!!!

He uttered for the umpteenth time.



However this winter I am determined to make a start at the very least on the next project on my seemingly unending list of things to do. The collapse of the boundary fence and my log store has been the catalyst for this new endeavour. In about an hour, I dismantled and sawed up the wreckage and was left with a nice clean hole into which I threw about a ton of breezeblock and cement rubble from the remains of the bathroom build.This still leaves me with the rapidly disintegrating bulk of the existing shed, the one that I proudly stood before some 18 month ago on my expose in the Grand Designs Magazine. The shed is still full of ‘stuff’ which need removing to the garage or skip.



Also to be removed is a 15 year old birch tree which is getting a bit too big for the garden and is in the wrong place. Also the neighbours are beginning to comment on it’s presence. They are of course able to cut back to the boundary, but I haven’t told them that. There’s nothing worse than a lopsided tree. So out it will have to come.



What then? Well the traditional shiplap shed doesn’t really do it for me I’m afraid. It’s ok for putting ‘stuff’ into, but I really want to have something more like a summerhouse, that can be used as ‘guest’ accommodation or a home office, or a bit of both. So I have designed my own – to be built from sheet ply – 2 sheets of thin stuff sandwiching a piece of insulation foam. . I can pre-fabricate these panels in the garage, and then assemble them on site in due course. The basic structure will be of 4x 2’s or something similar, supporting a curved roof made in the same way as the panels.A decent door and windows that actually are weatherproof completes the build, and I have 10liters of woodstain in a very fetching blue to finish it all off.



The ‘stuff’ will be consigned to a ‘garden cupboard’ opposite. Size? Well I am really constrained with this. I suppose if I used the whole width here I could go as far as 15’ by around 10’ but in all honesty this would be: 1. too big for the garden and 2. too expensive. I would also lose anywhere to store my ‘stuff’. I’m more likely to turn the long axis through 90* and put it along the fence line with next door and lower the dimensions to around 10’ x 8’.



Not as big as I would like, but at least it’s attainable and doesn’t rob the garden of space. .

Reading....and thoughts about books

Ok, maybe a tenuous link, but one of my favourite SF authors is Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote several novels dealing with environmental change and how man adapts to these.

This is what Wikipedia says:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson

The interesting bit is down in the middle bit in Science in the Capital where the writer lists things which KSR suggests we should get back in touch with.

For those not wanting to go there here's the list:

In Fifty Degrees Below (page 99) Robinson discusses neolithic activities that we, as humans, should return to in order to give us happiness, as our brains are hard-wired to enjoy such things:
walking
throwing things at things
having sex
dealing with the opposite sex
looking at fire
talking
running
dancing
singing
stalking animals
gathering plants to eat
cooking and eating
killing animals for food
experiencing terror
making your bed
looking at the moon

There's plenty there I can put a tick against .

I'll expand on this when I have time.

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