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The floor is down. It is not completely nailed down yet but all the boards are on and it holds together.

A pretty good session today. I woke up feeling amazing and rode that for a while. The floor is solid rimu and nails. And a bit of glue.

There are lots of little tasks now to keep me busy – I still need to finish up that ridge cap, gum up the roof holes, finish nailing down the floor, work out where the other window is going to go, and paper the bottom layer. Then brick laying.

I’ve got a mattress set up in the shack now and I’m not long away from bedtime I reckon. I’ll definetly start out there, but I’m not sure how committed I am to spending the night. If it is cold and there are bugs and wind and coughing sheep and birds I may just retreat to the house. That’s soft isn’t it.

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I worked as full a day as I was capable today, and I’m feeling it right now. Maybe something like 6 hours.

It wasn’t as fun today. I’m about 2/3 of the way done with the floor I think. We must have used all of the straightish bits of wood yesterday I think because today I was left with things that were bent and warped. In one place the warp of the wood is so gross that it is going to need big planing to get it approximating flat.

My 3 mm standard of yesterday looks laughable right now, I reckon I blew out to about 10 mm at one point. I’ve inserted a strip of offcut in there so I think that will come up ok. It’s not perfect, but once again I can blame non perfect wood. It is my floor and it is shack like.

I decided that I was going to plane all of the rimu timbers up to see if there was anything worth using for furniture rather than for the shack floor. From our discoveries yesterday, 2/5 had the really nice orange/red colouring and the others weren’t as nice. So, failing to find any that were geniunely lovely I decided I’d just keep using them for the floor. There may still be the need for a couple of pine ones to make it all fit, but not too many, and they should all be invisible if my arrangement of items within the shack goes according to plan.

I think I should probably sleep in it first night that I have the floor down, and that very well could be tomorrow. I hope it’s reasonably still though.

It was a gross day here today, overcast, windy, not warm, bits of drizzle hinting but never really letting fly.

Yesterday’s goggleless antics have left their mark

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Possibly the most fun day on the shack yet. There were jokes flying around, almost too many to remember.

Paul was there for the duration, in fact his arrival heralded the beginning of work for the day. This was sometime between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. I’d spent the morning running errands but always had plenty of interest in going to work on the floor.

Paul asked me if I used Excel to do a task with the wood. There was no using Excel for that task. It needed a hammer or a saw or something. But such had been my expression of love for Excel.

What are moths doing? You don’t see them during the day then they fly towards the lights at night. Do they spend the day flying towards the sun? What really is their game? What are they hoping to achieve by flapping around a light?

We fell into a nice rhythm of grooming a piece of rimu with the planer, chiselling out one end, drilling, and nailing down. Most of the chiselling lacked quality. I’m not apologising for that though, none of it is visible and it is completely functional.



I stated that I was prepared to accept gaps between the timbers of about 3mm. For those of you who have difficulty with mm, that is 0.3 cm. For the most part we pulled that off. The gaps actually look pretty cool, but not looking down to silver foil. I’ll need to get some black in there.

We got maybe 5 large timbers and 2 small ones down. There was discussion about spending the night out there tonight, but there isn’t quite enough floor space to hold a mattress yet. Maybe tomorrow.

It was so fun planing the timbers down. We would try and guess whether the board would come out looking amazing or not so. Some of the ugliest ones came out amazing, on one, the deeper I planed the more red and beautiful the wood got. 2 of them were a much lighter yellow/brown colour, with no suggestion of the lovely sought orange/red. The floor looks so great though, we were both really really pleased with it. I’m really not looking forward to having to put that pine down.

Before and after


We finished up for the day about 8.30.

517

The day began pretty grossly but got better later.

I moved the possible pine flooring timbers, 7, into position. I also sorted out the good rimu from the bad.

My one little achievement of the day was to put some of the silver underfloor insulation down. That stuff just looks warm. I'll get that all down tomorrow and hopefully have the floor in some sort of shape.

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The roof seems to know what it's doing. There has been rain and no signs of moisture on the floor area. Today there was some light drizzly stuff that was floating around and it just reached the foundation, so my bricks may be fairly safe.


