I finally started the construction of the garden pavillion (let’s not call it a garden house anymore ).
My daughter was sick today and spent most of her time either in bed or being awake and missing my companionship. so i decided to take a break of renovating the attic and do some stuff in the garden. baby girl was happy to see me, and a happy child is still the best thing a father can have..

initially a just wanted to clean the place up, but after a while i decided to go ahead and start measuring the foundation of the pavillion.
the concrete slab will measure 400 by 800

tha above picture is just after removing the top soil for about half the surface. (please ignore the mess in the upper right corner.. there used to be bushes covering that up, but those bushes had to go. Soon that little crappy shed can be replaced too.)
It was ‘hot’ today, really, it is the end of april, and it feels like it is already well into the summer.
Because of the heat, it was hard to keep the pace…

one advantage I already discovered about the location of the pavillion: it is covered in the shade of the surrounding threes for 2/3ds of the day. this will allow the building to stay cool in the summer, extreme insulation and a wood furnace will keep it nice and warm in the winter.

the red tripod thingy is a laser that shines 360 degrees, it turns out to be useless when the sun is shining…the beam is invisible… bummer.
I tried it just now (in the evening, twilight) and it is very clear now.. so the actual levelling of the surface will have to be done in the evening. come to think of it, if these tempreatures keep up, the evening is probably the best time to dig into the dirt anyway.

I have to take of around 10 cm of dirt, the concrete slab will be poured to a thickness of 15 cm..
after that has set, I have a very large working surface to start with the wood frame… really looking forward to this.

the plan is to work at the attick when little princess is awake, and work on the pavillion when she is sleeping. 2007 will be a very hard year…did I mention that number two is due to be born at the end of october? so it would be cool to have these two projects finished.

more to come soon.

I should probably start blogging about the attic too, a lot of things going on up there that are worth talking about..

I’ve been so busy lately getting the attic finished. It still isn’t…
I’m cursing at the previous owner, man, that guy really had no clue about waht he was doing..
What kind of person builds an netire new roof onto a wooden floor that is clearly been infected by woodworm…
some of the support beams are just mounted onto the planks instead of the floor beams..
This morning I was removing the planks, and discovered that the roof structure was slowly moving down… PANIC!

I had a plan to remove two planks, and leave two in and so on. this was to keep providing support for the roof, and to give me space to mount extra beams to give the roof it much needed support.
because of the woodworm, the planks where in such bad shape that they barely managed with all of them together, let alone with half of them missing..

so I needed to work a bit faster.. and an hour later the roof was stable again on solid beams now..

I needed a break after this..