A few more days’ bits and pieces

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My good luck with the weather (it hadn’t rained since the bales were delivered) finally ran out this weekend, with some decent falls forecast and actually arriving. The stations surrounding me recorded 30-37mm since ~midnight last night, so there was some decent water coming down.

I’ve been watching the forecasts pretty closely, so I knew this one was coming. Scooted out to the block after work on Friday and gave the shed a new wardrobe:

Concentrated on the lower walls, relying on my eaves to protect the higher walls. There was no high winds predicted, so I figured most of the water would come more-or-less straight down.

This morning the entire perimeter looked like this:

…so the eaves had done their job nicely. A little bit of splashback on the plastic in a couple of spots, but otherwise got through unscathed.

Baling

Meanwhile, there was more bales to be mutilated. With the top plates all in place and strapped down, the gaps between the plates and the ceiling had to be filled. Started with the wet area/dusty room, which was the smallest and fiddliest bit. Did most of this bit by stapling mesh to the inside of the beam, bringing it along the ceiling to the inside wall and then fold down, fill underneath it with straw and pinned it into the main wall. This…seemed to work well:

(ignoring that bit in the corner) but jeez it was fiddly, slow and prone to stabbing me a lot with the mesh. These bits were also made more complicated by the top plates not being parallel to the ceiling.

In the main room, I changed tactics – flat piece of mesh stapled to the outside of the beam, and pinned into the existing straw below. Then I could use some of my vast supply of loose straw (I knew I was keeping it for a reason….) to fill the gaps, and cut a bale to put above the plate itself.

This was much faster, and a lot less hazardous to my health, at the cost of some smoothness of the inside face:

By the end of the weekend I had three sides of the shed (lacking only the front wall over the doors) pretty much finished, bar the final cleanup and meshing:

This one needs a bit of stuffing 😉

The dog spent all weekend supervising, and generally looking bored:

Wood hoarding… 🙂

Somewhere in the last few weeks I had the idea of replacing the roller doors with a set of custom barn doors – figured if I could source some timber it would actually be cheaper than roller doors, more in keeping with the aesthetic I’m going for and….well, just downright cool.

A couple of days later the local auction house pops up a huge listing of milled marri boards. Gosh, don’t mind if I do?! Ended up picking up this load of 53 100x50x3200 pieces:

which I can process (once I get my gear out of its sea container) and turn into some rather nice doors.

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