Rimu won the battle against pine for prettiest wood. But I think the pine still looks a bit hard. Shack like. Plus most of the limited floor space won't be visible anyway, what with bed, fire, some chairs, and a table. I'm also conscious though that the pine may actually have some value so I don't want to be wasting too much of that. Maybe I'll make the bed and fire side of the floor out of pine then use the worst of the rimu on the rest.

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So my summary of today’s work – nailing in most of the rest of the roofing nails, covering the ends of the shack where the roof meets the triangle, and putting the polythene down on the ground. I also purchased a tube of silicon sealant for the roof holes. Afterthought – I also moved the fireplace from the shed onto the work site so that I could check its size and chimney angles.

I started liking the way a part of the shack looked for the first time today really. The synchronisation of some old ugly brown and green iron made it look really shack like. I think that was actually what I was envisaging when I first named this a shack – gross corrugated iron.



I’d be interested for it to rain now to see if any gets into the shack body – I’m testing to see what sort of coverage / likely brick protection my roof gives. At this stage that rain would just collect on the polythene then drain off or evaporate, so there would be no problem. Maybe actually some could still get through the roof, I haven’t finished that up yet. While I do kind of trust the roof, I haven’t been brave enough to leave my wheelbarrow load of tools out under the roof. It’s probably better for the power tools to be in the garage than have moist air sifting round anyway.

John Martin Leo Peter Son hopped along today. He confirmed that my flooring timbers are rimu. I didn’t really like this because I love the rimu and don’t want to waste it on the shack floor. Down in the shed there are some similar sized boards but made from treated pine. Maybe I’ll use them.

I think I must have used all of my powers up by about 1 o’clock today, because after running some errands I returned empty. I’m not well here now. I may be feeling the effects of that roofing day a couple of days back.

517

I banged in more nails, and cut 2 triangles out of some old iron that I stomped the corrugs out of. These triangles cover the exposed ends of the shack. This took 2-3 hours. I feel a bit beaten down from the long day yesterday.

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A big day. The roof is on. It was reasonably easy going until about 10.30 when the wind started. Putting the paper down in the wind was tough going. There is still a bit of work to do on the roof, I need to put in all the nails, secure the top cap properly, and work out how I’m going to cover the ends.



I did plenty of clambering up ladders today. I had one fall which was a bit of fun, I was most of the way up the ladder and felt my balance go, so I knew I had to prepare for a crash landing. No pain.

The McCartneys stopped by today. It was good to hear Justin’s thoughts on my progress, I’ve gone a while unguided, with no real clue. The idea of putting more windows in was floated, and boy it was a good one. It’s dark in there already, and it doesn’t even have any walls yet.

I ate so much today. I did work long and my belly isn’t feeling obviously fatter so maybe I used it all as fuel. The inventory:

2 pieces of peanut butter toast
2 apples
2 honey sandwiches
1 packet of 2 minute noodles
1 can cream style corn
½ a sushi roll
1 fruju
1 medium sized baked potato with chilli beans and sour cream
1 bowl of pasta
1 scoop of chips
2 bread rolls garlic buttered
17 small wrapped chocolates
1 bowl of salad

I just weighed in at 77.5, so maybe that is up a bit. That is a lot of food.

Miscellanery building detritus as viewed from the roof of the shack


The new neighbours asked me to keep it down a bit. I abused them heartily.

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It took on distinctly shack-like proportions today as I tacked the roofing iron on. It would be better if the iron was grosser, old paint coming off, but this is what I’ve got.

Surely only bad weather can stop me from putting the roof on tomorrow. I’ve got the iron cut to length, and each piece knows its position. First task of the morrow, low wind and no rain permitting, is to paper the roof area. Following that I bang the nails in on the iron, then I need to do some tricky things to cover the ends maybe. It all looks promising. I think I can do it.

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You can’t shake a baby. But you can shake the shack. It won’t care. It will most probably laugh at you.




Braced up. Today was sweating hot, just humid and lovely even after 8 o’clock at night. I’m not far away from being able to put the roof on. I need to cut some more 4x2 and put it into the frame kind of as more bracing, but its real role is to be a barrier to wind getting into the shack. I only need to cut and nail in 8 pieces of wood so that shouldn’t take that long.

I’m going to have to get the iron ready, lenghted, and I’m going to have to work out what piece goes where. Then I’ll need to find the gun stapler, then put paper on and iron on on the same day. It’ll need to be a still day too, otherwise that paper will go nuts maybe. Plenty to do.