Not sure what to do with this muddy area in garden..

Jimmy_M wrote: »

As i say the only thing that was any way complex was working out angles and lengths of the arcs of the boarder. But you dont need a boarder.

Table is somewhat permanent, in so far as it doesnt move. If i wanted to get rid of it i'd just have to lift 2, possibly 4 deck boards - so no biggy really.

As you see from my 2 pics, I had old grey concrete slabs down before the grass. There was also a strip of poured concrete which came out v easily. I used the roll out turf. Then for the slabs/stepping stones i simply placed the slab in position and cut the turf around the boarder with a bread knife. The grass now grows nice and tight around them. The grass is gne a bit patchy and yellow on me - but i have admittedly neglected it a bit since it was laid.

Well it's all turned out quite well.. I presume you've either got a good knowledge or hand at DIY, or you've done some similar stuff before?

Jimmy_M wrote: »

Now, on your slabs... I hate to be the bearer of bad news or break your stride - but laying them onto a wooden sub-frame is certainly not the norm. After some time, possibly quicker than you think, the wood will rot and your slabs will sink.

Im no expert on it - i've never layed slabs - but what i "think" what you should have done is raked an area of dry sand/cement so its as even as possible (with a slight fall for drainage) - long straight edges and spirit levels at the ready. Then lay your slabs straight onto that - you may still have bumps and hollows but you deal with them as you go. Then sweep sand and/or cement in between the joints.
As i say im not sure thats perfectly correct, i remember reading about it in the past and there are other techniques too.

Ah it's definitely not the 'right' way of doing it. Nowhere near. But In my head, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work. A level wooden frame surely would/should support the slabs level, was my thinking.

But I'm gonna pop out and get some stuff today to make life a bit easier (paving sand and the likes). I'll take up the wood and make it again as just a box (with no joists inside) to hold the paving sand and such inside, so I can level it out.

Will hopefully make things easier (and more level).

Ah in fairness, you're correct, Catastrophy.. I just didn't want anything permanent incase i made a mistake a long the way, but it seems the 'doing it right' approach is actually a lot easier than the temporary solutions I'd been coming up with.


my dad has booked a week off work next week. He reckons he'll help finish the garden and said that he'd like to do the slabs. So I said okay. I'll let him at it.

I went to Chapterstone Paving and picked up seven 25kg bags of hard core, seven 25kg bags of paving slab sand and a bag of cement. Yer man working there said that this would cover the area. As i've now got a proper method of laying the slabs level, and someone who can help with laying them, after a bit of discussing with my dad and throwing ideas back and forth, I returned all the slabs back to Chapterstone (who i rang in advance, to ask would they take them back, and they said they would, so long as they weren't damaged or such, which they weren't).


So instead of my €77.50 worth of black and red slabs, I opted for a €200 'Chalice Circle' patio pac. It's slightly bigger than the tiles i was putting in. My original tiles were gonna be 2.0 x 2.8 meters. This one will be 2.7 x 2.7 meters (so a square instead of a rectangle), but it looks quite nice in my opinion, and fairly reasonably priced, too.

curiousb wrote: »

This might be overkill for your raised side bed, but I used it last year to make a retaining wall.

It's a dry stone wall system where the bricks slot into each other. Once it is laid on a secure, level base it is really easy to install. You can install on a concrete path, just use a base of sand to level. I laid mine on top of patio slabs.

At 3.54 per brick, it could work out excessively expensive, would be my main concern, to be honest.

All going well, I should be posting a picture of them tomorrow, all laid in place. Wednesday at the latest (tomorrow is supposed to be a sh*t day again! :mad: ). But apparently the weather is to improve from then onwards.


I also picked up another 3 11ltr tubs of weathershield, this time in white, for the insides of the sheds.

martyo wrote: »

Any progress since

Erm....




Haha.. Well, my dad took the week off work.. full of 'we'll do this, do that, get this done", etc. Monday came and he spent a few hours moving stones around. Then said 'fcuk this for an effort', and went on the drink.

