New shelter complete!

IMPORTED POST FROM OLD BLOG. ORIGINAL DATE: 26/08/2007

We had a good day today! After church in the morning, we headed up to the wood but first dropped in on a neighbour of our wood, Jim, who we'd heard about through a contact in Rye. He's a tree surgeon, and came for a look round the wood with us - we may get a chance to work together in future, who knows? This is in addition to Tim (a friend of our neighbour in the flat above), who we met last week, who works in woodland management and various uses of the products. We're hoping to co-operate with him too in future.

This is a positive side to the damage that happened to our old shelter - it's prompted us to get on with what we said we'd do at the start - get out and meet all our neighbours! We want people to know our plans for the wood, so that they don't get any nasty surprises, and who knows, maybe we'll even be selling stuff to them at some point!

Anyway, we finished the new shelter this afternoon, and while I had the idea of suspending the tarpaulin inside the A-frame rather than over it, it was Tracy who realised that meant that we could set it up to be easily raised and lowered, so that when we leave we can let it down so it is less conspicuous but still waterproof. Then when we return, we just haul it up again!

Here it is the first time we hauled it up:


and here's an adapted curtain ring for the rope to run through as a pulley:


Then we moved our stuff in - much more spacious and convenient than the old shelter:


From the outside it looks like this when it's up:


and like this when it's down:


I realise the whole thing looks a bit improvised - because it is - but it's pretty strong and collapses down nicely, and won't have the problem of gathering rain until it collapses, as happened with the old one.

Mike