Finally, after 6 months, the conversion is finished and I moved in this week. The final jobs were to paint the inside with a oil-based primer and white emulsion and fit an offcut of carpet, and to build out, insulate and panel the existing door (no point having an insulated room if the door lets out all the heat!):

Next was to fit track shelving on three of the walls, so I can finally get my books out of storage:

At long last I was able to move the office from its temporary (well, 18 months of temporary) home in the corner of our bedroom. I've now got a desk I can fit everything on, a filing cabinet with actual files in it and a chance of properly organising everything that has just been piling up...most satisfying:

Everything is all hooked up and I can even get a mobile phone signal inside thanks to a Vodafone SureSignal (basically a mini cellphone aerial that piggybacks on our broadband). Needless to say, I'm pleased with what I've achieved - it's been a long process, due to having very little spare time, but I think it's been worth it. Next!

Next on the list is to panel out the inside with plywood - unfortunately I chose to use the thinnest, most splintery and hard to cut plywood (but it was cheap, at least). It's beginning to look like a proper room:

The electrical supply from the house has to come a long way: from the fusebox, up under the floor of our bedroom, out the wall and through a 18 inch deep trench under the patio - which is part concrete. I had a very hard time chopping through the concrete (especially the part where I found a metal plate reinforcing the slab - I decided in the end not to cut through this but to burrow underneath it) but for most of the trench all I had to do was lift paving slabs and dig a lot:

I'd prepared the way through the house for both the electrical supply and the network cables I needed to run, so when the electrician came he had a reasonably simple job to do and finished in a single day, laying steel wire armoured cable outside and fitting a new fuse box, sockets and a light to the new office:

The spare cables you can see are 3 CAT5 network cables which are also buried in the trench - although protected in 32mm waste pipe here, and in conduit when on the walls. They run from the front hall and will carry network traffic, a phone extension and possibly an intercom (this only takes up about one and a half cables, so I have some spare wires!). I've also pulled through some orange builder's string just in case I need to put more cables in there in the future (I really don't want to dig it all up again):

The power supply all works and I've started filling in the trench: the network cables have been fitted to a proper faceplate and box to keep things tidy: here's me testing the network connection:

So now all I need to do before I move in is to finish the panelling, paint if I think it's necessary, add some shelves and a carpet - shouldn't be long now.

Next, the floor. First I laid a piece of damp proof membrane (DPM) - basically a piece of plastic sheet - then horizontal battens, fixed at each end to the vertical ones. Then I cut 70mm Celotex foil-faced high density foam insulation into strips and stuffed this between the battens, taping the seams with aluminium foil to form a vapour barrier - this should stop the warm and damp air produced inside the shed (by me breathing!) from travelling through until it hits a cold surface on the other side of the insulation and condensing into damp.

On top of this goes chipboard flooring, which slots together neatly with a bit of wood glue and is screwed through to the battens:

Then I added yet more Celotex to the walls and roof, stuffing it between the battens - after knocking a few nails into the very back of the battens to stop it going too far in: I want a small gap between the rear of the insulation and the stone walls, for ventilation. Some of the pieces were quite fiddly to fit:

Why did I choose 70mm Celotex, I (don't) hear you ask? Well, the battens are 75mm x 45mm (3" by 2" in old money) and thus it neatly fits into the available depth.
All the seams are now going to be taped with foil tape, ready for boarding over - however there's now another major job coming up, which is to dig by hand a trench to the house for the electrical and network cables. However in the meantime I have a small silver room that looks a little like a set from a bad sci-fi film.

We have a large old apple tree, of the reasonably rare Peasgood Nonsuch variety - but it was massively overgrown and last year produced a large number of not particularly good apples. So I decided to have a crack at pruning it: loppers to take off the many suckers and thin branches near the bottom, a saw to remove some of the large branches and a new extendable pruning gadget for the high stuff. Here's before:



and after:



There's still more to do - I'd like to cut back some of the outer branches - but this is probably enough for now, it's getting a little late in the year for pruning. I've saved the larger branches for the woodburner and had a bonfire with the rest.

Next job is to add vertical battens, to stuff insulation between, to tack boards to and for supporting shelf brackets:

These are connected to joists or extra horizontal timbers with nail-on plates, and fixed to the floor with angle brackets, slightly drilled out to accept M6 expanding bolts. Note the piece of damp proof membrane between the timber and the floor - the timber is treated against rot, but it's good to be sure especially when you're dealing with porous concrete:

The timbers are spaced at 610mm intervals (mostly), which is deliberate: the plywood that will be tacked to them comes in 2440mm x 1220mm sheets, and I want to minimise any cutting, while being able to fix vertical shelf tracks through the ply. I've also been very careful to make the timbers exactly vertical so their positions are easy to find when fixing the tracks, and to make the whole thing reasonably square (the shed itself certainly isn't).

Next is the floor (more battens) and first fix of the electrics.

