A waiting game

As of now the CMA CGM Cedrus which is bringing my mini excavator to Fos-sur-Mer has been standing off Marseille in the Golf de Lion for the past four or five days. It’s arrival time has kept being pushed back and to cap it all a sister vessel, the CMA CGM Ambition arrived while it was being held up and entered Fos-sur-Mer before it. As I type this the Ambition is leaving the port and the Cedrus is heading in so in the next few hours my mini excavator will at last be unloaded and in France.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to get my hands on it. It won’t be available for collection for something like 5-7 days and in the meantime the agent I’ve appointed will have had to deal with the administrative process of getting it released and I’ll have had to pay the fees involved. During that period I’ll also need to have finished the garage I’m building for it as the weather here is still unpredictable and we’ll undoubtedly have more rain after it has arrived at my house. So that’s what I’ve been concentrating on.

After getting the basic framework for the garage up the next job was to build the structure for its pitched roof. This proved to be far more challenging than I expected as although I’ve managed it by myself it was really a job for two people. Initially I tried yesterday to build it ‘in situ’ but without success. It was almost impossible getting the various components lined up in the correct positions and then fix them together while standing on top of a pair of steps. I had a couple of minor accidents which caused minor damage so I therefore decided to build the roof structure on the ground and then lift it into place to complete the whole structure.

This was much easier said than done because of its weight and also because of how awkward it was to manhandle. It took me a while to figure out how to do it and a while longer to actually get it done but I finally managed it and it was then just a matter of going all around and drilling and screwing all of the joints as tightly as possible. In anticipation of this and also in readiness for when I start on the build for my much more ambitious garden tool shed/workshop I recently treated myself to a new high power Makita cordless drill.

My old Black and Decker is still working well having been used to build two wooden ‘abris’ at my old house and for much other work but having two drills means that you save an awful lot of time with not having to keep swapping from drill to screwdriver all the time. It came with a small battery so I’ve bought a new larger one for it as well and I also bought two large batteries for the Makita together with a double battery charger, so when I come onto my new, bigger tool shed/workshop build I hopefully won’t have to keep stopping due to running out of batteries.

As we keep having rain forecast which often does not turn up, I decided I couldn’t take the risk of leaving all the new woodwork uncovered. I had several old plastic tarps mostly in quite poor shape going back to when I had the caravan and the two ‘tonelle’ marquee type tents that were destroyed by the wind, so I used them to cover the wooden framework at the end of the afternoon, as shown in the images below.

The interior shot shows the basic roof structure.

I’ve attached strengthening fillets at the roof end apexes but although the rear of the garage is quite rigid the open front end is much less so. I’m hoping that this will be resolved when I attach the roof sheets but if not I’ll have to consider other measures as I don’t want the structure to be blown down by the first strong wind that occurs.

This may include adding corner braces in the front as I have done in the rear, as shown in the image.

The apex strengthening fillets appear quite effective but may not be sufficient to provide the rigidity needed at the open front end, but I’ll need to see how rigidity improves when the roof sheets have been added.

It appears that even at this early stage an uninvited guest has already taken up residence in the unfinished mini excavator garage. The old tarps and some other junk were in a heap under my inverted wheelbarrow for many months and in that time I’ve seen two lizards, one large and one small, living in it together with some mice at one time. The large lizard has been out in the sunshine while I’ve been working keeping an eye on what I’ve been up to and when I came to take the photographs today there he was behind a roof beam looking back at me. It seems that he’s already trying to claim it as his own!