Countrified

Thursday 5 January 2017: the shed builder and his team arrived on site in what was already a record-breaking summer for high temperatures in the ACT region. Clearly the weather gods were going to throw everything they had at us throughout this build.

To their immense credit, the building team barely took a break in the five days they were on site, despite our protests, the lack of shade and the intense heat radiating off the slab and the steel cladding. We made regular deliveries of cold water and ice-blocks to assuage our guilt and were relieved when the roof went on and they at least had shade.

Our structure took longer to go up than a standard shed, for a couple of reasons: the roof pitch is 30 degrees rather than the usual 15 or 22 degrees; and the windows and external doors are residential quality rather than standard shed windows and doors, and required additional flashing and framing. Solving the flashing problem was one of the minor challenges we encountered as a result of using a shed frame for what we wanted to be a properly finished house, with good quality fittings, lined walls, ceilings in bedrooms, etc. (See ‘Using a shed frame for a proper house’ for more details on a few issues unique to shed house builds that popped up).

By dusk on the Wednesday afternoon of the second week of January, we were at lock-up and the builder and his team had driven away, leaving us to survey our little one-hundred-square-metre domain with great happiness and relief. We were thrilled to have finally made it to this point. We stepped through the door to gaze around. At the same moment, we looked at each other like stricken deer caught in the headlights and I said, ‘Holy shite, where do we start?”. The magnitude of what we had taken on was momentarily overwhelming as it sunk in that it was all down to us and a few tradies from here.

Even though it was small, we had an incredibly long list of jobs to do, in a precise order, with a finite budget, based on what we hoped was good planning and all the right research. My husband is an aircraft engineer by trade and is very handy with tools and timber, but neither of us had ever built anything like a house.

On top of that, we had a real deadline this time: our rental lease was ending on 30 March, we had no idea if we would be able to extend it, and the chances of finding temporary accommodation in the area were almost non-existent. Our back-up plan, if we needed one, was to camp on the block with a small borrowed caravan and annexe until we got the house to ‘interim occupancy’ stage, but the thought of camping in April in the Southern Tablelands with two small children filled us both with horror.

We had eleven weeks to get this shell lined and liveable. There was nothing for it but to get stuck in and give it our absolute best.

Next: Using a shed frame for a ‘proper’ house – things to consider