Lockdown project.

Once there was a green shed... it was too small... and very green... way too green even for a greenspace such as a garden.

It was in a garden that had been neglected for close to seven years.

A new shed was purchased.

Fortunately, my son arrived in Somerset and he helped me created a sub-frame for the new shed.

The new shed was bigger but it wasn't particularly tall.

The shed was painted white... the fence was still green... too green. We'll also note that the green fence appears to have some random bits of wood tacked to it... that's because storm Kate: 2015 (previously Hurricane Kate knocked it over, and it took from March until August to find a fencing company that wasn't too busy, to come and fix it... it was a nuisance).

After three winters of trying to coax the lawn back to life, we decided it was not worth the effort.

We gravelled the garden and the white shed and the gravel made the green fence look less crap (well in this picture anyway).

Later the fence was repaired and painted a nice pale grey. Bits of the old shed were upcycled and became a log store, The log store is green and white... so `not' too green.

Jumping forward to 2020, and moho (as seen below), was being filled with stuff from the shed. 

This stuff,

And this stuff

Then I found all these pallets where I used to work.

I disassembled the pallets and put them in my car.

Then I put the disassembleb pallets in the empty shed to dry off.

Then I went and disassembled the rest of the pallets and bought them home. This was the deal. All the pallets had to come home with me... I have quite a bit of spare pallet wood.

I bought a 4.5mtr length of twin-wall opal finish polycarbonate and put it in the passage of our house. This went down like a lead balloon... BUT... it wasn''t just for decoration or to be wacky and weird.

The pallet wood (this isn't all of it) had to be re-stacked because it was soaking wet having been dumped in the yard where I used to work.

The shed as you can see had sprung a leak. It wasn't the best shed money could buy, but we had to buy it when we can back from travelling because we needed somewhere to store stuff as we renovated home.

I bought this pile of materials from a builders merchants. You are looking at £429. You have to be clever when your budget is about £600 in total. Shall we see what I did with my £429 of materials?

That's a Makita battery drill I've had since 2005. Makita Battery Drills are good. The Makita battery drill is on the shed roof. The shed roof has been stripped of roofing felt... some may say that is sub-optimal for a shed roof.

Oh good golly... that's even more sub-optimal. But look how the sun shines on the lovely Bosch compound mitre saw. The Bosch compound mitre saw makes me happy. It also transforms me into someone who is half decent at woodwork.

Look more tool porn, and some casually placed bits of 50x50mm prepared timber.

I wonder what it's for? That's you asking the question. I already know what it's for.

Oh... I see (that's you again). Yes, indeed I am creating a new roof at 7° inverse and opposite to the original and about 460mm higher.

Look, it's all clamped and bird-mouth cut and everything. Cor that saws really cool... I wish I had one (that's you again... I already own one).

The original roof slabs are now being put back up. Remember budget £600, recycling is important.

A little bit of fettling, and some new screws (Reisser Cutter Screws) and the original roof will be back to square.

The next day the roof was felted. I have to admit that even though I'd hung off the roof beams, I still felt quite nervous felting the roof, mainly because it's been my experience that when an unsupported human suddenly and unexpectedly experiences gravity from a height above maybe six or seven inches that the result is usually `ouch'.

Remember that bit of ornamental Opal finish twin-wall polycarbonate?

I wonder what's under the orange plastic that the polycarbonate used to be in?

It looks like some long flat bits of wood. And look at the trimmed felt and dart windows filling the ends of the shed.

There are those long bits of wood that were under the orange plastic. Guess what they are for?

And there are some more of them.

Yeah alright get on with it.

Crivens, recladding the front of the shed with full-length boards.

What kind of witchcraft is this?

Oooo Shiney... but why only the front? Crickey you ask lot's of questions.

However, to answer. Because that's the west face. And that's where Storm Kate came from, and where storm Kate comes from, is where almost all the weather comes from, and a single layer of shiplap isn't enough to keep water from getting under the boards. So using a few lengths of tongue and groove 19mm shiplap, offset to overlap the existing shiplap protects the weather face of the shed... it looks smarter as well.

Amanda painted it white. Doesn't that look sexy.

Blimey that orange plastic gets everywhere.

No point throwing it away, when it can act like insulation. Bit loud mind (down here in Somerset they don't say `Mind you' they say `Mind' but they say so it sounds like `Moind').

I re-framed the front window, using bits of tongue and groove cladding I stripped to width from the odds and ends of offcuts.

Remember all that pallet wood?

This is almost like stop motion. Phwoooar look at that compound mitre saw, all erect on its sawhorse bench with sliding rails.

The bench below is part of the original `too green' sheds floor. Recycling and upcycling are important and save you real money, but sometimes they cost you time. However, you can't save time, you can only spend it wisely.

Internal pallet cladding primed all over once.

External barge board pieces primed and painted.

Internal pallet cladding top-coated using Cuprinol Shades `Daisy White'... I reckon I out to get Adsense ... afterall I've mentioned, Makita, Bosch, Cuprinol and Reisser Cutter. 

Outside bargeboard to the weather face and Polypipe guttering... I definitely need to sign up to Adsense and sell my soul to Google. Note the mix of black and with fittings. That because I had the white brackets already to fix the house guttering after Storm Kate, and installing 700ltrs of water butts.

