Petestack Blog

Now we’ve covered the kayak store concept, posts, drainage, framing, cladding and sarking and door, what’s left? Really just the roofing and trolley, but the trolley can wait while I catch up with other things like fitting out Fly for the season, so today we simply complete (or nearly complete) the main structure with most of the roofing after heading briefly off-topic for my third and fourth Nevis Canoe Club pool sessions…

Last Friday I tried rolling, but really wasn’t ready for that (just wasn’t comfortable trying to put the paddle where it’s supposed to be) and have been practising low and high braces since along with some more wet exit and rescue stuff. Tonight I messed up my first proper head-in-the-water high brace when I failed to come back up because I apparently tried to lead with my head (remember ‘boat, body, head’!), then managed six successful ones (three to each side) before losing it again for the last two and getting some more unplanned wet exit practice, which is probably good for me anyway because it’s surely more ‘realistic’ when unplanned! But that’s this year’s block of four sessions done, so let’s get back to the kayak store build…

Tuesday’s roofing work started with spending the morning replacing a damaged skylight panel because I was careful beyond careful measuring, cutting, drilling and fitting the new one!

Before continuing with the black panels for the kayak store roof below, where I found my notched measuring stick/jig a great help in lining up the fixings:

I didn’t like the look of the clear caps/washers on the black stuff, so the first thing I did on Wednesday was swap them out while I still could:

Before fixing the rest of the corrugated panels to the store roof:

There might not be much obvious to see from Thursday, but here’s something to secure the ridge pieces to on this back wall:

And the long-planned piece to secure the front end of the roofing and provide a drip guard for the door, after which the whole exterior got its second coat of Demidekk:

Think this end is finished now (today) although I’m still contemplating a thicker drip guard below the line of the roofing:

But I can’t finish the back or make the vertical trim pieces till I get the wood I’m still waiting for:

That’s a stainless machine screw with penny washers securing the corner of the old roof to the new ridge piece, so no nail where there was nothing to hammer one into:

Pity I can’t finish this right now, but it’s essentially done and as far as I can go without the wood:

And that’s us bang up to date! :-)

So I’d got the cladding and sarking done and the store now has a door, which first needed a finished doorway to measure up and fit it to…

Here I’m testing a piece of trim before deciding after nailing it on that it shouldn’t have overlapped the post below!

Despite much careful thinking on Tuesday, I still didn’t really think through that top screw, which is why I drilled an extra hole below and you’re looking at a shorter screw for the top hole that I eventually got in with a hex-shanked bit and shifting spanner. The back of the original shed trim has also been rebated to take the new trim behind, with a further new piece yet to be added to sit flush with the old:

I decided after fixing this trim I’d done it wrong too, so marked it to cut back with the multitool…

And refined the cut with a chisel. The vertical piece you’ll see in the next photo can now go to the top and overlap another vertical piece on the side wall although my after-the-fact cut didn’t need to be that neat when it’ll be covered by another sloping piece above the door!

I just clamped the vertical piece on to test because I hadn’t yet decided how close to the ground to take it, but later cut it to match the bottom of the door:

It was still definitely too close to the ground here:

Like I said, the join didn’t need to be that neat because it’s not going to show, but I’m me!

Something I fortunately realised the night before I built the door is that you need to watch the thickness of a door with a sloping top or it will jam at the top corner when opening. Because the roof (and top of the door) are at a 30° angle, the back of the door needs to be 30° lower than the front for the same clearance when opening and, because I also wanted to fix a lip inside the opening for the door to sit against, I needed more clearance yet. But, having worked this out, it wasn’t difficult to apply to the design and build of a door that actually works. It took time and much careful measuring and checking, but the final fit is good with the top of the cladding sitting proud of the frame to create the required front-to-back drop:

It’s difficult to keep weatherboarding exactly parallel when fitting, and here you see a slight mismatch between cladding and frame towards the top of the short side which I later planed off to restore the parallel fit I’d previously achieved between frame and doorway:

So I made the door on Wednesday and had hoped to hang it on Thursday, but left it till Friday because it was raining with sunny days forecast. And my only photo from Friday shows it all wedged in place before getting to work on the hinges:

Now here’s a whole sequence from Saturday showing not just the fitted door but all the pieces it sits against in the opening. While I’m still waiting on more wood to make trim like the overhanging piece above the door and roofing to get the roof finished, I’d say I basically have a store here:

And here I am today framing the additional weatherboard at the back and starting to paint some bits. These back bits are where I wasn’t originally sure what to do with the falling ground, but are better framed now they’re boarded:

Quite striking how much the sarking and the cladding have dried out and shrunk back already since I put them together with tight joints!

So I’ve got a coat of Demidekk on the door…

And any corners/joins I’m planning to cover with further trim…

And might yet paint the rest while waiting for the wood and roofing I need to finish things off!

Following on from my framing blog of two Saturdays ago, the store is now weatherboarded and sarked and the long drain is finished. But first a quick résumé of Friday’s pool session, where I chose to practise wet exits again counting lengthening times before releasing the spraydeck and getting out the boat as well as heel-hook assisted rescues. And must say I’m much more relaxed about the wet exits now I know what I’d already guessed, which is that there’s really no need to rush at them when you don’t need long to find the cockpit coaming and work round to the tab with a calm, clear head and will probably get out quicker anyway remembering ‘more haste less speed’!

So here we have the long wall weatherboarded. Is it perfect? No! Is it still a good job? I think so!

Look along the line of the boards and you’ll see they finished up marginally higher on one side of the central join despite me setting them all as tightly together as I could. But that join will be covered and I’m not planning to spend my life lying between fence and store staring at that wall anyway!

