Do It Yourself

So where does your DIY draw the line?  I suppose my bete noir is plastering!  Beyond that I will have a go at anything.  To date my biggest project was the rebuild of my workshop.  The original unit was of corrugated iron on a timber frame probably built around the 1930's, since when time and weather had taken their toll.  The iron had rust through in many places and the wood work had woodworm and rot of almost every kind.  The crunch came during the storms or 1987 and 1990 when the back end 15 feet blew down, all window fell out and the doorway gave up the ghost.

I cogitated for many months deciding what to build and in what material.  I eventually settled on Celcon blocks under a tiled roof complete with hip ends.  The first major decision was to determine the construction of the floor as my hobby of model engineering implies heavy machinery.  At this point I realized that I needed a 'friend', one who could, and would, advise me on the building regulations.  My friend happened to be a highly qualified civil engineer working at that time in the house building industry.  His advice was not only invaluable but essential as there were many occasions when I reached a stage and could not continue due to lack of knowledge.

The size of the building measured up to 13m x 5m by 4m high.  Restricting the height to 4m and the fact that I was replacing an existing building meant that planning permission was not required.  However, in order to ensure remaining on the right side of the law I did visit our local planning office and arranged for an officer to pay me a visit to confirm that I would not be contravening any planning regulations.  Subsequently a letter from the Chief Planning Officer arrived confirming that no permissions were necessary but that the construction must conform to the latest building regulations.

The first practical job undertaken was to remove what was left of the original structure and clear the ground ready for digging out for the foundations and flooring.  I went down 1m for the foundations and 800mm for the flooring.  The flooring finally consisted of 450mm of hardcore with tonnes of sand filling the interstices and the final build up was of glass fibre reinforced concrete on top of industrial grade plastic damp proof membrane. 

The walls were built using a technique common on continental Europe but which has not caught on in the UK to anything like the same extent.  The blocks are glued together as opposed to being put together with mortar.  The reason this method was chosen was because of the better thermal characteristics of the adhesive over mortar, an additional benefit is improved sound-proofing, considered necessary due to the future use as a workshop.

On completion of the walls the next job was the roof.  The requisite timber arrived one afternoon and work started.  In order to improve both heat and sound insulation I chose to line the outside of the rafters with 12mm plywood, WBP variety.  It was a pig getting the boards up on the roof but it has proved itself more than worth the effort.  Finally these boards were line with red concrete tiles, mostly second hand ones.

Once the roof had been completed and the walls rendered, professionally I hasten to add, the internal walls were dry lined with 12mm plasterboard.  Then came the job of fitting door frames, doors and windows.  A tip here.  If you are building something from scratch and want to keep costs down use window frames that are known as misfits.  These are units designed for a job but due to measurement errors won't fit.  They tend to be very cheap, I guess they were less than half price.

Fitting out the various rooms took a long time.  I provided a small shower room and toilet, plus a tiny kitchen.  This means that if we are doing a dirty job in the garden and want a coffee we can get one without traipsing dirt into the main living bungalow.  Further we can have a shower when finished.  All the necessary drains were put in at the time of doing the basic groundwork.  Also at this time a new armoured power cable was laid in as was a water supply and gas pipe.

At this stage I was able to install all the electrical equipment, I am an electrical inspector in real life so was fully qualified to call myself a competent engineer, as required under current legislation.  I fitted a new consumer unit and provided plenty of power sockets.  In order to provide for future changes I laid in all cables in 75mm metal trunking.  Further I included in the ground works an 80mm sealed pipe right from the workshop and down to the bungalow, and provided a draw cord to enable additional wires, such as computer network CAT5 cables and a telephone line, to be drawn through.

The final task was to transfer all the workshop machinery from the garage together with my electronics workshop that originally located in the fourth bedroom within the bungalow.  The only item following on from this was to provide strong security and alarms, plus CCTV in order to deter any unwelcome visitors!