Not really a garage

But a good test run for the future I guess! I needed a place to store my firewood over in our holiday home in France so I decided to build a small pole woodshed from scratch. Its roughly 9' by 5' with a single pitch roof. Main uprights are roughly 4"x4", the roof is corrugated cement sheet with clay roman tiles laid on top. The front is half open to provide good airflow, the window is an original oak window salvaged from the house when we put new ones in and will be repainted in a more subtle colour next week when we next visit. The cladding is roughly 10" by 1" thick sawn pine planking, whole lot painted in creosote wood preserver. Floor is just gravel laid over a layer of landscaping fabric to prevent stuff growing up through.

I also have some left over zinc guttering to go along the back. It has a solar power light inside as when its dark there its like the inside of a witches pocket with a seperate solar panel on the end and I will be putting up some shelves this visit to store ckooped kindling wood etc and another solar panel to trickle charge my ride-on mower battery when we're not there. The wife has planted a nice climbing rose that should ramble all over it eventually.

The site (thats an old oxen plough in the background)



Ground prep by hand



The frame going up, posts are concreted in.



Bare frame



The finished product



With about one and a half cubic metres of oak firewood.









If this is in the wrong place can someone move it. I look at this as good practice for when I finally have space to build a garage/barn as I guess all the techniques can be scaled up. It took me all told about four days to build, one for ground prep, one to cut all the timber and two to put it up and roof it. Thats laregly working on my own with nothing but a chop saw, hammer etc.

Cool... looks old school. love the roofing..
Where is the lift going? lol

Thanks, the roofing matches the house roof. I guess I could just about get my ride on mower in if I made some doors.

Heres the house, its gone from this, basically a shell with half a roof, no windows, electricity, plumbing, bathroom, no internal stairs and no access road:









to this in about five years of hard graft in holidays, some work has been done by contractors but I've done as much myself as I can time permitting.









Eventually we want to convert the ground floor which is currently storage etc into more living space so I'll be building a lean to garage on the end to store all the garden equipment etc.

Lippyp... perfect compliment to the house... and the house... wow... that is really neat!

Wow that house is awesome, I wish that they use to build them like that in the states.

Nice job, love the house!

Thanks for posting. Looks like lots of work went into the house and you got great results. The woodshed looks really nice too.

OUNATE said:

Wow that house is awesome, I wish that they use to build them like that in the states.

Click to expand...

This is the one thing that slips the mind of most people. We often forget to realize that virtually everything structure wise in the continental United States has been built in the last 233 years, while alot of the structures currently in use in the European countries could easily be 800-1000 years old or more.
Most of the original buildings here in the states have long since rotted and fallen down because they were built from wood, whereas buildings in Europe were often built from stone. Unless someone has knocked them down, they are still there.

It's a perspective thing.........

Thanks guys, we're not sure exactly how old the house is as theres no date stone which in itself is unusual but we think its at least a couple of hundred years old, all the roof timbers are hand sawn oak, cut using a pit saw. Originally the middle floor was living accomodation, the top floor was where the hay etc was stored (great insulation over winter) and the ground floor was where the animals were housed. In fact when we went to see it it still had sheep in the bottom, the floor down there had a layer of well compressed straw and dung about three foot deep in places. The walls at the bottom are nearly three foot thick and step in a few inches at each floor level, millstone grit with a rubble core. Drilling the hole for a 100mm toilet pipe was fun, you can't really use a diamond core drill as its not solid enough so it was a matter of stitch drilling some holes and then using a crowbar to knock it out.

I've still got a lot of work to do inside, the bedroom needs another stud wall putting up, I need to finish the drywall off in the bathroom and kids bedroom, some plastering etc etc etc (I hate filling and sanding the drywall), the kitchen is just a lash-up of odd bits really although it works OK but it will get replaced by something a little prettier when I've tiled the floor.

For the first two years we went to bed up a ladder as there was no staircase and we had a chemical toilet. Now we've got a beautiful oak staircase made by a young local carpenter and I've put in a fully working bathroom with a septic tank system. We had no road so you could only get to the house in a 4x4, which inevitably got stuck on occasion as you had to cross a small stream in the middle of the 3 acres its set in and it used to get real boggy. We ended up carrying a big fridge up the field by hand and got the truck well and truly stuck one night after a trip to Ikea and had to hand carry a load of flat pack furniture, a king size bed and mattress and all sorts of other stuff up in the dark slipping and cursing (we needed the bed to sleep in!)

Its quite high up so we get a fair bit of snow in winter too.

This is upstairs with the walls going up around the bathroom and kids bedroom.





Woohoo, the road went in after two years of negotiating with the local town council about access, we ended up basically going halves on the cost of it. This was the track up to our land, after that it was just a field:









The beatiful staircase made of locally sourced oak.



Snow! 18" dropped overnight, this was before the road as well so I was a bit stuck. I'd gone over on my own to spend a couple of weeks working on it and this was the first night!







My mightily abused workhorse, 91 diesel Isuzu Trooper mk1, now sadly awaiting breaking for parts due to a terminally rotten chassis/body. I once strapped twelve 8' x 4' sheets of drywall to the roof, was a bit top heavy, it got filled with timber, bags of cement and sand and god knows what else and thats after a 900 mile drive to get there..

Good point tdkkart... seeing buildings like these makes me appreciate the architecture soo much more, esp. how they have lasted so long.

Wow, that is a super house don't see too many of those here. Here the 200 year old one's are made out of mud.

hello,

Very nice restauration ,bravo.....

In France there are a lot of old construction but
it's good to see other ways to build a house or
a garage.

regards Jean pierre