I can’t say that I’m particularly excited about building the garden shed. This is largely because there are undone jobs I look at every day inside the house I’d rather be getting on with. But Chris has been dreaming of a shed ever since we moved in, and says I can’t replace the stairs till the tools are out of the house – hence a shed.

We borrowed Chris’s brother’s cement mixer and spent last weekend laying the concrete slabs for the base. As I can’t lift the slabs on my own, Chris laid the slabs while I wheelbarrowed sand from the drive to the cement mixer, and then wheelbarrowed cement to shed base, in a continuous loop for hours. For something that looks like such a small job it took a full day, and was pretty exhausting.

With the base done and dried, we started on building the shed itself this weekend.

Chris has spent several evenings pondering on the design. He was keen to maximise the size so he could use it for tinkering on projects in the future. We also had an old door, two of our old windows, and some second-hand shelves that had to be worked into the design. My only inputs were a request for a green roof, an entrance for swallows, and an inbuilt bug hotel.

I spent my time cutting the wood to size while Chris hammered them together into frames. Once the frames were together we lifted them up and bolted them together. We then screwed the frame to the floor with a vapour membrane beneath it.

Next Chris cut the joists for the roof and we used a gravelboard from the shed base to begin constructing the roof.

A few more joists to put in and next weekend the larch boards should arrive the clad the outside. It might not be one of my priority jobs, but at least it’s moving on quickly.