{"id":4073,"date":"2023-02-10T18:01:47","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T18:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/?p=4073"},"modified":"2023-02-10T18:01:47","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T18:01:47","slug":"the-new-wendy-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/?p=4073","title":{"rendered":"The New Wendy House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s another post I wrote last summer and then actually, for real, forgot to post. That’s how little I think about this project these days. Honestly, it’s very refreshing. One day I will have recovered enough to drum up actual enthusiasm again, so watch this space. Meanwhile, in old news:<\/p>\n

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The old Wendy House, which was one of the first things I built, was lovely, but it was not well built. It was under-engineered to the tune of being unsafe (held up by a wooden post hammered into the forest floor, and therefore rotted through in 5 years) and over-engineered to the tune of being really, really hard to take apart.<\/p>\n

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But with enough brute force, even rusty 6 inch nails can be taken out of 2×4, and with enough willpower, I can strip out glass fiber insulation that has had generations of squirrels nesting in it. And two actual live mice looking very bemused at being evicted. God, it was awful.<\/p>\n

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Anyway, lots of lessons learned. So I set about stacking up all my reclaimed wood, some of it on its third or fourth use now.<\/p>\n

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And some of it quite fresh from a batch Anthony gave me.<\/p>\n

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And some of it an old telegraph pole (aren’t english names quaint, Americans?) or internet pole as Julian calls them.<\/p>\n

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The pole I cut up for the front legs of the structure, using all my chainsaw sculpting skills. And I creosoted them within an inch of their lives, hoping they’ll last a long time.<\/p>\n

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This time nothing’s getting sunk into the forest floor, it’s all going to stand on padstones which are set into that wonder-material MOT (what is that even called in America? Graded gravel probably…)<\/p>\n

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I made the floor structure super strong for the extra 2 feet in either direction I’d added to the floor area.<\/p>\n

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And recycled most of the old building’s roof to make the floor.<\/p>\n

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At that point, I had, like, two days before it rained, and I really didn’t want my dead-level plywood floor delaminating, so the race was on.<\/p>\n

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Well, it would be on the following morning, anyway. I was done for that day.<\/p>\n

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So, walls were constructed and erected…<\/p>\n

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…temporarily braced…<\/p>\n

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… posts and purlins, meaty as you like to hold up the cement tile roof…<\/p>\n

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… rafters which all had to be custom cut because recycled wood…<\/p>\n

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… but it was all coming together at the end of day one.<\/p>\n

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And with Julian’s help, we got the siding on and everything else that needed to be done before the roof went on.<\/p>\n

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And it was all looking great.<\/p>\n

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And then I had to go to Sheffield and teach a course. So Julian, Lisa and Ben were left to put the roof on in my absence.<\/p>\n

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Good thing Julian knew what he was doing from the last time he put a roof on a building.<\/p>\n

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With the three of them helping it was all on in a day.<\/p>\n

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Honestly, thank God for Julain and Lisa and Ben. I took a short break after that marathon. But soon it became clear that the job would not finish itself. It did offer a great opportunity to use up those 5 sheets of kingspan I’d had littering up the garden for ages and the three last sheets of plasterboard from the house.<\/p>\n

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Walls got covered in a mix of reclaimed plywood and deconstructed pallets. The beds were constructed from bits of the old beds, plus some other reclaimed stuff from The Collection.<\/p>\n

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With a paint job and a couple of maps wallpapered to the ceiling, it was looking very smart indeed.<\/p>\n

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Couple of curtains, bit of bedding, very homey. Anthony provided some vinyl flooring. Honestly, I texted him and said “don’t suppose you’ve got an offcut of vinyl flooring about 8 foot by 3 foot?” and he did!<\/p>\n

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The wall murals are a bit of wall paint and a sharpie marker. The maps are one small scale and one large scale of the area.<\/p>\n

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Naturally Julian and I had to spend the night in it to try it out.<\/p>\n

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The floor from the old building became a deck out the back of this one, complete with railings and a little door because I figured anyone seeing how close the rope swing reached was just about guaranteed to try it, whether I accommodated that level of adventurous spirit or not.<\/p>\n

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It is altogether a charming little house now, I am very proud of it, which strikes me as a little bit odd, in juxtaposition to my slightly “meh” feelings regarding having built en enormous house, but there you have it. We can’t control these things.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s another post I wrote last summer and then actually, for real, forgot to post. That’s how little I think about this project these days. Honestly, it’s very refreshing. One day I will have recovered enough to drum up actual … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4073"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4126,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions\/4126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}