I never thought last year when I decided to build myself a shed that it would take so long, be so complicated and cost so much! It’s almost finished, and it looks great but hell it’s has taken some doing.

Holes for Shed Footings

It went something like this. First I found a shed to buy; it came from Queensland from a bunch called Widespan Sheds and if you are ever in the market for a big shed, give them a miss they are dreadful to deal with. But after suffering their administrative trivia for several weeks I had got through the hoops and had a shed ordered and a promised delivery date.

Next I discovered because of the size of my shed I needed a building permit. I rang the local council who appeared to know nothing about the process and referred me to a ‘private individual’ whose sole purpose in life was to acquire other people building permits as the council didn’t want to get involved any more. He wanted $500 for his services plus the fees the council wanted for a variety of bits of paper.

Concrete Footings Poured

Half way through the long list of things I had to acquire or get certified was an item suggesting I needed to get drawings made of the property with the shed on it. I asked my tame permit guy about it and he told me I did need drawings, and guess what there were a bunch of folks just down the road who could draw them for me, and by coincidence, they charged $500 for the privilege! So I went and saw them and got that process underway.

Armed with all the documents, and after I’d paid the now just in excess of $700 bill for the building permit, I received a piece of paper telling me I could begin to build my shed, but progress needed to be inspected at regular intervals.

Meanwhile I’d been trying to get someone to commit to actually building the shed for me. I was out in touch with a bunch by the folks I bought them shed from who committed to a price and date that suited me so I said yes. Just after I said yes, they changed the dates on me, slipping it by about a week. I went back to them and said I wasn’t that happy with that as the shed was being delivered to coincide with their committed date and now they were changing it. The response I got was to tell me that in fact they were now slipping the date again to an as yet to be advised date around a month later that the original date, at which point I told them not to bother and went and started looking for someone else to do it. After a couple of goes I found someone who committed to dates and prices so we agreed, and signed the deal.

Shed Frame Up

Next the shed arrived. Amongst the plethora of forms the shed suppliers had sent me was one about delivery method, basically asking if they could get a semi-trailer up my driveway, I answered no. And yes you guessed it, when the shed arrived, it was on a semi-trailer, so the driver and I agreed that he should take it away again. The delivery was rescheduled for a few days later and arrived very early in the morning on a truck as large as the first one though this one was not a semi-trailer but again would not fit, or to be more honest, attempt to fit, in my driveway. After a number of phone calls the shed was left at the top of my driveway near the road and I spent the rest of the day moving it a piece at a time – total weight of shed two tons – to where I’d wanted it delivered in the first place.

The guys who agreed to build the shed arrived as they promised to put in the concrete footings onto which the shed would be attached. What happened next is covered in the post below on putting up my Hills Hoist but we got there, just before the end of the day and darkness descending.

Shed with Outer Sheets On

Next I went and ordered a 5000 litre water tank for the shed, as it seems you aren’t allowed to let rainwater just run onto the ground anymore it needs to go ‘somewhere’ like into the stormwater system, or in my case a 5000 litre water tank.

The shed builders came back a week later and put the shed up in four days. A fun four days as they brought a caravan to sleep in and we spent every evening they were there sitting around my outside table drinking and storytelling, they were a couple of nice guys. And finally the shed was up and we had a shed wetting drink and they hitched up their van and headed for home.

Next came the concrete slab. The guys to do that arrived one day in the week and prepared the ground, and came back at the end of the week and poured the concrete, returning today to finish it, cut joints, take away the edging etc.

Shed Ready for Concrete Pour

I have an electrician coming this evening to look over and give me a quote on putting electrics into the shed, and a plumber arriving at the weekend to fix up the water tank and drainage. At that point I will be able to seal the concrete inside the shed, and once that is done, it is finished.

It has been a long exercise, lasting several months but we are almost there. I’ve embedded a series of photos in this post showing the various stages of the build, to date. And now if you ever need to have a shed built, call me, I’m an expert!

Inside the Shed, a Concrete Floor

Is it just me that notices that almost every day there is, as the TV refers to it, ‘A horror smash on our roads’, and it always involve a truck. There was another on the 6PM news tonight, prompting me to write this. The truck usually appears to be at fault. That is, it jack-knifed, it overturned, it lost control and crossed onto the wrong side of the road etc etc. The outcome is usually the death of the occupants of other vehicles involved, the truck driver usually escapes with ‘minor injuries’.

