Building the shed
Seb’s been doing a lot of writing here lately so I am jumping in in between the French homework I should be doing with the laundry whizzing around behind me like a jet engine and I’ll talk about something we did this past weekend.
We built a shed!
Well, sorta kinda. Almost.
We had a three day weekend (happy birthday to the Queen) and so we skipped out of work early on Friday, spent two hours packing up the truck and trailer, and then headed off to the Coromandel. The traffic wasn’t horrendous thankfully and we arrived in time to make dinner in the dark and then head off to bed. The next morning we woke early to begin our task. A couple of weekends ago we had set the posts for the shed in concrete so they were well set by now and we began our morning with hot bowls of porridge and humming and hawing around the posts. It was all very exciting. Then after the last drop of coffee was drunk we got to work.
We cut and measured and attached beams all around, then across, then filling in the spots that needed more beams. There were a lot of beams. After the beaming was done we started on the roof. Seb bought loads of corrugated iron for the roof and this came in handy right about now. We had two perfectly sized pieces and the rest were too short. Awesome. So while the first two went on quickly, the remaining 854 pieces (actually it was more like 20) had to have little pieces cut up for them to fit properly. By the end of the day (just in time for an apero) we had finished the roof. We celebrated with a delicious bowl of scrambled frittata (don’t ask) and beer.
The next morning we woke to a glorious day which was great because the weather forecast was less than favourable. We spent the day doing framing and on this day we managed to get our first window into the shed (no thanks to my horrendous measuring skills which meant having to re-do some framing…it was a mistake!!!). Anyway, after that incident I refrained from measuring anymore. Damn metric system. With the first window done we were one a roll and we put the plywood on the wall to make it look all homey. The neighbors had come to visit us the previous day and invited us to dinner and hot shower (oh yeah baby!) and so we packed it up early and set off to their place. We had an awesomely hot shower and a delicious dinner with a couple of the neighbors and then crawled back to our place with a little too much wine making our heads spin.
Needless to say we both woke up with headaches the following day. Headaches and power tools are not a good combination and Seb made it half way through the day of hammering and drilling before I sent him back to the neighbors for head-ache fixer. After that we were back on track. We managed to get the second window in and cover the back and side wall with corrugated iron before the sun set on us again. We were disappointed that we couldn’t finish the work but pretty thrilled that we had managed to get so much done in three days! The shed looks amazing and slightly unfinished but we’ll fix it right up next weekend. That’s what weekends are for!