Henrik’s shed

[Henrik]

Focus now turned to the workshop side.

I spent ages filling and sanding the joints - probably spent more than a weeks worth of man-days (spread over many many evenings) filling, sanding and painting. In the end, it looks mostly OK. There are some bumps in the ceiling I wish I could get rid of, but I try to remind myself that it's a workshop that will get dirty anyway.

and painted.

The floor was unfortunately rubbish in this room after the debacle with the delayed concrete delivery etc, so I filled the biggest hole with some sand/cement screed (it was about 40mm deep).
I want to be able to roll tool-cabinets etc around, so also needed to sort out the roughness in other areas.

After much research, I settled on "High Performance Leveller" by Setcrete. It's possible to use as a wearing surface (i.e no floor required), which suits my plans. Unfortunately it also cost 30 pounds a bag, and I calculated that I needed 10

The sacks of gold lined up:

Getting ready to mix. I figured I wouldn't have time to mix this with the SDS drill and paddle, so got myself an Erbauer paddle mixer specifically for this job - What a lovely, lovely, tool it is! Should have bought one years ago to mix plaster etc.
I made sure I had enough water on hand for all the mixing, and also a separate bucket to clean the mixer between "mixes" (can only do one bag at a time).

Floor was first primed with the Setcrete acrylic primer - diluted 4:1.

I was super worried about this, but in the end it was fairly simple. If you're doing this on your own, however, you _must_ ensure you have all the water etc ready to go for all your bags. The stuff goes off really fast.

The only weirdness was that in some areas I got these little pinholes once it was set - not sure what happened, because I primed as per instructions, rolled with a spiky roller etc. Anyway, No biggie because most of the pinholes are under where the bench is going anyway.

The last remaining tasks are:

- seal the floor with concrete sealer
- cut in some wood for the window-cills (ye olde floor-boards again)
- fit skirting in two places where I will not have "stuff" in the way of the wall/floor join.

 

[Henrik]

So, now the inside is in effect "done".

I have kept very tight eyes on the spending, and can account for every single penny (well, maybe not penny, but at least to the closest 10 pounds). It's been eye-opening, and sometimes I wish I hadn't, because I've spent almost exactly 2x the original budget.

In hindsight, I would have done some things differently, namely the pumped concrete. It was great to get it up to floor level immediately, but on the other hand, it cost me a lot of money, and I still ended up with a crappy floor I had to spend 324 pounds fixing up.

The windows are a love-hate thing. I hate the fact that they take up room on one of the workshop walls, but on the other hand, I think it looks nice from the outside. Probably better long term to not have to look at a box, but rather something that is a bit easier on the eyes. I do however just hate the front door - no love for it at all, so maybe I'll change it later or clad it or something, i don't know, but it's butt ugly.

I would 100% do a timber stud build again, because you can fit so much more insulation in the same space. I possibly would not bother with 25cm of insulation for the walls (and the double walls, OMG), because it obviously eats into the available space inside.
The ceilings I should have 100% plumped for 200mm celotex, but I almost had a panic attack at the cost of it. As it is, because of the fluffyness of the loft insulation, and the fact that I had to 100% guarantee that there was a void above it for air circulation, I only ended up with about 12cm of wool, because adding more became so fluffy in places that it was impeding circulation. The office section has an additional 50mm of styrofoam insulation in the ceiling (and also the interior walls and door are insulated, so that when I'm working in there, I only have to heat up the office, and not the bigger room.
On the other hand, maybe there is enough insulation anyway - the shed is honestly warmer and cozier than the house now that it's winter, and even at the height of summer it was never uncomfortable in there. The highest I ever saw on the thermometer was 26 degrees, and the sun had been beating down on the building the whole day at that point. My old garden office would have been over 40 for sure, and that was with a portable aircon unit.

Given all the plastic membranes etc, it is incredibly airtight - in fact, unless I have the windows cracked, when I close or open the front door, I can feel "suction" before pressure equalises.

I have tried to follow "Passiv-Haus" principles where possible, just for my own curiosity, and I think I've managed to build something that feels a bit like a "Passiv Shed". I think my little portable aircon will be big enough to cool the office down in summer, and the little panel heater should be enough to heat it up in winter, if required.

The room sizes are:
- office: 3.0 x 1.8m
- compressor/store room: 1.2 x 1.8
- workshop: 4.2 x 3.0m

All in all, I've spent GBP 13,898.11 - that does not include the cost of any tools I bought (speed skim, paddle mixer, impact driver, a couple of hand saws), but all materials including Internet + electric wiring etc is in there. It's a big sum of money, obviously, for a small workshop/office/compressor room, but on the other hand, I'm happy with the way it looks and feels, and it's been an amazing project to work on - It's only been myself and at times my uncle helping out, but I'm a 44 year old computer nerd, and he's a 70 year old retired industrial machine mechanic - we don't really know what we're doing, and we had to do a lot of thinking and designing just to come up with something that would work (and often re-design after first implementation).

 

[dobbslc]

Wow that's really nice!
The Setcrete leveling compound is very good stuff, I had it in my lounge, dining room, utility room extension for maybe two years before the final oak flooring went down and it wears very well.

 

[Henrik]

Wow that's really nice!
The Setcrete leveling compound is very good stuff, I had it in my lounge, dining room, utility room extension for maybe two years before the final oak flooring went down and it wears very well.

Thank you, and good to hear that the setcrete wore well in the utility room It was lovely to pour it out and watch it fix the mess that was there previously. Very therapeutic!

Hopefully it holds up OK for me too, but even if it doesn't, at least it's now level enough to accept another floor on top

 

[dobbslc]

Very therapeutic!

Yes it is

 

[Henrik]

Moving on to fixing the outside of the shed, and the garden we wrecked in the process of building.

