• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Busy weekend after Doris!

W

woodstalker

Nordic Pine
Joined
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Location
Amesbury, Wiltshire
So I had booked a day off on friday to drive to Bristol and pick up the latest eBay purchase for Mrs Woodstalker; it was a Little Tikes Slide and climbing frame set for the garden (bearing in mind my daughter is 10 months old :shock: ) any way on Friday morning just as i was about to set off Mrs W notices that all the felt on the summerhouse had ripped off in the high winds of the previous day which was a little annoying. The summerhouse is currently used to store all sorts that i could do without getting wet so this needed sorting before it rained on Saturday lunchtime according tot he forecast.

Saturday morning required an early morning dash to the Building supply place to get some thick felt; i originally planned to re roof it over the summer anyway because it was starting to leak in a few places but now i didn't have time to get in an order of corrugated bitumen sheets which i banked on using so felt it was!

It took a couple of hours, mainly because we had both been up all Friday night with the little one and i had a slightly dicky tummy which made being up a ladder very exciting!

Here are the progress pics:


The original felt just laying back over before i stripped it off.


After stripping it off i found it was fairly damp with a lot of mildew and mould so i sprayed it all with a thin bleach solution to kill as much of it as i could and left the roof open to dry whilst i cut my felt to the correct size.


Edge pieces all done


Capping piece almost on


And finished, just in time because it started to rain not too long after this. So i retired to watch the 6 nations and await the arrival of our guests for the weekend.

They left on Sunday at about 2 o'clock so i thought i'd best get on sorting Mrs Woodstalkers greenhouse out which we have been carting around for two house moves. For her birthday we went to the Garden Centre on friday afternoon and got a load of veggies and tomatoes for the new veggie patch so she needs the greenhouse to start them off. I needed to put it on a firm base in the corner and the other week, inspired by a workshop build on here, i used that plastic mesh:


Here's the plot


I had load of old bricks from a path i had removed previously so they went in to be whacked level by the sledgehammer.


Then a load of scalpings reclaimed from the same path


Then a blinding layer of sand


finally the membrane and then the grid with more gravel reclaimed from the same path. I had just enough grids to fit the base of the greenhouse but i figured it would be better to have an edge all round and a bigger one at the front where the door is so i ordered four more which meant this is as far as i got. Plus it was getting dark and also starting to rain so i called it a day at this point.

Sorry for the long post but since i can't ad anything to my workshop build i thought i would show you all i do actually do something!
 
Doris got hold of a one ton bag of celotex and polystyrene waste and spun it around the garden to disgorge its contents. Some of the bits I had to fetch from the edge of the wood, 250 metres away, the following day. The surface of the pond was half covered. It also got under the membrane on my gable and ripped a piece off, which exposed the insulation in the loft and potentially put the roof at risk. So in the middle of the fiercest wind I found myself at the top of a ladder (which was being blown sideways across the wall), trying to staple a bit of fabric back into place. Not the most fun I've ever had in my life.
 
We had a bit of a "Doris Day" here too ... couple of roof tiles off the house, and some of the cement pointing? on the gable ends under the tile edge , just missed the cars ! :o
 
On Doris day I went to palletise a big lump of wadkin for a friend in Denmark and of coarse couldn't resist a lovely little RS lathe. The dealers place was in Bolton which got it pretty bad. His workers flat got a gable end dropped on it. When I got home the wife said it was pretty calm, apparently the eye of the storm past over. The roads were clear with very few wagons daring to travel.
 
That looks like back breaking work.
When I installed my GH last autumn I sank 8 x 100mm diameter tubes 800mm into the ground (used an auger to make the holes). The GH base is then attached to angle iron with the last 2 inches splayed out and dropped into the tubes then filled with concrete. All as per manufactures instructions.
Survived Doris :D
 
Andyp":1vi2n4ac said:
That looks like back breaking work.
When I installed my GH last autumn I sank 8 x 100mm diameter tubes 800mm into the ground (used an auger to make the holes). The GH base is then attached to angle iron with the last 2 inches splayed out and dropped into the tubes then filled with concrete. All as per manufactures instructions.
Survived Doris :D
Click to expand...

Yes I am feeling it this morning it has to be said, and I only had a couple of hits to get it to this stage too.

Hopefully will get the base finished this week and the frame up ready to glaze it on the weekend but we'll see if the weather plays ball!
 
Doris had her wicked way with me too…

I'll see your lost felt and raise you a completely removed shed roof!!



That orange thing is the pent roof from my (admittedly el cheapo) shed which has been ripped off and carried a good 30 feet over the top of 8ft high bushes and into my pond, smashing 2 cast aluminium heron statues and crushing my wife's lovely patina'd copper bird bath. :(



Chairs strewn all over the garden so these are now living temporarily in the workshop



Rocking chair NEVER stays upright in wind. The basketball hoop followed it around a couple of hours later when the winds were at their strongest, around 2pm...



You can just about make out the shed behind the bushes to the back right of this photo…



She even blew her foul liquid in through the wooden doors! Fortunately we were well aware of these failings and a whole programme of window and bi-fold door replacements is in the offing in around 6 weeks time…



Roof is now back on the shed but not screwed on so I need to do that soon before storm Ewan/Euan hits...

Cheers
Mark
 
Ok Mark you win :D

Got a load more of that grid stuff coming this week and a few tons of scalpings to level off my workshop site to turn it into a play area and garden shed spot for my little one and wife.

Oh the sacrifices we make!!! :lol:
 
A bit of a delay due to some poor weather, lack of daylight and the fact i could not find the big bag of glazing clips i've been tripping over for the last 3 years. Goodness knows what I have done with them! Anyway had a good weekend so far in the garden.