I didn’t cut the ‘bad’ joint wrong but simply trusted the factory ends to be square. They usually are but, after discovering the error on the first board I fitted, I cut all the remaining ends square before cutting the boards to length. And, as already stated, that join will be covered:

This all worked exactly as designed!

I cut the edges off the top boards on the table saw, which was still set to 30° from cutting the roof rails. The chunks of CLS are my ‘push sticks’ because I needed a bit of weight and rigidity there:

I wondered whether I should have cut the weatherboarding flush with the end rafter before doing the sarking, but (as you’ll see) chose to fix the sarking on top when the join between them was all going to be covered either way:

Already less of a gap under the back end where I dropped the side boards to match the back, but later to be effectively reduced to nothing through the addition of gravel boards to retain the chippings. I’m still planning to frame these lower weatherboards along their bottom edges:

A study in wedges where I recently discovered the shed found had sunk slightly at the back corner and I’m also temporarily propping up that side board, but the real reason for this photo was to show off that nice rounded corner on my frame!

(What the vertical pieces above hide is that it’s also rebated to fit round the shed trim.)

Not much to say about the sarking except that it’s, well, sarking:

Not exactly a day’s work next, but these gravel boards gave me something to play with on a pish day! There’s maybe a bit more to this than meets the eye because I had to dig out about a bucketful of soil with a trowel, find a piece of wood for a mini post, shape it to avoid chipping away the existing shed found (which I didn’t want to do), concrete it in, fit a spacer behind to take the boards, and shape and fit the gravel boards (one of which I did twice because my first attempt used a horrible bit of sarking that didn’t meet the weatherboarding nicely). But still really just playing compared to the previous few days…

Here I’m taking a break from building after an abandoned attempt to start the corrugated roofing on Saturday to work on the drain yesterday. There’s two bulk bags of gravel gone into that, which proved to be the Goldilocks amount as I tipped the last of the second into the top of the former hippo pit to finish working downhill then back up. So here’s where it starts on my neighbours’ side of the fence:

And where it finishes just above the remains of the old field drain I found:

Still quite a lot of gravel to go in here:

I worked downhill along the trench…

Then back uphill…

Till the gravel ran out perfectly up at the shed end…

Then raked a fair bit of the ground back, which was probably harder work than doing the gravel!

It’s not all gravel in the hippo pit because I put some of the rubble back in the LH side:

And finally (for now) some more ground restoration/realignment today before I get back to building things. Who knows when I’m going to get working on Fly, but I’m guessing April now. Which is OK because, much as I’m looking forward to a good sailing season, I’m currently busy with this and want to see it done! :-)

Yes, the subject’s ‘framing’, but let’s talk a little more about drainage first…

Sunday was a good day for digging and my materials weren’t coming till Tuesday, so of course I dug! There’s 11m of pipe beyond the ‘hippo pit’, so the drain is > 11m long, a shovel wide and as deep as the top of my wellies, which is to say 400mm (this depth chosen so there’s no uphill to get out of the pit, but handy to have a quick measurement system like wellies!):

I broke into this ancient earthenware pipe (presumably an old field drain) at the bottom end of my trench. It’s about 10″ diameter with walls 3/4″ thick!

And here’s my drain again from the reverse direction. Since these photos were taken, the pipe’s gone into the trench but is currently still waiting to be buried in gravel:

Here’s Travis Perkins bringing my stuff on Tuesday. No rear-wheel steering this time, but plenty of room from the uphill side. Of course the CLS for my framing is packed below the weatherboarding and sarking! The gravel is for the drain and the plywood (under the tarp) to build a lumber cart for my workshop as well as the kayak trolley gussets:

I got all the remaining post holes fully concreted and domed for drainage the same day:

This next six-photo sequence from Wednesday might not look like much, but shows what’s actually quite a significant step in cutting back shed trim and attaching an angled rail to take the continuation roof:

I’ll need to cut back that gable trim further to accommodate my rafters and sarking, but will come back to it when necessary:

This joint was photographed without fastening since I was still considering how best to do it, but I later fastened it with Gorilla Glue and a single screw:

By Thursday evening, things were starting to look more like my drawing, but still wanting intermediate rafters (six out of eleven done here) as well as all the wall studding. It would be nice to work with straight timber, but I managed to pull the longer pieces straight enough and was relieved to get past the post-cutting stage in good shape! Nailing the top ends of the rafters has proved trickier than the bottom ends because the overhang of the existing roof gets in the way, but I’ve got there:

Friday saw the long wall fully framed, leaving the two short walls and remaining rafters for today. I’ll decide what to do with the gaps at the base where the ground’s falling away at the back (unlike my hypothetical ‘flat ground’ drawing) later. The reason I didn’t frame right to the bottom of the shed woodwork was keeping the long-wall cladding to seven whole boards where there’s no point going lower than ‘ground level’ along the fence, but I’m at least taking the end wall one board lower where the gap’s biggest:

And here we are today with the framing all done:

The weatherboarding comes in the stupid length of 4.5m, which is not a multiple of 0.6m, so the only sane way to cut it for my 6m wall is 3m lengths (keeping the 1.5m leftovers for the 1.2m walls), and the logic of the tripled stud is simply more wood to nail all the joins and a covering piece to:

I shot multiple angles of the frame before it all gets covered up, and am still considering how to deal with the falling ground at the back:

So that’s how things stand right now. In other news, I did my first pool session with Nevis Canoe Club last night and practised repeated wet exits with the spraydeck. I’m also starting to think about working on Fly now the weather seems to be improving, but still really need/want to get the kayak store finished first!