Moving the Workshop - Day 2

We woke this morning sore, stiff and creaking from our efforts yesterday - digging is not something we are used to, thank goodness! After a huge breakfast and a quick dog walk for me and a lap of Tesco for Kristy, we set to.

The first job was to finish the shuttering - this is the boarding that contains the concrete in the trench and makes a fairly straight line. We had visited Ikea on Thursday, and they sell old sheets of particle board for £5 a load - perfect for the job, after they had been ripped to size on the table saw. Imagine the sound of Saturday Live to complete the image below!

The trenches were half filled with hardcore and tamped down - note the improvised bridge to allow access with the wheel barrow to the side closest to the large barn...

 

Kristy was OIC Concrete - here she is with Kiwi, unaware that she has to shovel 800kgs of aggregate into the mixer, and then pour it out again...

 

Lots of shovelling, mixing, pouring into barrows, pouring out of barrows, compacting and smoothing later - we have foundations!

 

Spot the deliberate mistake - all the spoil from the trenches is now marooned until the concrete goes off and we can get the Gator back in.

In other good news, I've found a listing on eBay for enough concrete blocks to build the dwarf walls - which should save us at least £100. Just need to find some nice but inexpensive roofing next!

 

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Moving the Workshop - Day 1

As part of The Barn project, we had to either move or get rid of the outbuilding that I'm currently using to store lots of outdoors stuff, and as a workshop. The first idea was to scrap it, but that would leave us with a problem - namely, where to store all the workshop and outdoor stuff while the new barn was being built. This was quickly superseded by another idea - to move the outbuilding as a whole, and then convert it into a tractor mower shed and potting shed when the Barn is commissioned.

The outbuilding is a fairly basic construction - a concrete foundation, two layers of concrete blocks, and then wood stud walls made in a frame style. I thought that if we could dig a new foundation and build an identical block wall, the wooden walls and roof could be disassembled and moved without too much hard work.

I did some calculations concerning the foundations for the outbuilding (and a new slab I'll need to pour for the relocation of the oil tank) and ordered a delivery from our local independant Builders Merchant, for 1700kgs of ballast (mixed sharp sand and gravel) and 250kgs of cement, in plastic bags in case of rain.

 

This morning, we started by pegging out the site after measuring the existing slab about eight times to ensure the correct dimensions! We had help all day from our neighbours son, who bought his John Deere Gator with him.

 

The Gator was hugely useful - we loaded all the cut turf into the load bed, and later filled it up with recycled hardcore to line the bottom of the trenches - and so was he, digging all day and trying to be helpful!

 

This is where we got to after 9 hours - trenches all dug, and more than half of the shuttering is in place. The front trench has hardcore in the bottom as well.

 

There is a forecast of rain for Sunday, which isn't great for fresh concrete - the loose plan is to pour concrete as soon as we have finished shuttering tomorrow, then cover the site to prevent the concrete getting wet.

 

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A New Tool

We have quite frequent deliveries of tools to AnAcreInHampshire - but this new one is quite special.

This is my new plumb bob - new to me, not brand new. It is a lovely object as well as a good tool - and I'm quite sure that a contemporary plumb bob would be plastic, or cheaply made.

This is particularly exciting as it is the first specific Barn building tool I've bought.

A plumb bob is vital for the scribe rule method of woodworking - because the oak I will use will probably be twisted and 'crowned' i.e not flat over its length, each joint will have to be custom cut to match its neighbour. Scribe rule joinery is one of those things that I suspect is easier to demonstrate than describe - at least that's my excuse for not understanding it fully yet!

 

 

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The Barn

When we were looking for our new home, we wrote a list called Our Next Home - it detailed what charecteristics we were looking for, and helped hugely with our search;

• Garden - 1/4 acre or more
• Barn - or space for one
• Three bedroom - but ideally four
• Parking
• Large airy kitchen
• Garden room - or space for one
• Utility room for washing machines and wellies

Item two was my favorite - I've always loved green-oak barns, and I was longing for the opportunity to plan and build one.

We have a collection of shabby outbuildings at the moment which have done the job, but are begging to be replaced by a proper barn. As it stands, we have a 5m x 3m shed (in use as a workshop and store), a lean-to which is in danger of collapsing at any moment, an oil tank and a garden shed which we rescued from the top of the garden.

Our plan (as it stands...) is to move the shed about 40 metres onto the eastern boundary and put the oil tank next to it - the front of the shed will go where the two posts in the grass are, and the oil tank will to to the right of this picture where the odd red pallet-thing is.

This will leave us with a nice big area for the new outbuilding, rather grandly dubbed The Barn. It will be green-oak framed - meaning the oak is cut and fitted together when green, or fresh - the mortice and tenon joints will then pull tightly as the oak dries. The building will be 11m long by 6 metres wide, and will accomodate two parking spaces, a workshop and a summer house / garden office room.

The best thing about the Barn is that I'm going to build it - from scratch. It will be a great project, and a wonderful thing to have done. I don't underestimate the significant amount of work involved, but the cheapest quote we have received is for £12,000 just to supply the oak frame - if we ant this barn, I have to build it!

To this end, I'm going on a course at the end of this month with a firm called Oakheath in Shropshire - 5 days which I hope will arm me with all I need to know about green oak framing. The latest design (there have been five previous incarnations!) is shown below;

 

 

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Fencing

 

Here at AnAcreInHampshire we are really lucky to have a small paddock in front of the house. When we moved here, this was a large open space where horses once grazed - we owned half, and our neighbours the other. There was a clause in our contract that we had to erect a fence to deliniate our boundary, but this was a project that kept dropping down the list of priorities.

