A Shedding of Inhibitions

Cooler and wetter weather has kept us inside (excuse). I've been making plans to replace the garden shed, which is somewhat rickety.  Pippy painted it three years (it must be) ago, and I remember thinking then that it wouldn't last.

So.  Plans.

Currently, it is just a storage shed, but we could do with something a little larger to use as a potting shed - the space in the outhouses isn't very suitable.   We (Genie and I) like the idea of a rounded shed with a view over the garden.  So we messed about with some ideas.

For a while, I disappeared down a creative rabbit hole, looking into 'reciprocal' roofs. These are self-supporting structures with a central hole, but a little OTT for a garden shed.  Also, they don't lend themselves to an uncomplicated waterproof roof covering. And they have a hole in the middle!

Having dismissed the reciprocal roof idea, I tried a few others, including regular an irregular polygons.

I've settled on an octagonal base with windows on four sides. I made a little model on Friday, with sides 4 and 2 feet wide (in scale of 2ft = 1cm).  

I like the shape and the size of the windows but the shed would be a little too small.  Scaling up would make the windows too big, so I tried again. (Models are fun!).  Much as I delight in the theoretical elegance of the SI system of measurement, I'm not measuring the size of a shed in comparison to 1/299 792 458th of the speed of light in a vacuum, not the distance from the Equator to the North Pole (or a fraction thereof).  So feet and inches it is.  Here's a scale model 1:12.  The door (in scale) is 6ft high and it's 6'6" to the waves,. The pitch of the roof is 1:3, and gives an overall height of just over 8'1". Planning regs limit me to 2.5m height.

Thanks to the wonders of modern camera miniaturisation, we can see the view through the window. What fun!

Here's the (non-reciprocal) roof:

Next stage is to plan the materials and the carpentry.