Building a bespoke workshop
This is an ongoing project so posts will be added as it progresses...
For quite a while we have talked about building a bespoke workshop in the back garden.
Like most things, when you are working on other peoples' property, the last thing you think about is sorting out your own, Hence, this is an ongoing project, relying on spare time and good weather (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it)...
The shed shown above had become rather sorry for itself, with the boards rotting away thanks to the leaves gathering in the space between it and the garden wall. With a gaping hole in the roof (possibly at one time a haven for the neighbour's ginger tom), it was mainly full of earth from the composted leaves and a tangle of various rusty and dusty garden artefacts, not to mention its fair share of spiders and families of woodlice.
Time for a larger more useable workshop but the gap had to be closed for security (there is an alleyway running along the back of the garden with locked gate access for the neighbours).
How many concrete blocks can you safely transport in a Land Rover Discovery...? Safely, it would seem about twenty - but the tires need a bit of air afterwards!
About three trips to the builders yard for the blocks and mortar mix so far and there is now a 6ft double skin / cavity wall in place, including a veritable collection of reclaimed bricks, including some Wealden red bricks and Bath stone, for what will be the inside wall of the workshop. There is even some reclaimed pottery and a Marmite jar embedded in the new wall - the jar has been set in place to be useable for whatever it gets used for... (probably not Marmite!)
Next up is digging to extend the concrete plinth for the new workshop. With a mind on recycling as much as possible during the construction process, it was decided that the garden should feature a raised vegetable garden and herb garden (eventually there will also be a composting section too but one step at a time). This meant that the earth dug up for the foundation could be re-used as a base layer for the vegetable patch and not so much would need to go to the dump.
************Note to all those people thinking about doing this sort of thing - if you need something and you spot a builder or a skip load of what you need, don't be afraid to ask!!************
One sunny day, we were walking past our neighbour's front door and, spotting a pair of builders lugging heavy bags of rubble out of the house, I thought "don't ask, don't get". We now have eight bags of gratis foundation rubble and left two very happy builders who didn't have to pay dumping fees and saved their van wheels for another day.
The winter, paid work and more recently the Beast from the East and it's little brother has stopped play for now, but as the evenings draw out and the air clears, the workshop should grow out of the ground fairly soon.
First of all, I need to do the pointing in the rest of the old garden wall and encase the remains of the soil for the herb bed. Watch this space as they say...
