It’s beginning to look a lot like a Hut

My granddaughter got an axe for her 13th birthday because she was keen to develop design and joinery skills through helping to build a Hut. She’s going to be 17 soon, spoiler alert, the Hut is still not finished, for loads of good reasons.

My daughter facilitates conversations with a view to building relationships between people in leadership positions in the public sector with a particular emphasis on cross sector working. She asked me recently to draw a graph on a two by two axis, time along the x axis and my level of energy along the y, with a wee note of what might have caused an increase, decrease, levelling out of energy. I think the idea is to collect lots of these stories and see if there are any common themes or glimmers of insight that might help people going through a change process. So I thought building the Hut would be a good example. As a start I worked through the timeline from photos.

With the lump sum from my pension I bought a wood (long story), and during the lockdowns of 2021 my brother, who’d built a few Huts over the years, and I started to have regular zoom calls to design our Hut. My main requirement was that it needed to accommodate people sitting in a circle (another story) so we came up with a hexagon shaped building with a reciprocal roof.

Example of a reciprocal roof:

Artist’s (another example of my brother’s talents) impression:

Over the course of the calls we covered where to site the Hut, what foundation to use, by definition Recreational Huts and Building Standards: EIR release — gov.scot (www.gov.scot) a Hut can’t have a permanent foundation, materials and labour required, planning permission (yes you need planning permission to build a Hut), where to put the door and windows for the best views.

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By July 22 we had planning permission (long story) and started to clear the ground. Our wood slopes down to a culvert then back up to what we call the Christmas tree farm. The top soil covered in moss was relatively easy to clear but we then uncovered numerous tree roots in the heavy clay soil which were the devil to remove.

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A hexagon is made up of 6 equilateral triangles. The maximum internal square footage of a Hut is 30m2 so the side of each triangle is 3.4m. The foundation plinths needed to be 3.4 m apart and 3.4m from the centre of the Hut. We dug a set of 7 holes and filled them with hard core and concrete blocks. The site is on a slope so each plinth had to be a different height. It took is three visits to get this right! Each time we went back thinking we could move to the next phase we worked out the measurements were slightly awry.

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We could then move on to getting the larch timber frame mortared and in place for the floor.

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The grandkids have been involved in the build to varying degrees. My older granddaughter to the extent that she’s cited her involvement in applying for an architecture and design course. My younger granddaughter is a bit reluctant but has had a go. Grandson? A bit of helping to move stuff but mainly wanders the wood drawing maps, writing stories, imagining he’s in Middle Earth.

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The beams were then placed to give an idea of the reciprocal layout, though how they’re going to get raised and positioned 8 feet in the air is still a puzzle to me.

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A year almost to the day it was ordered, the wayney edge timber was delivered. 100 planks of it.

We’ve created a few ‘paths’ just by constant walking on them but every step requires care over fallen twigs and branches, tree stumps, drainage ditches. My job this week, apart from keeping the coffee coming, was to move them down to the Hut site. I manged 80 in a day and a half, just putting one foot, carefully, in front of the other.

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Once the breathable membrane was stapled on, the wayney edge cladding was attached. In comparison to the speed of the build so far it was like my two brothers were on fast forward!

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There’s still a long way to go but all I can say is, wow!

Star Trek TNG ran for 7 seasons. Looking back the first season was a bit weak and cheesy, by season 2 it was picking up, some of my favourite episodes were in season three. There were peaks and troughs, characters grew, relationships ebbed and waned, a few episodes were just ok, most were good, many were brilliant. It was a real end of an era when we watched the final double episode ‘All good things’. But we can enjoy for a long time to come through DVDs and Netflix.

This build will come to an end at some point…