The tool shed replacement (part 1)

The old shed. Some would say it had character. I say it had its day!  

A lot has happened since my last post. We have been busy growing and building. We are getting there. When I last posted I talked about our new shed to replace the old ramshackle structure that was falling apart. You could say it had character, but in reality it was inefficient and well past its useful life. It was in the wrong place too. Not only that it had no floor and the rats could burrow their way in with very little difficulty. Decision made, we set about evicting the myriad of both invertebrates and small mammals that has set up residence, over the years.   

The ramshackle shed has to go...

Lets go back to autumn 2024... The shed was emptied and made ready for demolition. The back corner was rotten and rat chewed. This was collapsing into the ground meaning I was constantly sawing bits off the door just to enable access. We found new temporary homes for all the useful stuff and found long lost treasures as well as a considerable amount of rubbish.

Luckily for us, the new management of the site, had organised a bonfire party as Guy Faulks night was rapidly approaching. Demolition was very straight forward. The multi-layered roof was removes and the corrugated metal sheets were earmarked for future use in a yet to be imagined project. Reuse of old material is almost law on allotment plots. The use of glass prohibited on our allotment site. The only glass that is allowed is that with ancient rights. In other words, was here before the rule was introduced. Most of the glass and frames will end up at the recycling centre. Once the glass and frames were removed, devoid of a roof the shed almost demolished itself and was piled up awaiting onward transportation to the bonfire site. 

With the old shed demolished and gone it was time to get on with building a replacement. The maximum size a shed can be is 2 meters x 3 meters and 7ft high. yes I know those are mixed metric and imperial measurements, but that is what the rules state. The shed I had earmarked for the plot was longer, wider but shorter than that, and had been used by us as a storage shed, when we first moved to Herne Bay from London, some five years earlier. Now redundant and in the way of our new home workshop, it was the ideal candidate for modification. 

The shed is no more and the rhubarb is on the move too

Our old storage shed was dismantled and modified at home

The shed walls were dimensioned to comply with site rules. This meant narrowing the gable ends and reducing the length of the sides. New roof trusses were fabricated and a wall-plate run to accept the angle of the new trusses. The shed was to be elevated to give a more practical headroom. The original shed was very low - it was cheap. The elevation was to be achieved by mounting it on a solid floor plate fixed to the modified solid floor panels. This would mean the original; door would be too short. A new door was built from recovered 'V' tongue and groove boards recovered from our old workshop in London. 

A kit of parts

Once all the parts were gathered together they were loaded into the van and deposited on the plot. At last, the plan was coming together. A few hours work with some Timberlok screws, ring-shake air nails and the odd wood screw, resulted in the shell being completed. At this stage the final trim and cosmetic stuff had to wait. Winter was approaching fast and the priority was to achieve a dry storage space.  

The small brown shed seen in some of the pictures and the greenhouse are being used to store the 'stuff' that was in the original shed, sans the junk, of course.

The small brown shed will be used to store the crop once it has been emptied. It will also be home to the less frequently used hand tools. More on this in a later post, but for now we refer to it as 'Nine Elms' - If the irony of that has passed you by, Look up 'Nine Elms Cold Store'.

Most cheap sheds are supplied with very flimsy roofs. Our shed was no exception. The roof one was made from six panels of 9mm thick Oriented Strand Board (OSB) also known as Sterling Board, framed with fairly lightweight battens. They were intended to hold their own weight with no additional support. In order to make it work, it needed collar ties added to the battening. this made the headroom even more cramped and caused the air to turn blue on more than one occasion. Raising the walls and building a rigid frame for the cut down roof panels made the new construction much stronger and improved the headroom to a more acceptable level.

The base is down and the extra height is supplied by the oversized floor plates

Recovered walls and new roof framing in place

The old roof panels were trimmed to size and reused

Watertight. time to tidy up

Once the main structure was up, the roof was felted and work started on the inside and trimming the outside. For now we have a dry space to store our stuff for the winter. 

Part 2 will look at finishing up the outside and fitting out the inside.