Black guttering white brackets, sort of Starwars Stormtrooper guttering... Yup Adsense... definitely need that.

Oh no what's happened, the shed was all empty and looking cool and you filled it up with crap again (that's you talking again... I wish you wouldn't jump to conclusions). The project has had to go on semi hold, it's deepest darkest coldest wetest winter. I've partially made the benches up, but there is a lot of spare pallet material and it needs some projects and some decent weather.

Note, one very high bench on the right. I may have mentioned on my/our other blog that I have a bad back, I can't stoop even a little bit, so the closer my work is to my eyes the easier it is on the spine.

The lower left-hand bench is for potting and the like. And yes that is bog-standard worktop. We have a place up the road called the Woodpile he sells seconds so it's relatively cheap. It's also easy to sweep. What you can't see is the scruffy old bit I reclaimed from our next-door neighbour's kitchen refurb that we can use as a cutting surface.

Spring is a few weeks away. And as soon as it's here I'll be out here building our next lot of solutions.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. 

£500, some upcycled pallet wood, some Reisser Cutter screws (seriously I need to get Adsense). So if you have lot of locked down weekends and evenings you can upcycle your shed into a contemporary Mancave.

You can't save time, only spend it wisely.

Some time ago I set this up, and then life, the pandemic, a shed and campervan stuffed to the gunnels with the contents of a shed sidetracked me, and the well-pool of creative writing was dammed for a while... I reckon six years... unless you count various posts on various forms of social media. So the above is nonsense I have been writing thousands of words, just not here in my personal space. And suddenly I wish I could gather them here to demonstrate that I have written. How odd.

So have I spent my time wisely? Probably not as wisely as I could. However, I have achieved much in spite of a lack of focus outside the current crisis, furlough, redundancy, change of `job' (I don't have a dictionary definable career anymore). 

This is an awkward write, who am I writing for? I think me, but I'm subjecting you to my musings. Mostly I'm subjecting you to my musings because I am going, being, have been, a little mad for a while. I suspect you have too.

On the computer I'm typing on in a directory there is a story I started writing in 2011 about an incident that results in a `Stand' level depopulation event `The Stand': (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand),  and the aftermath and re-build of a pocket of civilisation. Life got in the way, and I for want of a better phrase `abandoned the effort'. 

Neither The Stand, nor my own attempt, imagined a year of not much lethality, but high transmissibility, and the `nuisance' of lockdowns. 

Pandemics are supposed to be wildfires of contagion, like in the film named Contagion or the earlier film Outbreak... martial law, megadeath civil unrest, troops in gas masks on every corner, curfew breakers and looters shot in the back and left for the rats. They aren't supposed to be middle-class angsty, work from home, wear a mask wash your hands and don't meet other people indoors, and not being allowed to go to the pub events. They are supposed to be rapid and over and back to some normality a week after the vaccine is developed... oh how science has turned us over its knee and spanked that silly notion out of our noggins.

This isn't the pandemic we expected, and it isn't the Pandemic we wanted (we didn't want a pandemic at all). But here we are eleven months in, going stir crazy, work home, work home, work home, furlough for six months, redundant, unemployed for two months and then back to, Work home, Work home. Waiting for our turn to get a vaccination and hoping that it trains your immune system well enough after two jabs to recognise the future variants well enough that we don't need to go into an annual cycle of winter lockdown-lights (it is a possibility at least for the vulnerable), and annual vaccinations on a best guess of which variant may be lurking. 

I'm no epidemiologist, but from the 6th of January 2020, when Kate Silverton first reported the outbreak of a what looked like new pneumonia-causing disease in China I've followed every twist and turn here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert. 

When Kate first dropped this story on the late bulletin, only six people had died, it was confined (we thought) to Wuhan or hopefully just China and that it would do what SARS did seventeen years before and fizzle out.

This is the first proper article I read once I'd followed the mainstream reporting, which was inadequate and didn't really tell you what you were facing:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2761044?guestAccessKey=f61bd430-07d8-4b86-a749-bec05bfffb65

I searched for this kind of stuff after it was reluctantly disclosed by the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party that some doctors and other medical staff were getting ill and that it was likely that the infection was being caught as readily through the eyes as by breathing in viral particles.

That was when we did a bit of gentle stockpiling, some six weeks before panic buying toilet rolls became a thing... I watched aghast as morons did the exact opposite of best practice for the prevention of disease, and wondered where they got this diarrhea notion from? Later (and still) it became apparent that most people got their news from headlines (without reading articles), or worse still from memes, based on nothing more than shit-stirring trolls `ironically' doing dis-information.

So did I make good use of 2020 in spite of Covid? Probably yes. Could I (in hindsight) have made better use of 2020. Probably. 

It was a protracted and long year, a never-ending cycle of mainstream media moronism, of water muddying, blame-storming, virtue-signalling and personal tragedies by the hundreds of thousands.

None of us were prepared for pandemic in slow time, none of us were prepared for the levels of boredom that have ensued. And the NHS was unlikely to have been prepared for this to go on and on and on like it has. But there is now  light at the end of this long twisty tunnel. And I for one hope to have a more productive 2021 (within the confines of yet again being in a miserable forty-hour week desperation job). 

You couldn't make it up.