Kitchen Garden Forum

Pa Snip, I am curious about your remarks regarding their preservative. Is that an expensive price?

On a slightly related subject, I build compost frames out of old pallets. However, I always mount the pallets on house bricks, never on the earth itself, and they last so much longer. I'm guessing for the same reasons mentioned for the shed.
This time around, I am also going to put down a mypex sheet first, since the area is full of twitch (couch) and you never manage to get it all out the first time around, so I want a protective layer!

Did some research, even by post you can get 5 litres for the same price as they sell 2.5 litres of wood preservative!

Barry wrote:Did some research, even by post you can get 5 litres for the same price as they sell 2.5 litres of wood preservative!

Yep that was exactly what I mean. Some shops prices can be even less for 5lt

The weather here is atrocious: rain, rain and more rain, so trying to get my shed base done is proving all but impossible.

I have watched lots of videos on line, which clearly show how to prepare the base.

However, it ain't that easy!

I've had to dig all the land around where I need to put the shed, so the ground is not settled. To give me an idea of the overall footprint, I laid out the paving stones on the earth, which has a dip in the middle, which I will have to compensate for when digging down.

My first thought was to get a level earth platform before starting to remove the soil to the depth I needed prior to putting in the dry mix, but even this task seems much too ambitious. Moving around damp - to wet -soil is futile; it is like trying to straighten the legs of a chair by lopping off a bit on one, only to then discover this means lopping off a slightly different length of the other three...

There seems to be no way of making the earth platform level prior to my modest excavation and retain my sanity...

I'm hoping that once my foundation hole is dug that, by using the dry mix, it will be easier to achieve a level surface, using a rake. Please, somebody, tell me that will be the case

I've also been told the best way to create the dry mix is by spreading out the sand first, then adding the cement to the top and just raking the two together. Does that sound about right? (I couldn't afford to buy the ready mixed stuff mentioned above; it worked out three times as much as buying sand and cement separately...)

How difficult can it be to create a level surface!?