Silkwood Depot: Now Back to The Shed.....

Soon after we got back from the UK, in July 2009, the shed underwent its building inspection and was duly approved. Work could now proceed to make the shed a suitable home for our On30 model railway.

To make it suitable for habitation we had to insulate the shed, fit plasterboard sheeting, provide an electrical supply and paint it.

Before the slab for the pergola was laid we purchased some suitable conduit from Hayman’s Electrical and our electrician sold us some suitable cable to run the power from the house power box to a sub-switchboard in the shed.

The contractors we had do the slab laid the conduit before pouring the slab. The contractors also inserted the electrical cable through the conduit to the shed. The cable was put through and both ends of extra cable were rolled up and protected from the weather in a heavy-duty plastic bag. Bear in mind this work was actually done 1/07/2008. It was to be another 19 months before the electrician would be called on to start cabling inside the shed although the he did put the cable through into the shed when he came to install lighting on the veranda and in the pergola area.

The conduit comes out of the slab at the corner of the house. The plastic bag protecting the rolled up cable can be seen next to the brickwork just past the down pipe.

The orange conduit was laid along the front edge of the pergola slab as can be seen here.

We needed to purchase extra steel studs for the shed walls and also battens for the ceiling. I ordered these from Titan and hired a utility on the 8 September 2009 to collect them from their Crestmead factory.

I arranged for a home handyman to repair and stabilise the fence on the top side of the house which had developed a lean. He also made and installed a gate on the top side of the house. He indicated he could help with the plastering and insulation of the shed as he was qualified as a plasterer and had the frame needed to raise the sheets of plasterboard up to the ceiling.

During the next three months Raymond and I installed the additional studs around the walls of the shed. At the same time we drilled holes and inserted nylon grommets to carry the electrical cabling around the shed. This was tedious work as we found we could not get the self-drilling screws to penetrate the steel! We had to first drill a pilot hole which made the task twice as long swapping between a drill and the Phillips head screw bit.

One wall of the shed before the extra studs were installed.

Raymond hard at work installing the extra studs.

The wall in the first photo now has the extra studs installed

A line of holes with the protective grommets installed for the electrical wiring.

We had finished this work by mid-January 2010 and called our electrician to undertake the cabling of the shed. He did this work on the 26 January. The home handyman, Ray, also came and compiled a list of the sheet sizes of plasterboard we required so I could place an order.