I currently commute around a 100kms round trip every day to work. On a daily basis I see acts of lunacy carried out by truck drivers. I’ve been tailgated by B doubles on stretches of road where the limit is 110kph, I’ll admit to doing close to 115 myself but I still have a very large truck up my arse, totally unable to stop if I was to brake hard because he wants to go faster still. Then you get the trucks who joins the freeway traffic from the left, flick on their indicator and bully their way across three or four lanes, on the grounds he is much bigger than you, so maybe you ought to get out of his way. I saw a couple of those this morning on my towards the Westgate Bridge.

Top Gear (UK motoring programme) continually take the piss out of UK Truck drivers for their habit of ‘murdering prostitutes’. Maybe we should start a similar movement here about Ozzy truck drivers and their habit of murdering innocent road users.

I don’t watch reality TV shows, but I can’t avoid the ads for them while watching other stuff on TV.

For a while now I’ve been seeing photos during the ad breaks of a female who looks like a suntanned ‘Barbie Doll lookalike competition’ winner. Just recently I found out who she was, Nicki Minaj. I have absolutely no idea at all what she might have done to become in quotes ‘a celebrity’ but I did formulate a theory about her as follows –

For years I can imagine, movie animators struggled to make Avatars in movies look like real people. It was hard, then they came up with an idea – ‘If we can’t make Avatars look like real people, let’s make real people look like Avatars’, and so Nicki Minaj was invented, plastic surgery and all.

Now I really am glad I don’t watch reality TV.

It’s been a busy few days on this lead up to Easter. On Monday the guys to put in the footings for my new shed turned up to do the work. It’s been a trial getting to this point but we made it.

One of the casualties of the shed is the Hills Hoist (clothes line for you non-Aussies – see picture). The old one, which was in truth somewhat broken down, sat slap bang in the middle of where the shed is going so had to come down. We purchased a new one at the weekend, then dug a hole 650mm deep to put it in. No mean feat in this garden which is full of natural rock, but we were lucky. Luckier it turned out than the guys doing the shed footings who hit rock in just about every hole they dug!

Hills Hoist, First Use - Note Concrete Base!

After hole digging, came hole Inspection by official building Inspector – Old joke – ‘a large hole has appeared in the centre of Melbourne, Police are looking into it’. Anyway he looked into the holes, made some observations, pronounced them reasonable, and then we were clear to fill them with concrete.

Concrete got ordered, arrived, albeit 45 minutes late, and got poured into the holes. I diverted several bucket loads into my Hills Hoist Hole, and the job was done. We all sat round had a celebratory beer and the hole diggers headed for home.

The Homemade Hooch bit came in when I was asked for my plans for ‘what was I going to do with the shed?’ – One of the suggestions I made was that I might brew my own beer, or even build a still and make real alcohol.

A Still - Made in China!

That seemed to interest everyone. My son sent me a link to eBay and a still he recommended, and my next door neighbour invited me round to view his setup (still) and how it all worked. That last one also involved, ‘sampling the wares’. He also brews beer so we drank homemade white spirit with beer chasers. My quick visit turned into a couple of hours. I eventually had to insist on going home as I still had to make supper. Anyway, I slept well that night.

And now having purchased and installed a Hills Hoist, all I need to become a 100% authentic  Ozzy is to finish that ‘blokes shed’.

It’s been a busy several weeks that has just flown by. I’m not working at present and looking back, it’s just as well. I’m not sure where I would have found the time for everything if I had been.

Quince

We just had a heat wave, nine days of over 30 degrees, which has thankfully just ended.  I’ve also had during that time a further set of fruit trees ripening that I’ve had to use up. I did a piece on my plum harvest around a month ago. More recently I’ve been inundated by apples.

Apart from giving lots to friends and neighbours, I’ve also made jams, chutneys, sauces all types of preserves just to keep up with the trees’ production. Thankfully that is all but over. I still have several kilos of tomatoes and a washing basket full of Quince left to deal with but that will be the end of it. Winter draws on (pun intended).

In the midst of all this I also had my Sister and her husband back to stay for a few days. They left at the end of February. Then I did a wedding which occupied a whole weekend with travel and attendance thrown in, and finally the fruit and hot weather hit, which brings us up to date.

There are some pictures of the products of my labour in this post.

Apples, Tomatoes, and more...

On Sunday the guy who normally helps me with my building projects said he couldn’t make it as he had to go drinking.

Respecting Aussie traditions I said OK, and kissed off working on projects on Sunday. It takes two, especially when you are using drop saws and nail guns. You don’t want to have an accident with one of those whilst ‘home alone’. So I settled for the safer pursuit of picking plums and making stuff with them.

