A-Frame Garden Shed built from preused wood and pallets

[SwissGuy]

Today's focus in the garden mainly was on plucking berries. And as sundays I am not allowed to make noise I just did some landscaping again.
I had some fine gravel left and there are still a few concrete plates, so I poured and leveled some gravel in front of both side doors. On the right (tool shed) I placed two plates and on the left I put down six.

As it was very windy today, I needed to fix the left door.

And I also realized that I messed up the rubber cover when I added the left eave...

But I really like how the shed looks already

Oh and yeah we collected some berries (even if I did only two boxes)...

 

[SwissGuy]

I almost forgot to post: I started to work on the inside and got at the counter. I'll use the few flooring boards with newspaper scraps that I have left for it.
I didn't take separate pictures, as I was a bit in a hurry, but I tried the time lapse setting of my new action cam for you:

 

[SwissGuy]

Here you can better see, where I'm heading with the counter. It will protrude into the room in the area of the little kitchen cabinet and then follow along the wall a bit narrower. Like this I hope to create enough storage (shelfs underneath) and counter space and in the same time keeping the room as large as possible to move around, when the roof is closed...

I would have finished it on monday, but my router bit decided to fall apart.
But today I bought a new one and some PU clear coat. So hopefully on saturday I might be able to finish off the wall and counter. We will see...

 

[SwissGuy]

Yesterday I had a few hours of me time in the garden and got some important bits done.

I finished the little cellar by finally closing the gap between the top row of the bricks and the wooden frame. So no more chance for mice and rats to get in there!

Then I also redid the two beams that hold the roof up. I recut the middle ends, as they weren't cut off really square before and seeing it always got my inner Monk in uproar. Now the beams are about one centimeter shorter and there is no more instantly visible gap inbetween the two folding halfs.

While at it I also installed my homemade latch to keep them from folding unintendedly.

But most important, I finished the counter! It's all fixed in place and the front edge is finally rounded properly with my new rounder bit.

I also excavated the remaining mod podge from my Wolverine build and gave wall and counter a first basecoat. Later I will finish both off with some clear semigloss PU floor coat. The wall will probably get only one coat, the counter at least two.

And here's yesterdays video:


Have a nice 4th of July everyone over in the U.S.!
I'll think of you, when I'm passing by the "Platz des 4. Juli" on my way to work!

 

[SwissGuy]

Today after work I gave the counter and the wall several coats of clear floor sealant. It was so warm, the coats were dry within minutes...

Then it was time to pluck some more berries and back home to do some marmelade cooking...

 

[SwissGuy]

School's over, reports handed out, classroom cleaned up. Time for building!
(Sorry, I have to make some more progress on the shed first, before I can pickup on Hope4muscle)

Today I took care of the trim in the angle between wall and eaves to make the sides look cleaner. I still have to work my way around the protruding beams, but the biggest part of this is done now:

First I did the left side (green door):

And the right side (tool shed):

When I was done this little fellow came to visit:

Here's how my afternoon looked like:

 

[SwissGuy]

The original plan for this week was to work each day on the shed for at least 4-5 hours to get this thing done.... but then live happened... The holiday camp of the kids got cancelled and so all plans were scrapped... As my wife had to be working on a important report for her studies it was my turn to keep the kids busy, bring them to friends, pick them up, get them to doctors appointments and so on. Not to forget the usual honeydo list...
So all in all I managed to squeeze in two slots of about 3 hours in the garden. With setting up at start and cleaning up after this left me about four real working hours on the shed for the whole week... This means I only got some little stuff done, but nevertheless I managed to make a tiny bit of progress (the BO bike still sits in the basement untouched since I got it here from the campground...). So what have I got to show?

The top part of the counter is finally done. I covered the flooring wood of the kneewall with two of the remaining floor boards and topped the rough covering plank with another two boards to get a nice surface. But see for yourselfs:

This was two days ago: the "splashboard" succesfully screwed to the top part of the kneewall. The rear top board is already cut down into the gaps between the beams and the front is cut to length resting on top of my mess waiting to get its front edge rounded...

Invisibly screwed onto the wall (both boards):

And this is how it looked after today. The top board done with rounded edge:

As there was not enough time left to takle a bigger project, I took care of the two holes in the separating wall. The left one was an easy fix, as it was almost perfectly square:
Before:

After:

The right one was very uneven, so I decided to simply cover it up with a small shelf:
Before:

After:

So for the next to weeks I'm off to the north of Germany. Next time with hopefully progress to report will be in the second week of august. See you soon!

 

[SwissGuy]

I know, I should work on my Build off bike but the shed really needs to be done...
So first task today was threading up the collected hagstones from last week to create a good luck charm for the shed.

Then I cleared out the corner in the shed and measured hoe much space I had to create a bench that convert into a sleeping area. The clearence between wall and trapdoor is a bit more than 60 cm, the total between wall and cabinet is 135 cm.

Then I dragged out two of the ply boards from behind the shed and cut off the uneven and rotten edges. I managed to get 50x220cm and 70x 220cm out of the boards.

After giving it some thought, this was the plan I came up with:

The 50 cm board will become the seating area and the 79 cm will be cut in half and fold up.