The Mrs has demanded a new patio in front of the existing brick wall, a path down the side of the garden, and finally to make it as level as possible.

This is what I’m dealing with now

The photos make the slope down look tiny, but I measured it with the laser level and it’s 1.55m down to the brick wall

This is the soil from the patio mostly dug out (about 20cm).

Uncle for scale.

Soakaway under the slab, and this is what is coming out under the top soil - more rock than clay/sand

Next step is actually to try to compact the soil somewhat. The question is how to do that? I’ve got a whacker plate, so I might try to level it as much as possible and run the plate over it and see where it sinks more and fill. Does that sound sensible? The loose soil is up to 50cm thick in places.
Oh and by level, I mean “roll it down the slope in a nice curve, not “flat and level”.

 

[lazybones51]

Personally i'd avoid trying to compact the soil, as that's going to give you drainage issues and knock the air out of the soil, which will hinder trying to grow a lawn.

 

[roblane65]

Moving on to fixing the outside of the shed, and the garden we wrecked in the process of building.

The Mrs has demanded a new patio in front of the existing brick wall, a path down the side of the garden, and finally to make it as level as possible.

This is what I’m dealing with now
View attachment 443234

The photos make the slope down look tiny, but I measured it with the laser level and it’s 1.55m down to the brick wall

This is the soil from the patio mostly dug out (about 20cm).

Uncle for scale.
View attachment 443235

Soakaway under the slab, and this is what is coming out under the top soil - more rock than clay/sand
View attachment 443236


Next step is actually to try to compact the soil somewhat. The question is how to do that? I’ve got a whacker plate, so I might try to level it as much as possible and run the plate over it and see where it sinks more and fill. Does that sound sensible? The loose soil is up to 50cm thick in places.
Oh and by level, I mean “roll it down the slope in a nice curve, not “flat and level”.

you'll have that done by tea time easter monday

 

[Henrik]

you'ii have that done by tea time easter monday

Easter 2026

 

[addjunkie]

Id be tempted to suggest a meandering path, and loose the excess soil by sculpting the shape of the ground.

 

[slim_boy_fat]

Oh and by level, I mean “roll it down the slope in a nice curve, not “flat and level”.

Why did this spring to mind when I read your post.....

 

[Henrik]

almost exactly six months later

I've had about 3 months off work, but tomorrow I'm starting a new job, so thought I'd best post progress until now, so that I don't forget


Test fitting of soakaway crates - 2x2 fit nicely. This was wrapped in geotextile and set into pebbles before being backfilled.

We dug some drains in - one leg to to the channel drain for the patio, and one to the sheds guttering.

back-filled:

Wickes turned up with the first lot of MOT type 1 - first of many deliveries, as we ended up using 20 bags of aggregate and sand in the end. Crazy amounts for a little patio.

First couple of layers compacted down - this took a lot longer than I'd have expected - it was pretty hard to hit the required levels, so a lot of faff back and forth.

And the second layer, where the fall is mostly correct (7cm over 5m). In total, there's about 10-15cm of type1 in the base at this point, depending on where we're measuring.

I built a raised bed from sleepers on one side to give us a nice line to work with, and also to "eat up" the difference in height between the fence panels.

Two sleepers high, secured with normal brackets, but also tied into the ground with these contraptions:

96 pieces of 90x60cm paving turned up:

and i decided it was cheaper to buy a cement mixer rather than hire one for extended time, so picked this up from Screwfix. Highly recommended - it's the quietest mixer I've ever heard. The patio will have a black border around it to frame it a bit, and also normal cement edging to build a box to cope with that idiotic fence panel setup on the left.

 

[Henrik]

and somehow i lost a bunch of images, but here the patio is basically done, and I'm starting on the path towards the house. I ordered a bunch of slabs too many, because I thought they might be broken etc, but in the end I had one broken tile, so there was enough spares to take the path all the way to the house, and even do some more paving at the front of the house to finish off the side entrance. We were originally going to have sparse tiles set in a black gravel, but as there were so many tiles, we laid them side by side instead.

Forming the curve to come off the patio:

and cut:

Mrs decided the didnt like having the sloping grass towards the path, so ended up building some kind of retaining wall from sleepers. The max height of the wall is only 50cm at the highest point, so hopefully it should hold OK.

this was a right faff. It took a week to complete just the wall with all the cutting etc etc, but now that it's in I really like it.

We ordered a couple of bulkbags of soil and filled in low patches (still another bag or two required, unfortunately...)

Oh, and the upper patio got a tiny little soakaway too. It's worked surprisingly well so far.

and finally garden lights controlled by a timer:

... and that brings me bang up to date. The garden is essentially finished for now - just waiting for some grass to grow and for some more cables to hook up the last lights. Once spring comes around again, we'll order some furniture and maybe even have a little barbecue - can't wait!

It's been an epic project, and not one I'm keen to repeat in a hurry, but I must admit I feel a great sense of satisfaction when I look out at the kids running around outside, or when the evening lights come on. Injury-wise, I think my shoulder is done for after all the digging - it was already pretty manky, but now it needs a a good rest for a year or two - next time I am 100% renting a digger.

 

[sparkysy]

You should be very proud, that looks better than most professional jobs!

 

[Henrik]

You should be very proud, that looks better than most professional jobs!

Thank you for the kind words

It’s got all sorts of tiny flaws everywhere, but I think we’ve done ok in the end

 

[Onoff]

How are you going to get the lathe, mill etc in?

 

[Henrik]

How are you going to get the lathe, mill etc in?

Haha, good question, but they both live in the garage

 

[addjunkie]

How are you going to get the lathe, mill etc in?

By bouncing them over all those new slabs cracking a few in the process!

 

[davenport]

Outrageously good result .

Hats off to ya...