He spent wednesday morning thinking of people we could get over to do it for us.

Reliable.


Anyway, i took his idea anyway and so I've gotten a hired helper in the garden. So last week everything was supposed to be getting done, but nothing really did. Me and my helper (who admittedly, knows more about it than I do) had been at it since.


He decided the decking was the way to go for getting things started. So that was monday (so at it yesterday and today).


This is how it looks tonight:









So it's progress.. painfully slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

The chap that was doing the decking isn't around now until monday though (that was dropped on me at short notice) so i've another chap who did a bit of general building, but has a specialty in roofing, coming to work with the doors tomorrow. He had a look today and reckons it's a 'make it up as you go along' kind of a job, so we'll see how we get on.


So I've taken more of a helper role myself, really, but Im looking at things being done (and helping where i can of course) and I'm seeing ways of doing things that i would never have thought of or that I'd have dragged out for ages.

Levelling the deck alone.. i'd never have got it right on my own.

Yeah, the chap helping me keeps banging on about that, too. Saying we should have a 'hatch' part that opens up for ease of access.

I'll see what happens. I'm not fussed. In 27 years no one has ever come to check on it, so I am not overly concerned about it, to be honest.

Moving in the right direction again today...












There was a lot more involved in the doors on the smaller shed than on the larger shed. As you can see, the left side there is all blocked in and cemented over.

I also did one or two small tidy ups, like filling in a hole on the side of the small shed (where the kennel-style shed used to be) and such. The small shed doors look a bit odd at the bottom (as the shed is on a slant), so I'm not 100% sure what to do there. I think I might run a length of decking along the bottom of the doors (screwed into the doors themselves) to cover the gap at the bottom when they're closed over. But I'm not 100% sure if I will or not. Will see if a better idea comes into my head (or if anyone suggests anything).


It also needs a length of decking along the top of the doors, to fill in the gap, but yer man doing it didn't want to do it himself as the cement was still wet and he said it'd be best left a day or two before touching anything again. It's simple enough though so can't complain.

Both sets of doors close properly, open properly and their in-built locking/latch mechanism works fine too (they're interior french doors, so they have a little latch built inside the top and bottom of one of the doors, to keep it locked, but the other one can open/close). Probably explained that badly, but if anyone has doors like that then they'll know what I mean (and if you haven't a clue what im talking about, let me know and I'll get a pic).

The inside of the small shed (on the opposite side of where it was cemented in) is rough looking though, so that'll need to be patched up. Haven't got a picture from inside of either shed, unfortunately.


Tomorrow I'm busy, but depending how my evening goes, i might do some small cement work to just fill in the gaps in the paths. Now that I've worked a little more with cement i feel a bit more confident with it. I'm tempted to pull up my 'edging' bricks and re-lay them on a cement bed (they way they should have been done). The bricks that run up the length of the garden, a handful of them are starting to 'sag' away from the path (where the gravel was pulled back, to make space for the paving - with no gravel pressed against the bricks, they've started to 'fall' into the gravel area).


Still.. It's making progress.. Bit of paint on the sheds will help them no end.


EDIT: I also need to get two latches for the doors on the small shed, to hold them in place when they're fully open (like on the last photo). I've seen them before.. like a little hook that's on the wall, and goes into a little steel ring that's on the door. No idea what they're called but I'll find them in Woodies or Homebase or such I'm sure.

I notice the pictures from the first post in the thread are gone (the site im using must delete them after a while). I'll reupload everything on a different site. But for anyone interested, here are the photos from the first post in the thread (if a mod sees this, maybe he can add them to it? I can't edit the first post as it's there so long).


Cheers

Pic 1:




Pic 2:

Still moving (sloooowly) in the right direction.

Whole of the small shed painted (outside) and a bit of magnolia added to the top and bottom of the wall behind the decking (the wall itself, that's pebble-dashed, will be painted white, just to break up the magnolia of the two sheds). The top/bottom needs another coat though.









