Excavations

[BT Humble]

Since I don't work on Fridays, and Monday was a public holiday here, I decided to use my 4-day weekend to excavate the site for my new shed.

I pegged it out on Thursday night, then on Friday it RAINED!  I got more rain in the first 3 days of October (50mm/2") than in the whole of September.  So I spent Friday rewiring my solar control panel, then blew all the fuses in the inverter and solar controlpanel when I hooked the battery bank up the wrong way, but that's a story for another day...

So I got to work on Saturday, stripping away the topsoil.  The shed will be about 6m wide by 8m long (20'x27'), and there were 7 truckloads of topsoil (about 8-9 tonnes after all that rain).  Here's a pic of the first "peeling":

Removing the topsoil took all day Saturday and Sunday, since I was doing domestic chores like clothes washing and digging some trenches along levee banks at the same time.

So on Monday morning I made the first cut on the subsoil, which where I am is 100% pure sand. This is carefully saved to be made into the concrete floor for the shed:

Unfortunately I was 50cm off with one of my pegs, but at least I caught that in time! (I want the second shed to be parallel to the first one, which is 6m uphill).

My off-sider wasn't being very helpful.

At the conclusion of Monday, I had a decent sandpile.  For purposes of scale, those timbers are 8"x2".

...and the hole makes me look like a forward-planning serial killer (or something!)

Now that the deep side is done, I should have the remainder of the excavation done next weekend.  Then I'll be digging postholes, and putting the frame up.

BTH

[Jerry]

BTH

That looks very ambitius. Just looking at that hole makes my back hurt?

What will be the end use of this shed? RE I hope?  JK TAS Jerry

[BT Humble]

It'll be used to store building materials for the house, and also to take care of some of the motorcycle overflow:

Fortunately the site for this shed isn't quite as steep as for the first one, saving me 6" of digging at the high side (which is where the granite is still solid, not sand!)

BTH

[sh123469]

Looks like lots of work.  Ouch! Makes my back hurt just looking at it.

You've got a great start there, though.  Hope the shed turns out well.  

You planning on doing anything RE with it?  Heated slab for those winter days working on the bikes or anything?

[BT Humble]

You planning on doing anything RE with it?  Heated slab for those winter days working on the bikes or anything?

A heated slab in a shed is pretty much overkill here, it's very rare for it to snow or for the temperature to stay below freezing during the daytime in winter.  Also, it's just going to have uninsulated corrugated iron walls... ;-)

I've already got the solar panels on the existing shed, this one is just going to be for storage so that I actually have room to work in my workshop! ;-)

(Yeah, I know, the steady state of any shed is "full", but I've got 25 acres to build sheds on!)

BTH