Sarah and Guy Build A Shed

The beginning of the week starts with sewing.  I’m making the covers for the foam cushions to go on the window seats… I get Guy sewing too.  Seems only fair – it is his shed! We also decide to put up the shelves on the eventually-acquired brackets.  We have marked the floor where the uprights of the shed are, so we can screw straight into the wood.  Easy peasy.  We’ve bought (and cut and routed and stained) wide shelves so we can use the brackets the wide side out.  Easy peasy.  We fit all the brackets, making sure they are all vertical and horizontal with the spirit level.  Then we put a shelf on.  The bracket sticks out beyond the shelf.  BUGGER.  Obviously not as wide as we thought… we have to take all the brackets off and turn them round.  And the holes don’t fit.  BUGGER.  Perhaps we shouldn’t do jobs requiring brains after we’ve been at work all day?  Eventually we get sorted and the shelves look really...

The beginning part of the week is weirdly filled with woodstain… shelves, floorboards for windowseat fronts, pew ends, window seat frames… To get the right amount of stain and varnish on things, I seem to be permanently staining something either before breakfast or after work.  And my fingers end up a funny colour.  On Monday I show three people in kagoules round Guy’s house and they irritate me.  They ask millions of questions like when was it rewired and what are the floors made of and have the walls been replastered and was this once wallpapered.  I begin to get facetious.  ‘Is this wall hanging hiding damp?’  I lift it to show the perfectly blank wall and say ‘Nope’.  ‘Is this fire ever used?  It looks suspiciously new’.  I fling open the doors, point inside and say ‘Ash’.  Eventually they go.  The youngest kagoule wearer phones the next day to say the house is ’15 miles too far east’.  I refrain from pointing out ‘it’s in ...

I have a day off on Tuesday to meet the energy assessor at Guy’s house to get the energy efficiency certificate bit of the HIP we need to sell the house.  He turns up late, stays half the time he says he will, doesn’t look in the lofts and shoves off again.  He says we’ll get a rubbish rating as its an old house but that it doesn’t matter as nobody ever reads the reports.  I say that must be a shame for you and he launches into a lengthy lecture on just how successful he is and how busy he is.  Odd chap.  I go to B&Q to buy pots for planters and then head for IKEA to get the shelf supports that they didn’t have the last time we went.  We had checked their ‘on-line stockcheck’ thing and it had said ‘in stock’.  Which, as they did have one bracket, was technically correct, if useless.  This time I am wiser.  I phone IKEA and speak to A Real Person who says that yes, they are in stock and that there are 57 of them.  Hooray!  I driv...

The week starts well with the builders merchants delivering lots of bits of wood for the architrave and skirting while we’re at work.  We get home and start measuring.  We measure how long the architrave needs to be, add on the width of the architrave, measure, cut and put in place.  How easy is that?  Except when we put it in place it is two feet too long.  TWO FEET!!!  Obviously something has gone wrong in the measuring/adding up bit.  We decide we’ll just plonk the wood in place and mark it with a pencil, and then try and figure out the angles.  Luckily we do have a mitre saw otherwise it would be never-ending.  Finally we get the hang of it, and soon we’ve got the door pieces cut to fit.  Then we start on the windows, and I cut the mitres totally the wrong way, so in the end we don’t have enough wood.  Bugger.  Never mind, most of it’s done!  We label all the bits on the back (LL for Left window, Left side, RB for Rig...