Gardening & Construction

Gardening and sheds

This page is about my garden and my sheds, mostly because there’s a creative / construction aspect to it.

When I first moved into my house the garden hadn’t really been looked after for a while – there were several old buildings and trees and things that were really out of control, as well as a giant Ivy which my neighbours hated. There was a Wendy house built of bricks and a shed made of random wood including desks, kitchen surface, and pointed wood from a picket fence. Most of this work took place over 2010 and 2011. First to deal with the Ivy:

And then the trees. These are Leylandii trees which grow and grow and grow:

Since the Wendy house was tiny – the door was only just big enough to get the lawn mower into, and it flooded in the rain, I decided to knock it down:

And next the other shed too:

The plan is to put one larger wooden building in, so I extended the existing concrete base:

I used the bricks from the Wendy house as hardcore for the base:

This is 0.75 tons of concrete, but I used 1.5 tons in total, all mixed by hand:

And finally covered the piece of concrete where the Wendy house was with decking:

I was going to build something, but I found a good deal on eBay for a ready made shed, an they installed it too:

However, that left me with a blank spot right at the bottom of the garden behind the shed. There was already a concrete base there, but it was quite a bit higher than the other one, so in order to put the new shed on it I’d either have to have dug it up or made the new one much thicker. I also needed a space for my hot tub, so I decided to build a log cabin from inch thick decking wood which was on sale at my local DIY store at the time:

All of this is made from 8ft bits of decking:

In inside was then clad with more decking, with the grooved part of the wood facing outwards:

I used triple-wall Polycarbonate roofing sheets to let some light in:

I uprooted a couple of trees to make space for the doors, which were also made from scratch out of softwood:

And what’s inside?: