Timber Garden Sheds Australia
August 2022
Rachel and Cham live busy lives, both working in the healthcare (which is how they met, by the way, too!). A few years ago they were very lucky to secure a relatively large parcel of land in Wynnum, with a nature reserve out the back, and plenty of backyard room with a large grassy area - perfect for their border collie "Sully" to roam around! Besides a chicken coup and a small tin shed for gardening tools they decided to get one of our SPIEKEROOG 24sqm cabins.
GROUND PREPS / FOUNDATION:
Concrete Base
Rachel and Cham decided on a 150mm steel reinforced concrete base., with 4 x 1200mm deep piers This was mainly based on the sandy soil that is prevalent in their area, being located close to the beach.
Aided by the relatively soft soil level ground, a small excavator got the grass removed and the site leveled in just a few hours.
Form work was done the same day, concrete was poured a few days after.
A good quality concrete base is the very best foundation for your cabin, however, the recent price rise of concrete slabs are now making steel bases the most popular foundation.
We are happy to assist with any type of base.
CABIN DELIVERY:
Doing it the hard way....
One of the many effects of Covid19 is that it is currently (Sep 2022) close to impossible to find a local crane truck company that is prepared to do short haul transport jobs at a reasonable price.
This site was only about 4km away from the Brisbane harbour, so we decided to transfer th cabin from the warehouse ourselves.
This worked out overall ok - it just meant more individual trips as our new 6m-deck custom trailer was not yet ready for pick up, so we used a smaller box trailer....hmmmm.
The weather was brilliant throughout the entire build, leaving us to concentrate on building this quite large single room cabin instead of worrying about the next downpour.
It's building time!!
When installing a cabin on top of a concrete base we place builder's plastic underneath, to keep moisture off the treated pine base frame.
The space between the concrete base and the tongue&groove pine flooring boards was filled with acoustic floor insulation wool. That space was also used for running electrical cables.
Running cables needs to be done before the floor boards are installed, so they remain hidden and safely tucked away.
Only after the cabin is 100% finished the sparky connects all leads.
WALLS / WINDOWS / DOOR
It was great to have owner Cham working on the cabin alongside us, makes the job so much easier and quicker. No "serious" hardware experience is needed, but to have another pair of hands on the job helps with so many things.
For example, the window is really quite heavy, as it comes pre-assembled and needs to be placed once the first row of window opening logs has been installed. Placing the window with two people is a breeze - and a real struggle for just one person.
NOTE - we also now have additional windows in stock that we can install in any wall of your cabin!
Depending on the cabin model the door frame needs to be installed either during or after the wall construction. This depends on whether the timber door sill sits on top of the floor boards or is installed via rebate in the floor boards - we are happy to advise of the correct method.
It's more like a hall....
The SPIEKEROOG (named after a German Island) is the largest of our garden shed cabins.
Measuring 4.8m square it provides a full 23sqm internal space. The size allows for many uses of this cabin, for both private and professional purposes.
You might notice that we do not install any gutters for the roofing. This is simply to avoid having to point the rainwater roof run-off into a storm pipe, which often is impossible to achieve in backyards. No gutters means that there will be a strip of water splashes from the roof along the side of the cabin. To avoid soil splashing on to the side wall of your cabin, we recommend to place pebbles or (artificial) lawn where the water run-off occurs.
Looks great and keeps your cabin in top shape!
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