Tuesday 5 May 2015

New Block Shed - Self Build Part 1 - Digging out


Well it's that spring time time of year, which at our house means; building project!

My dad, brother & friend Case put up a 10 x 8ft shed about 4 years ago to store all of the usual things a minimalist house cannot store. The roof that came with it was so under spec for the span of the shed that it has given up and no amount of patch jobs can repair it, so we decided that we will build a really sturdy block shed instead.

The bottom of our garden had a huge mound in it along with a sycamore and a hawthorn tree. Although these were great fun for Raph to play on, they weren't the best use of our garden, so they're all coming out to make space for our new build outhouse. The area will be about 5m x 3m so it's a great bonus space.

I did the usual ring around for friends to help and of course the best helper around, my dad! I knew it would take too long to dig out by hand so I hired a digger for a week. I rang around local building merchants & in the end hired an 0.8 tonne micro digger. They are brilliant as they fit through a normal door or gate with the tracks in. It was around £250 for the week including delivery. It's not much more to hire them for the week than for a day & it means you can take your time a bit more. I've never used a digger before but you get used to it quite quickly. I did put a few dints in wheelbarrows & the old shed but if you take your time it is really fun.

The digger arrived on a Friday evening to mine & Raph's excitement & we were on it until bedtime for the little man ready for an exciting Saturday & week to come.

One digger, four ten-tonne-lorry-loads taking soil away, many achy legs and arms, many empty beer bottles, one enormous tree stump and one big hole ready for footings.

I will go on to talk about concrete footings on the next post so stay tuned.












Post by Rob.
SHARE:

No comments

Post a Comment

Blogger Template Created by pipdig