A New Summerhouse for Avocet

There comes a time when every wooden garden building reaches the point when it can no longer be repaired – beyond the point of no return! This recently happened to our summerhouse which looked out over our wildlife pond. It had been up for 12 years or so and I have lost track of the times I had to repair weather damage from sun, wind and rain. So the time arrived when we had to bite the bullet and order a new one.

We ordered a replacement which would sit on the footprint of the original, not an easy task as it is an unusual shape.Normally we would have erected and painted it ourselves, but with serious hand surgery in the offing we had our new summerhouse delivered, painted and erected as part of the deal. But we did demolish the old one – we were not going to miss out on the fun!

We wandered down to the bottom of the garden and set about the destruction heartily, with lump and sledge hammers and monkey and gorilla wrenches to hand. We had week of bashing fun!

   

We made some new spidery friends who were hibernating behind panels so we had to re-house them. They are an essential part of our wildlife pest control unit so we had to look after them.

And so with our spider friends rehoused we raised the old summerhouse to the ground. For a while we had a see-through summerhouse and then none at all!

  

We then had to break up the old wood to use as firewood for the woodburner.

 

Before the new summerhouse arrived we had to prepare a level solid base for it.

 

We were delighted  with the new summerhouse and were soon looking forward to painting the inside and putting the furniture and artifacts back.

 

First though we had to paint the interior as we want it to be as light as possible. Once the paint dried some of our artefacts soon decorated the walls.

 

We can’t wait to take advantage of our new summer house and sit inside admiring our garden while we drink coffee and enjoy some of Jude’s delicious home-made cake!

A few weeks after completing our summer house build we added a deck which would sit in front of it and go out over the end of the pond. Our son and son-in-law, Jamie and Rob came with their families to build the deck for us as following surgery on my thumb I can only use one hand. We sent for the cavalry! While the boys constructed the deck daughter Jo worked away in the new Arabella Garden adding edging to the borders  and stopped frequently to give advice.

The final jobs were to put down carpet, varnish the deck and get the furniture and pictures back in.

     

We are so pleased with our new summerhouse now it is finished and are regularly enjoying spending time relaxing in it.