{"id":18326,"date":"2021-11-24T15:19:50","date_gmt":"2021-11-24T14:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=18326"},"modified":"2021-11-24T16:34:15","modified_gmt":"2021-11-24T15:34:15","slug":"just-as-the-rain-began-to-pitty-patter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/just-as-the-rain-began-to-pitty-patter\/","title":{"rendered":"Just as the rain began to pitty-patter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, that unmistakable sound of raindrops on a metal roof. But just as it started I finished hanging the doors on my new tool store, meaning that the structure was finally complete and I was therefore ready for it. Well, not totally, because I’ve still got to move all of the stuff that I need to into out of the weather and only then will I be able to rest. And rest is what I need after all the work I’ve done. I’ve now got an aching back and if I have to fit one more fiddly little nut onto another fiddly little bolt with my sore and aching fingers in the next few months I’ll blow a gasket.<\/p>\n

But the job’s done, and it’s a good ‘un as we say in the UK. Not that hanging the doors was totally trouble-free… far from it. In fact I think that the doors have been the most disappointing part of the whole job. One of the reasons was that very early on you have to place the door hangers in the sliders and what they don’t tell you is that they are ‘handed’. I thought about this at the time but they didn’t show a picture, which would have been easy enough. At that time the door parts are bundled together (taped up) with other metal parts and as I wanted to get on with the job, it was too much trouble at the time to locate them and check.<\/p>\n

The result was that one hanger on each door was the wrong way round. Luckily I’m an enterprising sort of person and resolved the issue by cutting a small locating lug off each one. That left the problem of levelling the doors because at the correct height, each of the hangers in question then protruded beyond the edge of each door so the doors could not completely close. I resolved that one by moving the hangers in and drilling new holes in the hanging strips on the top of each door.<\/p>\n

But even then, although the doors were hanging vertically, they still wouldn’t completely close. The reason for that was that although the externally mounted door handles were fitted correctly, they each extend just beyond the edge of the doors ie they are too wide. I’ll have to come back to that later and either file a bit off each handle or remove them and elongate their mounting holes so they don’t extend beyond the edges of the doors allowing the latter to come into contact with each other and fully close. Or I could attach some kind of strip to the edge of each door to take up the gap, I don’t know for now.<\/p>\n

The other criticism that I have is that there is no kind of central stop and individually, each door can be pulled past the centre point of the door opening. If that happens, their rear edges can move past the ends of the horizontal rails on each of the front side panels preventing them from re-opening without a lot of fiddling. I’ll need to work out a way of avoiding that.<\/p>\n

But anyway, here are today’s shots.<\/p>\n

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So at the end of the job, what are my conclusions? OK, there have been one or two problems along the way but you have to expect that kind of thing with this kind of job. Nobody is perfect and it’s not surprising that given the amount of engineering design that’s gone into the structure there are a few missing or mis-placed screw holes. Am I happy with the final result? Yes, definitely, even given the problems that I encountered and the criticisms that I’ve made above, it fully meets, or even exceeds, my expectations. There are no visible faults of any kind to detract from what I think is a pretty good-looking utility building.<\/p>\n

I’m also very happy that I was able to complete it single-handedly. Wim very kindly offered to help me out but I wanted to try and do it by myself and am very pleased that it was both possible and I succeeded in doing so, even though it took a bit of working out from time to time. The manual says that two people can put together a structure like mine in a day. I doubt that, unless they already have experience of putting one together previously. I have taken the equivalent of six half days, shortish ones at that given the time of year, so say 3 working days. I’m very happy with that and I doubt I could realistically have done it in less.<\/p>\n

And finally, what about the cost? Let’s say it cost 400\u20ac plus the materials (sand, gravel and cement) – I’ve lost the numbers now but just under another 200\u20ac as I recall, so call it 600\u20ac for the concrete base. The structure itself cost just over 600\u20ac (619\u20ac actually) so the complete job came out at 1200\u20ac. How does that compare to other alternatives? Realistically the only other alternative is wood. When I built my wooden garden store in Plazac, it only measured something like 3 x 3.5 metres or maybe slightly more. However, that cost something like 1100-1200\u20ac in total and took a lot of work measuring, cutting and fixing all of the components that were needed to construct it. That was in October 2015 and wood prices have gone up a bit since then also. So given that the capacity of my new tool store is greater and that it only took me three days to build it, I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out.<\/p>\n

Now all I’ve got to do is start moving stuff into it, and you know what always happens then. You find you have more stuff than there’s space for… \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

FOOTNOTE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just back to say that I’ve already discovered what I always suspected would be the biggest downside of a structure like this. Carrying in the second of the two heavy ‘tounelles’ that I bought last summer I smacked the edge of one of the front doors and put an unsightly dent in it. That will always be a problem. Wood would have just shrugged it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, that unmistakable sound of raindrops on a metal roof. But just as it started I finished hanging the doors on my new tool store, meaning that the structure was finally complete and I was therefore ready for it. Well, not totally, because I’ve still got to move all of the stuff that I need … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18326"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18344,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18326\/revisions\/18344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}