I spent most of this last weekend working on the first of the timber framing for the office. The first job is to add some extra joists, to form a ceiling or mezzanine across part of the space - I want the room full height to the peaked roof and Velux window in the middle, but with two storage areas, one at each end.

I discovered that one of the two existing joists that tie the bottom of the roof together was rotten, so I had to remove and replace it - except I found out that if it was to be full length, it would be impossible to fit from inside the building (normally these things are done *before* the roof goes on, of course). So I chopped it in half to fit it and added wood and steel bracing. Note the extra piece of wood on top of the wall where there was yet more rot! I've also added two more joists (easier to fit as they aren't quite as long) to form a part ceiling:

Next was to open up the roof space a little above the part ceiling, which will be used as a storage platform. The rafters are tied together with a plank (as they've sagged a bit over the years):

Let's chop that out then, so we actually have a decently shaped triangular storage space in the roof. At the rear you can also see where I've added triangular framing *inside* the rafters - insulation boards will sit on top of the rafters, leaving a ventilation gap between them and the tiles - the insulation boards will be wedged between this extra framing:

However to replace the plank, we'll add some vertical struts down to the joists (this is actually the other part ceiling, but you get the idea):


Don't worry, I've not removed anything too vital - this is a pretty small building, and the extra framing will all contribute to making the roof stronger than it ever was! I also added some horizontal timbers along the top of the walls - next is to drop vertical timbers from these to the floor, to form the framing for the internal walls.

I've now started the office conversion in earnest. First step was to get the roof fixed: as you can see it's had the tiles removed, battens (and some rotten rafters) replaced, new breathable felt applied, new battens, a Velux window fitted and tiles relaid.





Next is to start on the indoors. I'm building a wooden frame within the existing structure, more or less independent of the walls (as they're built from a cold and damp combination of brick, clunch and entirely innappropriate cement mortar patches), which will be insulated with phenolic foam. The wood arrives this Friday so time to get cracking!

If I was religious - which I'm not - I might feel we're currently living through one of the more interesting parts of the Book of Revelations or some such addled nonsense.

We've got record-breaking cold weather, national demonstrations of many flavours against a half-baked government who are lying to us about why they have no money and what may be a battle for both press freedom and the Internet, fought on one side by a bunch of hackers led by a chap who looks like Andy Warhol's less hip younger brother and on the other by some of the lunatic fringe of what America laughingly calls politicians.

Meanwhile the business I run has more leads than ever before by a factor of 10 or so, driven partly by my discovery that this Sales & Marketing lark isn't anywhere as difficult as it appears, and consists mainly of telling the truth to as many people as possible as loudly as possible (contrasting nicely with how most of our competitors do it). I've hardly sat still for three months.

Somehow around all this I've restored and reinstalled our woodburner, refurbished an airing cupboard, filled a skip, replumbed a sink, all while coping with a volume of baby snot that would fill a couple of rolltop baths.

Happy days!

I'm currently working in a corner of our bedroom, which is less than ideal: also, most of my paperwork is in boxes in one of the sheds. So, it's time to convert one of the outbuildings into an office.

At the rear of the house is an old washhouse, built from a combination of brick and clunch (a soft local stone) and with a tiled roof. The roof is full of holes, with plants growing through it and the remains of an old chimney balanced precariously in one corner. It's been patched up over the years but is still pretty rough. The picture below shows its best side: there's some damage to the render at the rear and a crack running down one of the walls.

I have a firm booked to come and replace the roof and install a Velux window soon, so I've started to clear the interior (involving dismantling a heavily creosoted shelf unit made from scrap wood) and remove a corrugated iron lean-to tacked onto one side:


Even with a new roof this isn't going to be the driest building - clunch is naturally pretty moist, and the situation won't be helped by the layers of innappropriate cement render that have been applied. The plan is thus to build an internal insulated 'box' for the room I'll be working in, separated from the external walls and floors by airgaps and damp proof membranes. I'm also having electricity installed and will be adding CAT5 network cabling.

Admittedly I'm writing this on a laptop connected via wireless broadband to the Interwebs, after a very long day in London, but I'm increasingly convinced that the Internet is all wrong and we should probably start again.

One one hand I'm talking to one generation about how to monitor Twitter, Facebook, etc. for corporate purposes - our business is about search, after all, and searching the Internet now encompasses all the multifarious flavours of creating things people might want to read (what sandwich you're currently eating, or what company you're planning to acquire, and everything in between), and on the other hand I know young people who appear terribly shocked by the fact that Facebook doesn't respect their privacy, or that people might disagree with what they've just said to the entire world&dog.

Nobody seems to quite get it. Type some stuff in, stick it up and hope. Hope that someone will notice or that nobody will. Which exactly do you want? Shall we just give up, invent a time machine, go back 30 years and start again?

On the other hand, in the last two weeks I've created an entirely corporate Twitter account and blogged endlessly about stuff, entirely for marketing purposes. The dark side beckons...