Here's how far I got today:

After I cleaned up the workshop and came back from unplugging and winding up the cable this little fellow just left the shed after inspection:

See you tomorrow!

 

[SwissGuy]

After working off todays honey do list, I managed to get to the shed in the afternoon to continue working on the convertible bench.
Yesterday evening I had dug out some largeold Ikea caster wheels I had stored away in the basement (My golden Ikea rule #1: Never throw away any Ikea hardware!).

With those and leftover OSB boards from the old sheds roof and some pallet slats I built a rolling plattform and with some more beams also coming from the old shed I quickly had a rolling box that fitted underneath the bench but was about 1mm higher than the frame I had built yesterday.

Then I attached the seating board to the front of the box and gave it a pull. It worked!

Here's a video to show the rough version in action. The rear board is not yet hinged to the wall hence the little difficulties on the way back in, but I might change the hinging system anyways.



No foxy visitor today, my kids were a bit too "vivid" for the timid red fellow.

 

[SwissGuy]

Today's task was to refine the pullout mechanics and when done round all upper edges and sand everything.
It doesn't sound like much but took me a few hours to get it done.

I added simple stops to the front of the rolling box.

Edges are rounded.

The complete surface is sanded so that the green matches the color of the door.

And all hinges are in place. It works as intended!



Next on the list is covering up the front and right side of the bench with the remaining floor boards.

 

[SwissGuy]

And the bench is done.

 

[SwissGuy]

Yesterday I started working on the round windows. I used the third of the green ply boards for that. I had to made rings that fit as close as possible over the edges and roundings of the washing machine windows. To achieve that I used my milling power tool with a straight bit. As I had to produce rings I needed some "guidance" so I created a kind of compass attachment (the one that came with the machine didn't allow me to make small enough circles). Here's what I came up with first:

After having problems with the narrower circles (interference of the right grip with the compass), I created a flatter version that worked nicely.

Here's the tool in action:

And this is the first ring. A perfect fit!

Here are all the rings I made. The narrower ones go outside, the broader ones inside so that the bulge of the window point outward.

An finally I rounded all the exposed edges with a rounder bit.

Next up is sanding off (most) the green paint to create a similar patina to the other green parts and then cut the window openings into the walls..

 

[SwissGuy]

Today I started off with sanding...

Then I realized that I need to somehow cover the inside of the top right wall (shed side) as there was a lot of light coming through the gaps between the planks. They were sitting really tight when I nailed them on but due to the actual heat the kind of shrunk a bit.

I had some leftover ply from a large crate, that I used for it. It wasn't wide enough, so I had to cut two triangular pieces.

Somehow I forgot to check the arrangement, so I had one with the ugly side front... Tried to deal with it by replacing the ugliest part with a nice leftover...

Then it was time to mark the circular cut... No way back now, time to get cutting...

Hey there's a big in my shed!

And we have one finished window! Ta-da!

I must say, I really like the view:

 

[SwissGuy]

Today after work I went directly to the garden and got at the second window.
Marked and ready to cut:

Window in and attached from the inside

And the outside ring is on

A thick seem of caulk will hopefully avoid any leakage.

It will provide some extra light to the inside.

I got it just done in time. When I finished the caulk seem I felt the first raindrops and started to get back all the tools inside just before the great downpour started.

I guess I don't need to water the garden until after tomorrow...

 

[SwissGuy]

After a day of "team building" I went to the garden to get some stuff done.
Here's what I started with:

And here's what I made of it:

A little awning over the green door. It still needs some trimming and finetuning, but I like it so far. Next on the list is the awning over the tool shed door...

 

[RustyGold]

Superior craftsmanship!

 

[SwissGuy]

Superior craftsmanship!

Thank you!

 

[SwissGuy]

After hosting my older kids burger barbeque on saturday and apple harvest on sunday it was time to do some more work on the shed.

Today I managed to get the awning over the toolshed door done.

And at home in the evening I tried a new marmelade recipe: apple-zucchini with cinammon

The smell is already very promising. I'll give it a try tomorrow for breakfast...
If it tastes as good as it smells I can get rid of some more apples and zucchini this way...

 

[SwissGuy]

One more little thing crossed off on my ToDo list: I finally managed to add the trim around the outside protruding beams!
First I had to dismantle two pallets and saw the wider slats into several smaller 3cm wide slats.

This took a while and got me a complaint by one of my neighbours. Sorry, but not sorry! I'm sticking strictly to the rules here and do no noisy work inbetween 13:00 and 15:00 but after that I'm allowed to make noise... German rented gardens in a nutshell...
With enough material on hand I went at trimming the beams. These gaps had to be closed:

At the area of the awning roof edge it got a bit complicated, but I managed:

The others were quite easy and quickly done (no need to show more than one example):

After that I continued on the inside. There was this long gap inbetween inner wall and roof:

It's now taken care of, as well as the rest of the wall edge over to the other side onto the little shelf:

So the only remaining things to do on the outside are now to create a water barrier inbetween the wall and the awning roofs and the trim around the doors. Then the outside will be done (for now).

Possible additions to the outside that still remain on my ToDo list: more round windows, climbing aid for greenery (wine or similar), solar panels, ...

 

[ifitsfreeitsforme]

apple zucchini cinnamon. that's gotta be a winner.