I'm a bit stuck of any ideas on what to put inside the smaller shed, though, to be honest. The bigger shed is a home gym/car wash place mish-mash, which is grand. The small shed currently has no purpose though. Can't think of anything off the top of my head though. Anyone got any ideas? It has electricity with a light on the ceiling and plenty of plug sockets.

Richie71 wrote: »

Check out readersheds.co.uk for some ideas. The pub sheds would be my favourite!! The 2015 final is on Sunday night @ 8 on channel 4.

I was actually looking on that website, alright, for some inspiration. Great site!

gerrybbadd wrote: »

Mini bar!

The thought of doing a miniature pub was in my head alright.

5T3PH3N wrote: »

Pool table, dart board, couch and fridge.

Might be a bit of a tight fit... Pool table could be quite costly i'd imagine :P




Can I ask ye guys, I've effectively left the decking to a chap that I know, as I've been running off a bit myself, lately.

I agreed with him I'd throw him €100 per day and he could do the decking and paving. He's a pretty good handy man, so he has a few bits on working elsewhere doing other bits and pieces.

However, I've started to get a bit frustrated as I feel (perhaps wrongly) that, for someone who has done a lot of decking, he's going painfully slow about it..


For example, the photos above are of how the place looked yesterday when he finished up (deck half-laid). After a full day today, he has the whole lot of the deck laid on top, and he has 2 posts at the front (for the hand rail).

He still hasn't got a foundation for the 'steps' on the left, or anything like that. just a full floor and two posts installed at the front. I can't help but feel this is an example of someone getting paid by the day, having it handy, and therefore dragging it out as long as they can?

(i'm not around as much as I'd like, so he's working away in the garden on his own, has a key of the house so comes and goes as he pleases, etc. no one watching him or working with him or anything so it's a handy enough job, in that regard).


Is he taking the piss? I've already agreed with him that I'd get him on Monday (next day he's available) but I'm thinking of trying to get some one different to do the paving. So far he's put 4 full days into doing the decking (and it's still missing it's hand rail, sides are exposed and no base/foundation for steps at the left).

(in fairness, i'd say 3 days, as the first day involved knocking the little kennel style shed and such, and I'd say that would have eaten into his day a lot?).


Just looking for opinions incase I'm being a bit naive, myself.

Well I pulled him up on it and he said he did agree that it was taking longer than he had anticipated it would, so what he'd do is finish the job without charging any thing more. I said that was fair enough (but at the same time, not sure I feel comfortable having him working for nothing, either! On the other hand, my budget has pretty much been wiped out, so I'm in a bit of a moral dilemma.. ).

I told him I'd help him out and we'd bull through it together as quick as possible. So we did a half-day together in the garden on Monday and got stuck in. This evening I pulled off the old gutter from the shed and screwed the new brackets into place. As of this evening, this is how it's currently looking:

















I was the one that started pulling up the ground for the paving, while he continued to tick away at the decking.

I have a question for ye guys - The post-toppers that are on the posts aren't actually fixed into place. They're just sitting there. Incase anyone's not sure what I'm talking about, it's the circled pieces here:





He reckons he can route a design around the edges of them. Personally, I think they look far too thick and are, to be honest, pretty siht looking. I have lengths of wood in the shed that are about half the thickness and I think they'd look a lot better there instead. Am I a bit mad in thinking that or..? I think they completely take the look off the deck (although that hand rail isn't how I'd have done it myself anyway, but I don't mind the general design of it).


A very, very nice Boardsie has messaged me too, and said he picked up some floor paint for his shed. He said he still have a bit left, and reckons it could do the floor in my small shed and said I could have it if I wanted it! Naturally, I'll take him up on that. Fair play to him. Exceptionally nice thing to do. I won't name him incase he doesn't want to be named but it's a really nice gesture in my opinion. Really re-enforces the community feel of this forum too.