Back again. More on the general state of play later, but for now, it’s shed time.
The garage is too dang small. We always knew it was too small: too small when we spec’d it out when I drove a Grand Voyager and now too small for the Tesla. Still too small for all the gardening, camping, sporting and building equipment, and definitely no swinging of cats at all. So,…. shed it is.
We’ve hired George and Olly to build a shed and plant some trees in the garden. Us being us, it’s not just any old store bought shed… We’re using some of the materials left over from the build for this and other parts in the back part of the garden, and because we’ll see the shed from every angle of the house, it’s got to look pretty nice. They’ll be here for a couple of weeks.
The walls will be red cedar and the fun part will be a green living roof.
Surprising how many moving pieces there are to a simple shed: composite beams on a concrete base, pent roof at < 10 degrees pitch for the living bit, windows of uPVC and small and high enough so no one can wriggle in and positioned in full view of the cctv camera, old water butt (that the builders put the hole in too high so is now redundant–I recall all those discussions with Tim: Don’t worry about the infill being too high, the water butt will fill anyway because not all the water would flow downhill into the pipe…..) placed under the roof using the house’s aluminum piping. It will be a pretty posh lawn-mower garage in the end.
Three of the specialist trees arrived a few weeks ago: two acer sango kaku for the front by the cars, and a huge almighty great big acer griseum for the back by the seating area. Our friends Paul and Kim have one in their garden bang centre of their garden, and it’s a beautiful beastie. This one will be quirky and weird with low hanging branches for hanging loads of neat things from. A quartet of silver birch along the back fence will see the heavy work done. Then I can get on with the fiddly flowery bits.
Chris and Chris work for George and Olly, they’re the guys on the tools, and they’re awesome. Communication between all of us is really good which makes the job go really smoothly. One of the Chris’s has a fitness company that he bookends around his landscaping work. He’s at http://yellowbrickfitness.co.uk/, if you’re in the Redhill area check him out! Both Chris’s have recently transplanted themselves to London and we’re glad to have them.
Now that the initial chin-scratching phase is over in setting up the framework, next week will see all the nice bits the sides of the shed all zipped up, the lovely green roof installed and the trees going in. Right in time for the beginning of Spring which Punxsutawney Phil says is due six weeks early this year–yay!