A close shave

As mentioned in previous posts, we’re putting up a shed this weekend. Believe it or not, this is actually on the critical path to getting the nursery sorted out before the garklet arrives (erect shed, move paint tins from library cupboard to shed, move computer into library cupboard, turn former computer room into nursery). The shed got delivered this afternoon, slightly later than I’d hoped, and I can now breath a huge sigh of relief.

You see, when we took down the previous shed, and I measured the plot and realised that we had enough space to fit a 7’x7′ shed. I went ahead and ordered the shed from Screwfix.

A week later, I woke up in the middle of the night with the realisation that I hadn’t measured the height of the passageway through which I’d need to move the shed panels in order to get them into the back garden. A passageway which has less than 7′ of headroom at either end. I lay there tossing and turning for the four hours until dawn while trying to work out what I could do:

  • There’s limited space at the garden end of the passageway, so there’s no guarantee that we’d be able to turn the panels to clear the garden gate if we moved them diagonally through the passageway.
  • We’re mid-terrace, so we’d have to heft the panels over at least two gardens if we were to try and get things in from either end.
  • That aside, there’s a wall at each end of the terrace with a doorway of the same dimensions as our passageway, so we’d have to lift it over that wall as well.
  • It might be possible to take the panels apart, carry them through in bits and reassemble them, but the base is a single sheet which would need to be cut.
  • Lifting the panels over fences and walls would take more people than we’re likely to have around at the weekend.

We’ve been very, very lucky. The highest minimum dimension of the panels is 6’10”. The diagonal in the road end of the passageway is 7′, and there’s just enough space to get round the gate at the other end. Moreover, the shed panels were light enough either for me to move by myself, or for and I to move between us (yes, I forced my wife to do heavy labour when almost eight months pregnant). The downside is that it’s clearly a very cheap shed, but hopefully it’ll last for a few years longer than the previous one was going to.

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