Got the greenhouse finished:






My Supervisor approves!


All done, i needed four new panes of glass to replace some that had broken and the glazing clips turned up from Amazon so i was able to double up on them to make sure nothing blew out in the wind.

Then i turned my attention to waste ground next to my workshop base to be. I figured i could tidy it up and put a little garden shed on it for Mrs Woodstalker's gardening tools and they would be right next to the veggie patch to make life easy:



a weed membrane, a tonne and half of scalpings and some sand to smooth it flat all compacted by a whacker plate. As you can see close supervision required again.


All grids cut to size


All filled with left over gravel reclaimed from the path i dug up.

So today i will be doing a bit more in the garden, mainly picking the flints out of the veg patch ready to get rotavating (i am borrowing my grandads old Howard Rotavator if we can get it going, its not been started for forty years! otherwise i will have to hire one) Then getting the flints out of the left over topsoil used to level off the lawn ready to seed it and generally getting the garden tidied up.
 
Andyp":j76e42f9 said:
Good progress. What is holding that greenhouse plinth down?
Click to expand...

Currently the weight of the glass, but i had planned to use concrete blocks in each corner, although i might get some spikes to drive in too, the problem being i'll inevitably hit one of the bricks i used in the sub base!
 
woodstalker":2vhh8slv said:
Andyp":2vhh8slv said:
Good progress. What is holding that greenhouse plinth down?
Click to expand...

Currently the weight of the glass, but i had planned to use concrete blocks in each corner, although i might get some spikes to drive in too, the problem being i'll inevitably hit one of the bricks i used in the sub base!
Click to expand...

I am sure you know this already but that is not enough. I have a much heavier framed GH with 3mm toughened glass. It is held down with 8 spikes concreted into 100mm tubes of concrete 800mm deep.

I am not sure what you can build on top of that plastic mesh but I'd be inclined towards making a brick or concrete plinth to attached the metal GH plinth to. This will have the added advantage of raising the height of the GH at the same time.
 
So i have enough concrete lintels that i can put a continuous border around the inside of the greenhouse plinth which should be enough weight to hold the greenhouse in place i hope. Just waiting to cut a couple of them to size.

In the meantime i am off work for the next two weeks so with Mrs Woodstalker at work and the Littlest Woodstalker still off to nursery each day it has given me a big opportunity to get as much of the garden finished as i can before i go away. Its a combination of getting a man in to do it (most of it) and a bit of DIY shenanigans. So today i picked up a rotavator from a hire place in Andover. I was hoping to use my grandfathers Howard Bantam but that needs an engine rebuild which i have just ordered all the parts for, so i had to hire one for now.

I started off with this:



The long pile of the right is the compost heap i have spread all over the soil to get some organic what nots into the soil.

After much wrestling and swearing for a few hours i ended the day like this:



A fair few stones to now pick out but much more ready for Mrs Woodstalker to plant her veggies in.

By the way could one of the mods move this thread to the Woodmanglers Retreat; theres not much woodwork going on at the minute so i think this might be in the wrong place.

Although i am planning on building a raised wooden planter so we've got somewhere safe(ish) from the slugs so there should be some fine woodworking on display there!
 
Malc2098":2dps7432 said:
Nice job. Wish all my gardening efforts looked that good!
Click to expand...

Cheers Malc, i am very good at clearing and destroying, less good at the growing stuff; i leave that to Mrs Woodstalker, she is very good at bringing a bit of life back to a garden!
 
Well no need to worry about the Summerhouse leaking agin this winter:



This is me trying to put it out with the garden hose at half five in the morning last friday waiting for the fire brigade to arrive... :shock:
 
Good grief that's a bit on the terminal side, any idea how it started? I hope there was nothing of value stored in there.
 
genuinely no idea, the fire brigade ran through the list of possibilities and we ruled them out one by one leaving arson as a possibility. The rozzers came round too and did the same. No idea why or how someone did it but there were no other sources of ignition about. I am now overseas and left the family behind so have beefed up the locks, had the alarm serviced and am looking at getting some cctv installed.

Lost a decent Hayter 48 mower and a large amount of less pricey garden machinery but that still added up, plus the cost of the replacing the summerhouse too. Mrs Woodstalker has the loss adjuster coming round next week so hopefully insurance will cover a lot of it.
 
noooooo !!! :(

apart from the burning, there will be the sleepless nights listening to every noise that isn't there :-(
I hope the insurance coffs up properly, then doesn't want it all back over the coming years :evil:
 
Ouch..you have my sympathies. If you are looking at cameras, especially if you are away a lot then take a look at Nest Outdoor camera. I'm rather impressed with it.
 
Sympathies from down here, too!!

5.30? Sun had been up an hour or more, very low. Any glass or lenses it could have shown through? Any vapour from the Hayter?
 
Cheers for the replies all, sun was up but a touch cloudy, nothing like the preceding hot days. Mower hadn't been used for ten days because i had set a contractor up to do the lawns whilst i am away to save the wife trying to start the big mower and figure out where to put little woodstalker.

It would seem some stuff is covered by the house cove limits and other bits by the garden cover limits so i am hopeful it should all be covered. I have photos of everything that came out of the wreckage and receipts/manuals for pretty much all of it less the Hayter but i did clean that up in order to pull the serial number off it since it was the most expensive single item in there!

It was two days dealing with that i could have spent packing and being with the family before i came away. The saving grace was that my tools are in the storeroom/workshop so weren't affected.
 
Tough luck. I always feel sickened when I see property go up in smoke. Hope you do not have a hassle with your insurance.
 
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