Thirty Nine
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 nice. And don’t fall off the wall. We celebrate by putting two daleks on them.
Then we have the Really Good Idea of moving the little copper wall light and filling that space with a CD tower and bookshelves to Put Things On. We like making work for ourselves. So we buy wood and cut it to make two sides that will follow the slope of the roof, lots of little CD shelves, and 7 bookshelves. Then, having just got the shed looking nice, we cover the floor in plastic sheeting and start glueing, screwing and woodstaining everything.
We take a break on Friday and get ourselves clean to go to Erica’s wedding (our dormouse and bat friend). Lovely wedding, lovely venue in Somerset, and we’ve booked to stay overnight, but eventually don’t as the chap who’s buying Guy’s house is coming back to see it with his wife, who hasn’t seen it yet. Yes, we are still VERY excited! Luckily when we open the door she’s standing there with a huge grin saying ‘I love it already’ and we like her immediately. They also put a fake bed in their house to sell it… sounded even more wobbly than ours.
Then we get back down to the nitty gritty of DIY. We start by buying serious quantities of uprights, brackets and contiboard in order to put shelves in the back room.
And then they look so good we put shelves on the other side too… We have a lot of shelves. We also buy curtains (dark brown chocolate suede effect from B&Q – fab!)
Easter Sunday is not spent being clean and going out for lunch – it’s dawn to dusk DIY again. However, we do swap pressies. Guy gives me badger food, olives, a CD and a DVD about badgers, and I give him a Dr Who Tardis Easter egg (great sound effects) and two lovely Burberry cushions. Very chav, but had to be done, given the history of the floor. He is polite enough to say he likes them. I think I did better out of the pressie-swapping. Later on we watch two badgers tucking into the food we’ve put out, but after they’ve gone we discover they’ve eaten the dried fruit, peanuts and apple and COMPLETELY ignored the ‘badger food’. How ungrateful is that? It gets eaten later… perhaps the fox enjoyed it!
On Monday we erect the CD tower and shelves, finish off the shelving in the back room, do skirting boards, put up the curtain rail, move the copper light, saw legs off a table to make a coffee table (and it even ends up with legs the same length!), put up the curtains, put the internal door back on (having cut off the bottom to allow for the floor we’ve put in) and tidy up.
We think we’ve finished! Except the stove boys are coming back tomorrow to finish off the inside, paint the outside and repaint the flue.
We’re DONE! We can hardly believe it. It won’t really look furnished till Guy moves in – rug, chest of drawers, books, CDs etc. But in the meantime we are DONE on the DIY front. At least, we’re finished in the shed….
Now we start on the house!
Achieved: A fully furnished totally completed shed. We did it!
Hours worked: Sort of 8 all the days we weren’t working… and then curtain sewing after that.
Purchases: Curtains, shelves (that’s a serious quantity of shelving – we have actually cleared out TWO B&Q stores), wood for carpentry.
Pressies: I got olives, badger food, DVD and CD. Guy got chav cushions and a noisy egg.
New skill of the week: I can at last keep a pencil behind my ear and not know it’s there. I’ve been trying to do this for YEARS. Am Very Excited.
Good news of the week: We’ve FINISHED the shed!!
Wildlife update: Badgers don’t like badger food. Labradors say they do…
Plan for the week: Start on the house…
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 nice. And don’t fall off the wall. We celebrate by putting two daleks on them.
Then we have the Really Good Idea of moving the little copper wall light and filling that space with a CD tower and bookshelves to Put Things On. We like making work for ourselves. So we buy wood and cut it to make two sides that will follow the slope of the roof, lots of little CD shelves, and 7 bookshelves. Then, having just got the shed looking nice, we cover the floor in plastic sheeting and start glueing, screwing and woodstaining everything.
We take a break on Friday and get ourselves clean to go to Erica’s wedding (our dormouse and bat friend). Lovely wedding, lovely venue in Somerset, and we’ve booked to stay overnight, but eventually don’t as the chap who’s buying Guy’s house is coming back to see it with his wife, who hasn’t seen it yet. Yes, we are still VERY excited! Luckily when we open the door she’s standing there with a huge grin saying ‘I love it already’ and we like her immediately. They also put a fake bed in their house to sell it… sounded even more wobbly than ours.
Then we get back down to the nitty gritty of DIY. We start by buying serious quantities of uprights, brackets and contiboard in order to put shelves in the back room.
And then they look so good we put shelves on the other side too… We have a lot of shelves. We also buy curtains (dark brown chocolate suede effect from B&Q – fab!)
Easter Sunday is not spent being clean and going out for lunch – it’s dawn to dusk DIY again. However, we do swap pressies. Guy gives me badger food, olives, a CD and a DVD about badgers, and I give him a Dr Who Tardis Easter egg (great sound effects) and two lovely Burberry cushions. Very chav, but had to be done, given the history of the floor. He is polite enough to say he likes them. I think I did better out of the pressie-swapping. Later on we watch two badgers tucking into the food we’ve put out, but after they’ve gone we discover they’ve eaten the dried fruit, peanuts and apple and COMPLETELY ignored the ‘badger food’. How ungrateful is that? It gets eaten later… perhaps the fox enjoyed it!
On Monday we erect the CD tower and shelves, finish off the shelving in the back room, do skirting boards, put up the curtain rail, move the copper light, saw legs off a table to make a coffee table (and it even ends up with legs the same length!), put up the curtains, put the internal door back on (having cut off the bottom to allow for the floor we’ve put in) and tidy up.
We think we’ve finished! Except the stove boys are coming back tomorrow to finish off the inside, paint the outside and repaint the flue.
We’re DONE! We can hardly believe it. It won’t really look furnished till Guy moves in – rug, chest of drawers, books, CDs etc. But in the meantime we are DONE on the DIY front. At least, we’re finished in the shed….
Now we start on the house!
Achieved: A fully furnished totally completed shed. We did it!
Hours worked: Sort of 8 all the days we weren’t working… and then curtain sewing after that.
Purchases: Curtains, shelves (that’s a serious quantity of shelving – we have actually cleared out TWO B&Q stores), wood for carpentry.
Pressies: I got olives, badger food, DVD and CD. Guy got chav cushions and a noisy egg.
New skill of the week: I can at last keep a pencil behind my ear and not know it’s there. I’ve been trying to do this for YEARS. Am Very Excited.
Good news of the week: We’ve FINISHED the shed!!
Wildlife update: Badgers don’t like badger food. Labradors say they do…
Plan for the week: Start on the house…
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