DAYS 5 and 6

Spent 2 hours on Saturday morning at the timber merchants (Champion Timber, New Malden) and B&Q.  Took ages to find the wood I needed.  Had gone there with the intention of buying external plywood - but when the guy took it out it looked terrible - full of big knots and cracks.  So after much discussion with the very helpful sales assistants I decided to buy hardwood veneered plywood.  Now this is not recommended for external use - but the guys said if I painted it and sealed the edges it should be fine.  They cut it into the shapes I required (6 rectangles)  I also bought 28 meters of 2*2 which I would use as the frame for the house and the hand rails and 60 L brackets and 400 screws to put it all together.

Then off to B&Q to get some paint.  The cantankerous old git in the paint section looked at me like I'd two heads when I asked him where the sealant was - then he barked "4 isles over".  Couldn't see anything obvious so just got some Ronseal Blue external wood paint (Bobby had insisted on a blue tree house).  

Jo was off on a wine tasting all afternoon and I had to take the kids to a birthday party - so all I had time to do was quickly check out my new jigsaw by cutting the corners off 2 of the rectangles to make the gable ends of the house.

Rain was forecast for today - but miraculously we didn't get a drop all day so I got a full day's work in.  First job was to cut all the plywood into the required shape and cut out the doors and windows.  The Bosch jigsaw was the business for this.  I drew out every cut line in pencil first.

Once that was done I sanded all the edges and painted them with the Ronseal decking end grain preserver - still have half a tin left so I might as well use it.  It's not really a sealant - but it should slow down the rotting.  You can't paint over it for 3 days!  So i decided to start cutting the 2*2 to size.  Wasted 30 minutes trying to fix the guiding laser on my neighbours mitre saw - only to realise there was an on/off switch I hadn't seen.

Here's the first gable with all the wood cut to size (not screwed in yet).

I thought I'd been very clever cutting 45 degree cuts in the diagonal bits - only to realise that left a bit of an over hand with the upright.  Did some quick geometry to work out the angle should be 22.5 degrees on both the upright and the diagonal.  Didn't want to redo this end - so I'll stick with it...  but here's how it should have looked.

With all the 2*2 cut - I sanded the ends and painted them with the grain preserver.  I still had a couple of hours working time to go - so I decided I could paint one side of the plywood, avoiding the edges.

Next weekend it will need a second coat, paint the edges and paint the other side.  Hoping for decent weather!