Sarah and Guy Build A Shed

Just before Christmas we receive some bad news – the glorious (and very old) beech tree behind the shed is infirm.  Well, it is 250 years old… it seems that it is simply tired, and liable to fall over.  In the direction of the shed.  And the pool cabin.  Oops.  We’ve had a tree surgeon look at it and also had some serious tree analysts with sound wave kit stuff, and we’ve been given three options – cut it down, cut it back (which will probably kill it anyway) or leave it for another year, hope it doesn’t come down, and then fell it.  Not great options…  Still, look on the bright side – we’ll be ok for firewood for the next 30 years… Christmas is lovely… Guy stays with his mum (no, that’s not why it’s lovely, wait a bit…) and then drives her down for lunch on Christmas Day, my mum comes round too and we all have lunch together.  Guy makes himself a puff pastry veggie plait thing, and the rest of us have a farmer’s market chicken, which is de...

On Monday we decide that there HAS to be an easier way of cleaning the floorboards… we do some hunting on the internet and come up with the following suggestions: 1.  Nitromors.  Yes, we know, been there tried that. 2.  Caustic Soda – will eat the wood.  Best not then, eh? 3.  Sandblasting – apparently ok on hardwood (like maple, hooray).  Will cost but we are now past caring… There is (luckily) a sandblasting chap (Jason) near home, so we arrange that Guy will meet him in the centre of Llanbradach and give him two floorboards to test.  Guy shoots straight through Llanbradach, not realising that that was, in fact, the centre.   Big place.  Jason takes away our boards and agrees to meet up again with the results on Wednesday morning. On Wednesday Guy picks up the two planks.  Not sandblasted.  Well, not except for about a foot on one end – the sand blasted not only the grunge, but also the wood and just wore it away....

On Monday I have the utterly brilliant idea of putting the party lights up.  These will be the party lights we put up for Rob, took down, put up for the shed boys, and took down again.  This means that we can (a) find the shed in the dark and (b) work in it when it is dark (all the available non-working hours from Monday to Friday) and (c) finish the floorboards. With the lights up we can now de-nail boards in the cabin and clean them too.  Except this is the coldest week this winter and it is FREEZING out there…  Warmer in the shed, but still COLD.  The sort of cold where you can’t feel your fingers.  Which isn’t great for chiselling… We shift the floorboards so that where my sitting room used to look like this: It now looks like this: Festive, eh? Anyway, back to the floorboards.  We’re not really, er, winning.  We knock out the nails, which is better now with the nail punch (the tool I was calling a ‘nail knocking out thingy...

Thursday dawns wet and windy – not a good day for shed-putting-up.  I wake at 5, listening vaguely to the pelting rain and a distant alarm which has obviously been set off by the windy weather.  The heating tries to start, despite the fact that it’s too early, and then the heating and the alarm both stop abruptly.  Power cut?  I try the radio… yep, the power’s out.  So how, exactly, am I going to produce bacon butties and hot tea for shed builders who’ve been on the road for 4 hours…  I lie in bed and Come Up With A Plan.  There’ll be enough residual heat in the Aga for the first round of tea and butties, then I can boil kettles and fill flasks, and cook the beef for sandwiches at mums, and we can drive the soup (made but not blended yet) up to Guy’s to work the blender.  Good grief!  At 6 the power comes back on, so my plans aren’t needed – I could have slept the last hour after all…  At 6.30 I ring Guy – he’s so full of cold that he’s...

It’s a completely unsheddy week, so we’re both looking forward to Guy’s gig on Thursday night and a day off work on Friday – nothing much planned, except a lazy morning, bit of shopping, catch up on some telly, take it easy. As I’m leaving work on Thursday I get a phone call from Keith the Shed to say our shed is ready and how about Wednesday?  What, NEXT Wednesday?  Yes, yes, yes and YES!   I decide not to phone Guy to tell him as I want to see his reaction… when he picks me up for the gig I say casually ‘Keith phoned, he’s coming down with the shed next Wednesday…’ and then there’s a lot of ‘what, NEXT Wednesday?’ and ‘WOO HOO’ for a while.  To say we are excited is a bit of an understatement. WOO HOO!  And then we start planning madly… the forecast is horrendous (again) for the weekend, so we think we ought to finish the drainage on Friday.  Our nice lazy ‘recovering after the gig’ Friday…  We spend the entire journey into Cardiff discussing...