Garden Carpentry Repairs
Nothing seems to last long around here. Anything metal simply rusts away in no time and even wood seems to rot pretty quickly. To make matter worse, anything that isn’t 100% secure gets ripped to pieces by the wind so it’s not surprising that I always seem to be making repairs.
The sheep invasions haven’t helped this year but that seems to be under control now (fingers crossed). The recent storms did put pay to the fence between ours and Dave & Sarah’s though. As we left for work in the car the other day we noticed that it was wobbling violently in the wind. So much so that I stopped the car and moved the camper away from the fence just in case it did come down.
Dismantling the Fence
The wind had eased this weekend so it was time to get out there and start dismantling it. I had intended to take it all down as quite a bit is in need of replacement. You know how it goes though, these things look as though they are about to fall over and dismantle themselves but as soon as you try to do so they fight back and do their best to hang on. It certainly wasn’t an easy job to take it down, so by the time I’d done the bits that were in immediate danger of falling over and damaging something I decided enough was enough for now.
The remaining parts will need doing but not all in one day and they are fairly secure for now.
Reduce, Reuse, Recyle
With the fence reduced to rubble it was time to reuse some of the less rotten bits of wood. First some planks were used to rebuild the raise bed. This was only ever constructed from semi-rotten wood from elsewhere anyway so it was time for some parts of it to be replaced. Morgan helped out, removing nails from the planks and generally standing around watching!
As well as the fence and the raised bed, the log store shed was falling apart too. The roof – if you can call it that – had lost it’s felt a long time ago and the wood now had a large hole in it. One of the doors had been ripped off its hinges in a recent storm too. The doors themselves were still in quite good condition. They were certainly the best part of what remained of the shed as elsewhere it had been patched up a few times over the years. The doors were also a pretty good fit to simply be put up on the roof and become a new roof, so that’s what we did.
A log store doesn’t need doors anyway! Although, we did add a couple of planks of wood to the front of it just to help keep it a little drier and slightly more stable.
The fence had been reduced to rubble, some of the planks had been reused for the raised bed and the shed doors had been recyled into a roof. Not bad for a days work.
It wasn’t all work on Saturday of course as I did manage a surf ski first thing in the morning before the tide got too high and a nice bike ride to Cwm Rheidol and back too.
