Shed time

For reasons which are too complicated and too tortuous to go into in full, we have decided to retire our garden shed and turn the area over to a patio with a bit of sun, this last being absent from the patio we have just presently.

One effect of this is that the various garden gear which presently lives in the shed is being moved to the garage, including garden tools and the rack which kept them in order. Adapting this rack to its new home necessitated the most serious bit of woodwork since the construction of the trestle tables (see June 27th 2011, in the other place, that is to say http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). Adaption included the addition of a new divider which gave me a rare excuse to have a bash with my half inch mortice chisel (made by Marples with a box wood handle, naturally) and the results are illustrated above.

What the illustration does not show are the facts that 1) the backbone of the rack, a length of sawn four by two (which after metrication and various other weights & measures or health & safety flavoured regulations is an endangered species) was quite badly twisted and 2) that the floor of the garage sloped east, thus enabling any water in it to drain towards the drain. Quite sensible really. But these two facts occasioned a fair amount of fiddling about; a rack that looked crooked, as opposed to just being crooked, would not have done at all.

Having moved the tools to their new home, I then started to clear away some of the stuff behind the shed, which included the lid to the compost bin reported on October 14th 2010, this having been decommissioned a year or so ago in a drive to reduce the vermin at the bottom of the garden. A lid of short life, despite the impressive handle. The lid needed to be dismantled so that the various parts could be consigned to their various recycling destinations, and in the course of this dismantling I discovered that the substantial treated plywood which made up core of the lid was fairly rotten after less than three years in the open, rotten to the point where one could almost snap the sheet - say five feet by three feet of it - in half by jumping on it. And with a little help with the saw I did snap the sheet in just this way. So much for the treatment.

The work continues.