Lots To Do & No Time To Do It……
Life near the beach, too many distractions.!?

It’s been a while since I have posted anything (the last post was a draft from last year!). This year has seen a lot of life changes forced on me and therefore quite a bit more time on my hands.
Well this is what I thought, but between dropping and picking up the kids from school, fitting all the jobs in that I had planned for the day and studying I never seem to stop.
I have always been a busy person with lots of things to do but when I think the list seems to be getting smaller it increases again because the jobs I have done mean others can be started. Some of the things I have done since I stopped posting are, complete the shed, remove the old shed/clear the bottom of the garden, move one and put up another greenhouse, build some steps into the extension (this has been in need for the last few years and at last I can have my tool boxes back again!!), clear and dig an allotment, clear a friends allotment and start to build a chicken run. With all this going on I’d best get my camera out and post some pictures in the next few weeks.

I have had a good week as the clocks have changed giving me a bit more time in the evening to get out and dig holes. This might not sound too difficult but as the area for the shed was the dumping ground it is full of buried bricks and lumps of concrete. This meant it required the liberal use of a lump hammer and crow bar to break through and continue the journey downwards for the posts.

I have now run out of materials so I shall be off to Wicks at the week end for three more posts and two more bags of Postcrete. This has made the job reasonably quick as the idea is to fill the hole half full of water, put in the post then tip in the bag of Postcrete tamp it down a bit check its all upright then leave it. I like the simple ways of doing things.

The next task is to tie all the walls together with noggins. This is the basic structure of stud walling which is strong and ideal for how we are putting this shed together.

Hopefully there will be more to tell next week if the juggling between shed and allotment carries on as it has been!

Well they say that the English spend a lot of time talking about the weather, so as I’m English I would hate to see traditions die out. I can’t believe that in the last one and a half weeks since we’ve had the allotment we’ve had all weathers, rain in it’s various strengths is no surprise, but sleet, snow, hale, gale force winds and today lovely warm sunshine. The wind didn’t win the competition, my coat only came off when the sun came out!

I pruned out currant bushes in the garden today, the wrong time of year maybe but a great opportunity to take hardwood cuttings and plant them in a small cleared patch on the allotment ready for transplanting when the plot is ready. The raspberries look a little sad, I hope we see a few green shoots soon, guess I’m just being impatient (not a very good trait for a gardener though).

We lit the flame gun, worked a treat until we ran out of fuel and had to refill it whilst it was hot. Couldn’t get it to light properly after that, finished the area we wanted to burnt down though and hubby loosened the soil so we can fork it on our next trip and remove those roots. I’m a little concerned our blog might start sounding repetitive!

I had a pruning session around the garden: our hazel tree had gone a little mad and was encroaching on the pears and apples; the climbing plants along the fence were climbing a little wide and the blackberries had started to land. Hubby also had the chance to dig a few more posts into the bottom of the garden for the workshop too! Hopefully we’ll start having the evening weather to thin out the pond, now well and truly established (the children’s old sandpit and flower pot seem to be working great and having seen the winter through successfully). Toads are in their holes and vegetables roasting, dinner will be ready soon, with a well deserved glass of red wine…

Putting a spring in my step and made me eager to get some of my projects started. One being the allotment we have just signed up for, I’ll try and get the wife to tell you more about that, the other being the new shed in our garden. This is going to be built in the waste/dumping ground that is beyond our shed, which will be coming down to make way for a vegetable patch or something like that.

The idea behind the look of this shed came from pig pens which enlarged to an Anderson shelter and then onto a farm yard barn! Ok it will not be as tall as that but it will feature the curved roof. This was purchased a while ago and has been waiting for better weather and the finances to carry on with the structure that will support this roof.

So far the site has been cleared of the brambles and vine weed and we have decided on a floor level. Due to the way we have dumped stuff and the natural lie of the land it has been decided that the digging out and leveling will happen after the structure is in place.

The construction of the shed started yesterday with the first posts holes being dug and posts concreted in this is not the usual construction of a shed but we don’t intend moving it any time soon!

This is a method we have used before, on the shed that we will slowly be dismantling to use as the materials for this new shed. We will how ever be doing it slightly differently as we found a few faults with our original design mainly the roof didn’t have enough pitch on it and some of the timbers weren’t heavy enough for the job and ended up bending. So with that in mind the build has begun and I shall try to update this as I go to document how we go about our build.