The pond shed, which is primarily for housing the pond filtration equipment, but will also be used as a bike shed, is now almost finished.
Our tame builder, Colin, loves working for us as it's only a few yards for him to commute. This is what a tame builder looks like in its natural habitat.
He started with a concrete pad in the only logical place for the shed, which is not ideal as it hides some of the garden and part of the pond from the house.
The pad is being laid in two sections with an expansion gap, to prevent cracking - the bit on the left still has to be completed. The weight of a filter full of water is considerable and so he went a little deeper than normal and used some of the rubble on our depot to bulk it out.
The shed was delivered on Tuesday, on time, giving us enough time within the day to erect the main section; however, the quality was atrocious when you consider the panels should be identical if manufactured on a production line.
We had to take the shed apart once because the instructions were very poor. None of the parts were numbered, some of the tongue and groove panels hadn't been fully slotted together before being fixed into place, resulting in mismatches externally, and one panel was split quite badly. Not what you expect from something costing £1,600. However, Colin is a master of rectifying ugliness and so long as I apply some high quality protection at regular intervals (something most people omit) it should outlast me.
Colin could have made a much sturdier shed himself (he made our 2 bedroom cabins and Hay's garden office, as well as the house itself), but he said that the cost would have been prohibitive for something to be used for pond filtration equipment and a few bikes.
Having 3 blokes - me, Bruno (aka No.2 Son) and Colin - interpreting the instructions was not ideal, as we all reached different conclusions about the order in which it went together. When you think of it, all we really needed was one woman interpreting the instructions, as women operate from first principles and actually take the time to read them properly, rather than merely looking at diagrams and using intuition.
Just the roofing felt, doors, a concrete pad extension on the left and the little veranda that goes on the left hand side remain to be completed by Colin over the next day or two.
3 blokes achieved the above in 5 hours, with a bit of confused backtracking, and with a little time off for lunch. The rest is down to Colin.
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