I made a Plum Worcestershire Sauce, Plum Jam and a Spiced Plum Preserve. I got around six or seven bottles of each, from each recipe. I still have a plum tree with a huge number of plums on it but am out of ideas as to what to do with them all for now.

The other thing to note is that in an earlier post about Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals how much washing up they generated. I believe now that 15 Minute Meals is second to making ‘preserves’ in large batches. Ther was sticky stuff everywhere! I’m still cleaning it up.

Anyway if anyone out there wants plums, or the stuff I made with them at the weekend let me, I have loads. Email me at – jonbell@jonbellonline.com .

My last contract ended last week Thursday, so my first day of unemployment was Friday. I had a ‘day of rest’ on Friday, and started back into the outside work at the weekend.

The current project is garden edging for the pathways and garden beds. With the whole property being on a slope the garden has a tendency, encouraged by nature, and the bird life, to slide slowly down the slopes to places it is not meant to be. To prevent this I’ve been making edging for the beds and pathways, to hold it back. I have lots to do but made a good start last weekend. It will continue tomorrow. A photo of the work to date in this post.

Today I spent a lot of the day trying to get a building permit for a shed.

I decided to buy a big shed and have it erected onsite here in Brookfield where I am living. Buying it was the easy part, well maybe the easier part compared to getting bulidng permission. Buying it wasn’t actually that easy either, but maybe that’s a story for another day. Getting ‘permission’ to put it up is proving to be a whole different set of problems.

So complicated that I went to see a guy who specialises in getting these permits. When I saw him a week ago, he gave me a big list of things I had to acquire to attach to the application. I went back to see him today with most of what he’d asked for. Today he casually dropped into the conversation that I’d also need drawings done of the site. Drawings to scale showing the plan view and side and rear elevations of the shed!

So once I got home I made another call to someone who does drawings! I think it’s going to cost me more in ‘consultants’ fees to have this shed erected, than the shed itself will cost. Stay tuned for progress on the shed build.

Thai Chicken Laksa

Having been inundated with Jamie Oliver books and DVDs for my Birthday and Xmas I decided to take the hint and try one of his 15 minute meal recipes this week. The one I tried was the Thai Chicken Laksa. See this link – Jamie Oliver Recipe.

My Feedback – Firstly it was delicious. Next it took me more like 45 minutes than 15 minutes to make it. That was because all the weighing and preparation isn’t included in the 15 minutes, and I don’t have a top of the line food processor like Jamie does to chop and blend all that stuff in seconds. That said a new food processor is now on the shopping list!

But lastly a warning, it created the world’s largest pile of left over vegetable bits and dirty dishes. I filled my small household compost bin with the left over veggies, then I filled my dishwasher with dirty dishes. Having filled it I still had a pile of pots left over that I did by hand.

That said I believe it is well worth the effort and persevering to get it right. It was very tasty.

Last week there were no trains at all where I live due to works on the rails. This week Monday I needed to go into the city and with doubts about whether there would actually be any trains I headed to the station to discover there were indeed trains. I caught one into the city, did what I had to do and went back to Southern Cross to catch the one I had planned to return on, that was at 13h08.

On entering Southern Cross about 15 minutes before it was due I checked the big departures board. That told me that my train was leaving from platform 4A. I went to 4A and sure enough there was a train waiting. The departure board now specific to only platform 4A told me this was my train, so I got on. A couple of other people also got on, and we all waited.

At around 13h05 a gent wearing a Hi-Viz jacket got on the train and walked through shouting something along the line of ‘and where do you folks think you are going?’ I replied Ballarat. He said this train wasn’t going there. The Ballarat train was leaving from platform 8A in 2 minutes. We all jumped off and started to run to platform 8A. I did have time to check the Platform 4A departure board as we dashed past it; it still said this was still my train on platform 4A, which wasn’t what the gent in the Hi-Viz jacket was saying, but we believed him and kept going.

I got to platform 8A with less than a minute to spare and jumped onto the nearest carriage of the train. Nothing happened for a little while and I got suspicious. I got up and went to the open door and looked out, just in time to see the front half of the train leaving. The back half which I was on, was not attached to the bit that was leaving and was staying firmly where it was, at platform 8A!

So well done Vline for you extremely confusing messages as to which platform, at what time, and which actual piece of your trains may, or indeed may not, be departing from Southern Cross. I had to wait another hour for the next one.