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22/11/06
The Workshop Project
I don't know what got in to me, but for some reason I decided it would be a really good idea to start my workshop building project in the middle of winter. You would have thought that having put so much time and effort in to the pond earlier in the year that I would want a break. Nope, not me. So, with a half baked plan and a pile of second hand concrete garage parts we got going.
November 2005
In simple terms the plan was to clear out the odd bit of land between the end of the barn and the east boundary and fill it with a workshop. This area varies from 8 feet wide at one end to about 11 feet at the other. In the first picture this is the area between the trees and the right hand end of the building. Hmm, I have just re-read that last statement and looked at the picture again - there are a lot of trees aren't there! I'm sure you can work it out.
Suffice it to say, we hired a digger in for a weekend and I employed the help of friends and family to help clear the site. I was not surprised to find out that after we cleared the site we then spent another three or four more weekends levelling it even further. I am not sure if I originally judged it really badly because I was sitting up on a digger or because I had drunk too much beer. Ho hum.
February 2006
Putting in the shuttering was fairly quick work, but filling it with hardcore and levelling that was a real drag. The hardcore we used was from the remains of the concrete base we broke up when we dug the pond. It was nice to finally get rid of this pile of "rubbish" and clear the area further. Now I come to think of it, we did actually run out of hardcore. This suggests to me that I may have made the base a little on the deep side, but I wanted it to be level with the existing building (which it is). We got the remaining hardcore from Andy and Kate who were taking down a wall in their kitchen. It saved them the hassle of getting rid of it and it was a good result for us.
March 2006
I can't remember how many weeks the hardcore sat there, but it certainly had plenty of time to settle. However long it was, I know it was still cold and horrible when we enrolled Lucy, Arun and Steve to come and help out. We dug out the cement mixer that was lurking behind our shed and had been pretty much forgotten about and ordered a couple of tonnes of sand, along with lots of bags of cement. "Lots" is a technical term used by would be quantity surveyors when they haven't really got a clue how much they need i.e. Me! As it turns out we didn't have much of either left over, but it was all based on guess work.
It was at this point that it really started to feel like a proper building project and not like a mindless exercise in moving earth and rock around.
May/ June 2006
Easter came and went very quickly and the base had plenty of time to set and begin to cure. I had committed to purchasing a second hand concrete garage earlier in the year, and the time had come to collect it. This was to form the main structure of the building, and this proved to be a good plan. What I hadn't considered was just how heavy the components were! The building was laying "flat packed" in the corner of a field. It had been raining for several days before we picked it up and consequently we got the van stuck a couple of times. It was very frustrating. It ended up taking two weekends to finally collect all the parts, but we got there in the end.
The roof components were scrap and the bolts were beyond help. The brackets were OK though. Well, they were OK until such time as I foolishly left them laying around near a pile of rubbish and they got cleared up in to the bin. Hmm. This slowed the project down by about three weeks whilst I sourced replacement parts. In retrospect this probably wasn't too bad a thing because the new bolts and brackets meant construction of the shell was very quick. I got from ground to roof plate level in one afternoon!
July 2006
The next tricky part was creating and joining the new roof. The original roof pitch for the concrete garage ran in the wrong direction so I had to scrap the metal frame and build a new roof frame from scratch. The alignment with the existing building was more "artistic" than technical, but it looks good and more importantly it doesn't leak!
All that was left to do was to build a door, fit glass to the windows and paint.
It was September before we finally got around to painting the floor and doing the electrics, but it looks great in there now I've started filling it with my junk! With that job over though, we realised the house desperately needed painting. We should really have done that last year, but we completed it in record time. That's a story for another day though.
Since the workshop was finished I have connected it and the bar up to the network in the house. This means I can use it for PC repairs as well as motorcycle work. It is also the home to the webcam when that is running.
All that is left to do is to say a big thank you to everyone that helped - Andy, Kate, Lucy, Arun, Steve. A particular big thank you has to go to my wonderful wife Steph and my father Peter for endless support and patience when things were not perhaps going as well as they should.
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