Today is the twelfth of September. Today Cate joined me down in the woods to get some progress done on the cabin and have a home cooked den date dinner. We had an amazing time and made great strides forward on the cabin. The later time of departure for her meant that I was able to use her phone to get some far better photos of the cabin. As the blog goes on I am trying harder and harder to improve my photographs I publish. So I do hope you enjoy the story below.
Laurence.
Todays plan was to get a large section of the front wall done. This is not really an urgent project like the roof however it is more fun and far more rewarding then making shingles. The planks used for today are of a great level of significance to myself. These planks were a den present from my grandfather who sadly departed this world 4 and a half years ago and never actually got to ever see the den kingdom. These planks we given to me by him to use on my tree house and then get moved to the den. They have been sat in the dry off the floor in the kitchen for close to a year now. I knew what I wanted to do with them years before I actually started work on the prep for the cabin. These planks are rough sawn scabs from a wood mill in Gloucestershire. I think this project is a worth while use for them.
Sadly however due to the planks being rough sawn and scabs they are all different sizes and lengths and shapes. Now you would figure this would work well with a cabin that is anything but straight and square. However, this was not the case. The was lots of shaping and cutting needed. I have saved all the off cuts and will be using them to make furniture inside the cabin later. But after much wiggling and brain wracking we started to put a wall together.
For dinner Cate and I had a standard den meal with a twist. Due to them being on offer we had reduced price prawns with our den pasta tonight. Made a nice change from the sausages or burger lumps we are very use to. We cooked one pot of pasta, put in a tin of chopped tomatoes, some ketchup, bbq sauce, two packs of prawns and some salt. Mixed together once the pasta was cooked until it was hot through left us with a rather amazing meal. The kitchen grill and bbq has meant that cooking has become a walk in the park. Was very nice to spend the evening eating good food.
The day was a glorious one. Weather was clear with odd bits of cloud and sunny. But not too warm. Had plenty of visitors throughout the day. Was a perfect day all in all. The next stages of the build is to commence the great shingle-a-thon. This I plan to do next Wednesday if I can book the day off work. I plan to get the den as early as I can (somewhere in the 7:30am range) and using my froe split out every possible shingle I can out of the remainder of my sweet chestnut logs. It will mean I know this winter how large I will need to go with the chestnut coppice project. I think I have about 500 locked up in logs at the moment so I will need about 800 or so more after that. This is a lot and a lot of work and becomes very tedious. However the result is always beautiful and by doing so I am that one step closer to the cabin being finish. So the next few updates will be wordy and few photos due to the fact Cate is off to university and so I will have no one to take photos for me. I will try my best however to keep you guys updates on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Well thank you for reading, until next time.
The Den workshop 