Vegetable Garden

A Rabbit family live under the household firewood pile. There is no construction or maintenance time currently available for a vegetable garden. The rabbits need grass to eat. Unfortunately, sowing grass seed onto shreddings produces grass with loose roots, so the rabbits pulled it out of the ground.

So a new lawn is required and the area tidied.

The weeds were removed from the lawn area, before Grass seed was spread. The scaffolding removed. The rotten scaffolding boards removed.

New Garage

The new garage separates the vegetable garden from the back garden.

I dug the foundations for my new garage and put the topsoil in one section of the back garden, the concrete in a mound and the subsoil sand in 2 more of the back garden in 2000. The concrete foundations and floor were installed by bricklayers. A bricklayer built the walls, the door manufacturers installed the doors and I then installed the:-

joists,

ridgeplate and 72 rafters,

a skylight and side windows,

roofing felt, battens and kent peg clay tiles,

weatherboarded the outside walls and painted them, the windows and the doors,

electrical system of a circuit breaker board with lighting, power sockets and hot water system, plumbing system of toilet, basin, guttering, downpipes, drains to cesspit for the toilet with access manholes at each turn, drain for roof water to soakaway with access manholes at each turn of direction,

 

by myself.

I bought second-hand scaffolding and boards. I erected the scaffolding inside the garage to install the wallplates and the joists (Modern government rules do not allow you to put up your own scaffolding unless you have a certificate authorising you to do it. Soon you will need a certificate on how to breathe in the proper manner!). I created the following scaffolding plan so that all of my scaffolding could be installed outside the garage walls, so that I could install the rafters from it (The scaffolding would also not now pass the new The Working At Height Regulations to provide sufficient railing to prevent me falling off the scaffolding by falling under its one side rail as seen in the photo below, and also there was no safety harness attached between my body and a supporting structure above the roof ridgeplate to prevent me falling when erecting the roof rafters). You need a certificate to show that the electrical work is correct, so you would need a qualified electrician to install the electrical side and also a qualified plumber with electrician to install the hot water system. This does of course mean that you would be allowed to watch providing that you are wearing a hard hat and are at least 15 feet away from the garage structure so that if anything about it fell down, then as a bystander you would not be harmed. This does mean of course that in this enlightened age of 2008, you would not be allowed to build this garage by yourself unless you were a qualified builder, bricklayer, roofer, electrician, plumber, scaffolder and carpenter.

I created the following plan to calculate the amount of ironmongery required for the installation of the joists:-

I created the following plan to calculate the timber and ironmongery required for the roof structure using the book "Site Carpentry and Joinery" from the Practical Projects section of my Library:-

The Common Rafters were each 38mm x 150mm and were installed as a pair and then bolted together because there was too much weight for handling one piece of timber of 76mm x 150mm x 5000mm for those going over the log area. Dragon Beams were installed at each of the corners to prevent the hip ridges from sliding off the walls. All the timber used was stored on scaffolding above ground level with every piece separated from another and it was exposed to the weather for up to 5 months, whilst I constructed the roof between doing days of work for clients of Ivydene Horticultural Services. If the timber had been put together, then it could have warped, split and bent.

The drain pipe taking the rainwater from the entire roof was installed in a trench alongside the vegetable garden hedge, surrounded by pea-shingle which itself was enveloped by Plantex. The end of the pipe closest to the soakaway had a rightangle bend put on it facing up so that the water would have to fill the pipe before it could overflow into the soakaway. Slits were cut in that pipe alongside the hedge at the halfway height position to allow the water to drain out to water the hedge. The drain pipe was laid with a 1 in 40 slope to guarantee that water would flow down it.

Garage Roof Structure

Looking down the garden before maintenance work starts.

Looking back at the garage before maintenance work starts.

Weeded the area and left the rabbit-proof camomile.

Used the green rotary spreader in the previous picture to cover the ground with grass seed.

Lightly raked into the ground some of the grass seed.