A job well done...

So I mentioned in my August in the Garden post about the work we’d been planning on the old log store area. When we moved in it was part full of logs - but a lot of them were rotten due to the fact that water was easily getting in and soaking them - and we rapidly realised that if we wanted to use them, we’d do best to move them into the shed, where we've been keeping our supplies ever since. When we looked at it properly a lot of the issues were fairly apparent - the roof was made from rough chipboard which had long since pretty much rotted. The base was made from the same material - giving the dual issue of a roof that was allowing water to leak straight in, and a solid base refusing the let it drain out again! 

The "assorted rubbish" store - as it became for a while...

Since moving in we’ve been thinking through how best to deal with it, and also starting to salvage materials for the task where we’ve been able to. A storage cupboard being cleared out at my place of work yielded a number of lengths of sturdy timber, and some clearance out the back of the garden revealed a pair of wooden doors that looked suspiciously as though they may even at some stage in the past have been fitted to the log store! We had no plans to replace them, but we did realise quite fast that they might make a nice robust base for a new roof. We already had various wood screws kicking around - some purchased for previous projects, and others salvaged from dismantling things previously. The final part of the jigsaw was realising quite how well two leftover slatted timber decking tiles from when we did up the balcony at the old flat fitted to form a new base - there was going to be a gap between them but we figured we could easily enough work out a way of filling that. There were always going to be some things we’d need to buy - some form of roof covering and the means of fitting it, notably. The timber would always need treating too, but as you’ll recall from recent posts, we’ve been working on repainting the shed and office anyway, so the various bits for the log store were all given a few coats of the same “Cornflower” colour being liberally applied elsewhere. 

"Cornflower" blue paint - and a completed structure

The one thing we had no solid idea how to go about was dealing with the roofing - and we kicked various ideas around before eventually settling on what seemed like the simplest solution, roofing felt. The complication here was that neither of us had so much of an ounce of experience about dealing with it - however, we adopted a somewhat cavalier approach of "well, how hard can it be?" - perhaps not the best approach, however, in the absence of wanting to take the "pay the nice man" approach, it was the only option we had. 

MrEH fixing the roofing felt in place

The first step involved lots of measuring, and a fair bit of painting. We wanted to slightly enlarge the roof area, to create more of an overhang and so more cover from rain actually blowing in, and that also required an additional bit of timber being fixed to one side, too. To avoid the risk of it rotting from the base, that needed fixing in a way that left it sitting above the ground. Most of the existing frame was in pretty good condition, and the side panels too - but removal of the old chipboard roof really showed how much damage had been caused to the cladding on the side of the office by getting drenched every time it rained - we weren't going to be able to replace that cladding, so took the only option available to us - with it being (thankfully) bone dry currently, we slapped on as much wood preservative as we could persuade the remaining wood to absorb, and hoped for the best. A couple of additional supports for the new roof were required - the old ones having totally rotted away - and those were swiftly fashioned from some of the free-to-us timber. 

Some spending was inevitable, and after a bit of shopping around for best prices, off we trotted to a local DIY superstore, emerging a little later - and £90 lighter - with a roll of roofing felt, the correct nails to fix it in place, a roll of flashing tape, some fixing plates for the side panel, some mastic and a guttering set specifically designed for smaller roof areas - we'd intended looking at what guttering options might be open to us but weren't expecting to actually buy anything in that line, however a special offer of £25 for a set that would do everything we wanted seemed a good deal. We also opted to pay a little more for a roll of felt with a longer expected lifespan - 15 years rather than just 5 for the most basic option.

Beautiful old tools inherited from my Dad...

It then just (ha!) remained to put everything together. Handily, and in part thanks to my lovely Dad, who was never knowingly under-tooled, we had all the various bits of kit that we needed for the task - and I thoroughly enjoyed using some of his old equipment too - including a VERY old yardstick which I suspect originally belonged to one or other grandfather! The work bench in the photos was also his - I can remember this being in regular use during my childhood, along with the electric drill we also used (and which you can see in the picture) which is still going strong! We were glad of having replaced our old jigsaw recently too - this made the cutting down of the various items far quicker, particularly as one of the doors-turned-roof-panels had to be cut. While MrEH worked at getting various parts in place, drilled and fixed, I turned my hand to making a further cut to the bit of old door that was being discarded, and with the addition of get another free-to-us piece of timber drilled in place, that filled the gap in the base perfectly - once again fitting the brief of allowing airflow. With the structure finally complete, we faced our nemesis - the roof covering! As it happened, "how hard can it be" turned out to be "not very" - much to our surprise the felt was incredibly easy to work with, and beyond a few head-scratching moments over how exactly to fit the felt into and around the various corners, that was almost the easiest part of the task! the final steps were to add the flashing tape around the top (had we realised quite how much this would look like duct-tape we would have bought a different colour!) and then fix the guttering and downpipe in place. 

The finished project.

To say we're impressed with the result we've achieved would in honesty be an understatement. We're accustomed of thinking of ourselves as not really being people who are good at DIY, but we've surprised ourselves here. I'd be lying if I didn't say that at one stage we were indeed considering paying someone else to do it for us, but when we thought it through, it seemed to be a false economy - we wanted the ability to store more logs as that would mean bulk-buying = moneysaving. If we paid out more than we had to to sort the storage though, it was going to take a long while to recoup that spend. In the event, we've ended up with a solid and (hopefully!) watertight structure for well under £100 plus the cost of a couple of days of work. We're almost hoping for a bit of rain now so we can see if the guttering works OK - and if we need a bigger bucket! 

Robyn