Six months later, neighbour Graham and I decided we should crack on with the fence - in the interests of labour saving we got a quote for a contractor to install a post and rail fence, but we thought that £600 for 30 metres of encing was a bit rich. As ever, we decided to DIY!

After shopping around for supplies, we visited a firm called McVeigh Parker in Bradfield - think Scats on steriods! Graham and I wandered round with jaws dropping at all the great stuff they sell... So that was the materiels sorted - how about some tools? We love tools!

Here is Monty posing with the essential tools for an aspiring fencing ninja - from left to right we have;

• Post driver - these will knock you out in a flash if you catch the top of the post on the lip of the driver. Much easier with two, but still proper hard work. Prevents the top of the post splitting as it would with a sledge hammer.
• Fencing pliers - the only thing short of a grinder that would cut the heavy guage wire and stock fencing. Also has a rough hammer and a prising lever for staples.
• Pair of digging shovels - essential for removing spoil from the bottom of a hole.
• Wire tensioning tool - you won't get any tension in wire or stock fencing without this.
• Trenching shovel - allows a nice small hole to be dug, saving unneccessary work.
• Digging bar - loosens soil in the bottom of the hole prior to use the digging shovels.

Now, all you need is a few days of good weather to dig some holes, drive the posts, fix some stock fencing and attach rails and you are done!

The most important lesson we learned was to brace everything - the stock fencing would exert enough force to pull a 150mm square gatepost (with over a metre driven into the ground) out of vertical. We used a combination of rails to brace as 'pushers' and strained wire as 'pullers' where a pusher would block a gateway.

This is a pic taken one glorious evening of the fence across the paddock.

 

The gate we installed between the houses - note the diagonal 'pusher' to strain the stock fencing, with a proper chiselled mortice to ensure mechanical stability.

 

Graham (R) and I relaxing after finishing the cleft fence across the front garden. This was much more work as you can't really drive the posts in, as the rails sit in mortices in the posts. A much nicer looking fence than square rails though!

 

 

 

 

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Adventures in Plastering

So, it turns out that plastering is not as impossible as it looks!

We paid to have a few walls plastered in the new bathroom when we bought the house - it made financial and practical sense, as the builders were here and being paid anyway, and a bit of plastering only cost us a slab of beer.

Looking round the house, most walls (all lathe and plaster construction) were in a poor state. The options were to patch and fill with Easyfil, strip the lathe and plaster and start again with plasterboard, or have them skimmed. The latter seemed like the best mix of economy of effort and speed of completion. However, the price was an issue - it seems that most estimates were for £100/wall - when we have five or six to do, it became a big job - particularly when the materials costs are about £5/wall. I decided to do some research!

I stumbled across www.diyplastering.co.uk, which contained some great video clips and instructions. A quick lap to town found me armed with a bag of Multifinish Plaster, a hawk and trowel - there was no stopping me! The first job was a re-skinned airing cupboard, which a previous resident had (for some inexplicable reason) covered in hardboard. The end result was sufficiently good to confirm that I should press on and try a proper wall.

This is a pic of the wall in our living room before I attacked it, with patches filled in with concrete (yup, really) and an odd two tone paint finish;

 

And after two skim coats of plaster;

 

 

The walls had quite high suction - the rate at which the water from the plaster is drawn into the wall. Slower is better, as it gives you more time to work the plaster as it dries. This wall sucked the water out before your very eyes - despite two coats of diluted PVA glue which limits the effect. The second coat was better than the first as it dried more slowly, allowing a better finish.

I'm still learning lots - I end up with lots of little holes and patches which need to be filled after the plaster has dried, but the walls are at least flat and smooth. I've done the airing cupboard, a large wall in the new bathroom, a window reveal and this wall in the sitting room. The best thing is the price - I think a wall takes about 2-3 hours of my time, and a fiver for plaster. This saves about £30 an hour for my time - a worthwile saving.

Any tips for getting a better finish first time round?

 

 

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Chopping trees, hedges and Bonfires!

What a glorious spring-like day! I was all set to have an hour on my road bike, but by the time Kristy and I had taken Monty on one of our regular walks (Seven Stiles) we decided that we should really press on in the garden.

I started by logging the tree that I'd pulled over with the Land Rover the day before, but one thing led to another and I took about six ivy covered trees down. They were totally bound with ivy as you can see from this pic. It's really no wonder that ivy will kill a tree if allowed free reign.

 

I took a pic to show a before and after. Before...

 

And after:

 

Quite a difference I'm sure you'll agree. This whole copse will need to be grubbed out to make way for our green oak barn, that will eventually incorporate a garage, workshop, tractor shed and summer house / garden office. We will then start again with native trees and hedging.

The trees were fairly straightforward, but the stumps were something else. I used a 2 ton chain hoist that I'd bought to help change the chassis on the Land Rover, combined with a couple of lifting strops, to winch the stumps out. The soft ground definitely helped!

 

 

Our neighbour Graham was spurred on by the activity, and chopped down the woody, leggy hedge that separated our front gardens. This was once a nice hedge, but had been seriously neglected and not cut for a number of years. Kristy and I had already cut it down from about 15 feet to 7 feet in the summer - the top of the hedge was blocking light in the first floor windows! Here is Kristy wondering if Graham was doing the right thing...

And the finished article...

It makes both gardens feel much more open and lighter - the dogs love it as well! We also decided over supper to replace the hedge with a post and cleft rail fence, with stock fencing incorporated to contain the dogs. Something like this, which we found in a catalogue of Charlie's. The hedge will be able to grow up the fence as well, but kept firmly in check this time!

Finally we took advantage of the fine afternoon to have a huge bonfire in our front paddock. We had a large unburnt pile from a previous attack on our laurel tree, plus the trees I had cut, plus the hedge. The whole lot went, and the bonfire is still smouldering 24 hours later.

 

 

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